Impossible
Nature: The Art of Jon McCormack
by Jon McCormack,
Jon Bird, Alan Dorin, & Anne Marie
Jonson
Australian Center for the Moving Image,
Melbourne, AU, 2004
136 pp., illus. AUD$39.95
ISBN: 1-920805-08-7; ISBN: 1-920805-09-5
(DVD)
Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)
harle@dodo.com.au
Zen cautions us not to mistake "the finger
pointing at the moon" for the actual moon
itself. Similarly I would caution the
reader of Impossible Nature not
to mistake this book for McCormack's art.
One of McCormack's main areas of artistic
investigation is the concept of "containment",
that is, images bounded by the perimeter
of the computer screen, paintings contained
within frames and so on. It is rather
ironic that not only does this book "contain"
some of McCormack's images but further
renders them somewhat impotent compared
with his originals because they are without
movement.
To address this unavoidable problem faced
by all video, dance and performance artists,
of having their art captured on a flat,
2D motionless book page, McCormack has
included a dynamic DVD that brings us
very close to the original impact of all
of his major works. It's hard to find
words to adequately describe these works,
stunningly beautiful would be one
phrase, eerily familiar yet somewhat
alien would be another. These describe
first visual impressions and say little
about the purpose and philosophy behind
them. This book helps our understanding
of the art and has essays by McCormack
himself and also Alan Dorin, Jon Bird,
and Annemarie Jonson.
McCormack is a visionary and pioneer of
"electronic media art", he exemplifies
the Leonardo project of art-science
symbiosis, as he is both an artist and
a computer scientist. He has a PhD in
computer science from Monash University
where he still works. His art is all the
more remarkable when one considers that
he produced his first major piece in 1989
when many of us were just learning how
to send emails on clunky old computers
with 640Ks of memory!
The book is lavishly illustrated, mostly
in colour and contains a useful Glossary
and a good Bibliography. McCormack has
four essays that describe his various
artworks and discuss his reasons for creating
works about naturewhich could not
be made without a computerthese
have been called "sublime computational
poetics". His philosophical position seems
rather paradoxical in that by creating
artificial natural worlds he forces us
to consider the real natural world and
how we are destroying it at an alarmingly
disconcerting pace.
Jon Bird's essay Containing Reality
discusses the previously mentioned notion
of containment. He does so, not only in
respect of various McCormack projects,
but also from a computational perspective.
In particularly the constraints of computer
programming and the creation of algorithms
to produce the artificial in a
generative and perhaps emergent way.
Annemarie Jonson's short text discusses,
Turbulence: An Interactive Museum of
Unnatural History, a major McCormack
work from 1994. She does so regarding
the paradoxical nature of the work, "McCormack
frames Turbulence as a meditation
on nature: 'a lament for things now gone
and a celebration of the beauty to come'"
(p. 23). Jonson believes these dualisms
are " . . . a preoccupation of our epoch,
as the boundaries dissolve between the
cybernetic and the organic, the synthetic
and the natural, the virtual and the real"
(p. 23).
Alan Dorin's essay discusses AL (artificial
life), the computational and methodological
basis for much of McCormack's work. This
essay is a further paradox in that Dorin
on the one hand helps us understand McCormack's
work at a deep level. On the other hand,
the centre section of his essay (pp. 78-81)
does nothing positive to help this book
at all. I found this section highly irritating;
its tone is condescending, as though preaching
to schoolchildren regarding the destruction
of the environment and the total alienation
from nature and animals. Gross assumptions
regarding human society, nature and technology
are topped off by suggesting that, "If
we are to survive in the long term, the
humanist view is preferred" to the "engineering
worldview". The humanist view is precisely
why we have destroyed as much as we have.
Whilst humanism has quite a few philosophical
meanings, it always regards humans as
the pinnacle of creation or evolution,
and as such, assumes nature is here for
us to exploit!
This minor criticism aside, the book and
the art presented on the accompanying
CD is wonderfully challenging and pushes
the viewer and reader to think deeply
about the relationship of the natural
to the artificial. McCormack's art " .
. . simultaneously criticises and embraces
our dependence on digital art" (p. 90).
Just to confound the dualistic nature
of McCormack's philosophy, I will leave
you with his own observation: "If technology
has one consistent feature it is that
it promises long before it delivers (if
indeed it ever does deliver)" (p. 74)!
McCormack's art despite its reliance on
technology does deliver some important
and hauntingly beautiful art.