Projections of Meaning: Where Content and Context Intertwine
Margot Lovejoy

Monica: She has been making work through the use of projection and all sorts of digital technologies, since at least the 80s. I had the pleasure of meeting Margot, probably around 1992 or 1993, but I actually haven’t seen her much since then, so it’s a real pleasure to have her come speak to you all this week.

Lovejoy: Thank you Monica. I’m very happy to have a microphone because my voice doesn’t carry too well, and I just want to say thank you to the Institute for inviting me--I find it a hard act to follow. I think that mine is not going to be as controversial, but I can really report to you some acts of censorship. I’m thinking about the fact that here, the seminar is dealing with photography, and you know that as far as the fine arts were concerned, photography was not really brought into the mainstream until pretty recently in about the 80s. Now when we go into the galleries and see the huge amount of photography that’s being shown in the, it’s pretty phenomenal. For those who were struggling, like myself, back in the 70s, I’ve always been very interested in photography and the fact that I couldn’t get shows of my photographic work earlier, even though photography had been brought into the fine arts by the pop artists but especially by Andy Warhol, and his silk-screen figurative images. Remember, it was the age of abstraction. I’m not going into a lot of art history at this point, but to actually have figuration in a mainstream show was very unusual. It took quite a lot longer before museums began to have photographic exhibitions that were mainstream. So we could say that about 100 years after the invention of photography is when it was finally recognized as a fine art fully by the mainstream. So there you have censorship. What I want to talk to you about this morning is the fact that my work, which has gone on for a long time, really crosses over all sorts of boundaries in media. Since I’ve been working for a long time using photographs in different ways, I thought that it would be really interesting to explore these transitions in my work and maybe give you ideas in your own research for other artists and their trajectories.

I thought it was interesting to read a recent e-mail that I got from Lev Manovich, one of the theorists who is very prominent in exploring issues in new media. His new book The Language of New Media is really very much involved in trying to understand the roots of things. So he referred to the time period in the 60s when the white cube of the gallery began to become like the black box of cinema, thinking of movie houses as being places where projections took place. Actually that milieu was really regarded as a kind of lower class area, or one that did not actually fit the fine arts milieu. He referred to that space as being the white box. So I thought that was kind of an interesting idea, that since the 60s there has been far more interest in using video and slide projections as a way of projecting into a gallery scene. Some artists also wanted to have their images appear on television, so thinking about the 60s and the arrival of video in 1965 and the kind of experimental work that was going on during those years up to and including the 80s and 90s, there’s been an incredible explosion of artists who have broken away from abstraction, and whose work has become much more accessible in a larger context. That’s another issue I wanted to talk about today, which is the idea of context and content and how they slide back and forth and how one can influence the other. As far as my own position in this, you could say that I started off using a lot of photography though not being able to actually use it much in my fine art work. Could I have the slide projector turned on please? I thought I’d just show you where I came from and the first time that I began to use slide projections in my own work. I also wanted to show you how I moved on into video and computers in my work and most recently the Internet. I’ll also be showing you my new Internet piece towards the end.

So these were very early works. The one on the right hand side folded up. It was a pop-up book that I created. You can see that I was interested in very formalistic ideas, very modernist kind of ideas, trying to understand the form of things, creating spatial illusions, the whole idea of perspective and all that. I was rather fascinated with landscape and those issues. The image on the right-hand side, on your right, is actually the very first slide projection piece that I did. It was called Azimuth and it actually was in a room-like situation and used some of the same concepts that I had started with creating that book piece. I was also raising questions about the forms of representation.

This other, on your right, is a print that was done with the use of photography and an attempt to create very large silk screen layers which I would then print one on top of another. So since I was in the field of printmaking I very much was using that as a kind of mechanical tool to make large photographic sheets which I would then make into screens and print. So this piece, Azimuth, has about 20 different printings on it and it called for a huge amount of research on my part. It had so many ideas in it that I could never possibly get into a print that would take me so long to create. So I had created this show in 1984 using these prints as part of the show and while I was doing it I began to project images that I had used to create the show on the walls and on the shapes that were in the gallery. So this is one of the images from that time. And I began to get very excited about actually creating projection works. Rather than doing prints I moved much more into the field of creating sort of dimensional room installations with varying numbers of slide projections. Next one please.

I did quite a few of these works and they became more and more sophisticated. This one is called Labyrinth and it was actually a very expensive and very complicated installation. The entry point is where the rope is. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the story of the labyrinth and Theseus, a very heroic and meaningful kind of story. In order for the viewer to go into this area they had to wear a mask. The content of the work had to do with questions of identity and gender and my idea was that there are questions of power involved when people are observed and since this work dates back to 1988 there was a great deal of feminist theory at that time about the power of the gaze. Of course, the theory has been changed quite a lot since then to add questions of gay and lesbian issues that had been left out at that time. There was this idea that your identity can be affected by the power of relations or through the media. This morning we had a bit of a taste of that by seeing how women were objectified to such an extent that we saw more women than men in the examples, although I don’t know whether that was just a choice on the part of the speaker. But certainly we’re aware that that this still exists even though it’s starting to change. But in those days it was an important issue. So I created a mask, which was two-sided and you had to decide whether you were male or female. There was no question about race in the work, I’m afraid, at the time. So the idea of wearing the mask as you go through the labyrinth where you are being picked up by surveillance cameras as you go through this long black entry way, was meant to confuse you. Sometimes the surveillance camera would show you and you could see yourself in it but other times you could only see people staring back at you. So the journey into the center of the labyrinth where the projections were held was an experience which I very much wanted people to actually make decisions--a place where they would start to think about these issues in a serious way and feel effected by the experience. So, the image on the left is simply the center (next slide please) of the labyrinth. Visitors would sit on the floor in the center and there were these five screens that were coded according to different themes that I chose to portray in order to develop the idea of the historical aspects, the emotional aspects, and the kinds of mythological issues that one could use to provoke more thought. Next please.
So there were five slide projectors that were computerized so that they could move in tandem and there was also sound that was composed. I hired a composer to actually create the sound on this. I used images from art history and the media, but I also did some of my own photography as well. It was a mixture of images that were constantly moving and that required you to actually create a kind of synthesis, like the idea of the montage where you’re looking at all of the images at once and then try to create a meaning out of those images. Next please.

One of the things about my work is that I usually do a huge amount of research and have far more information and interesting ideas that I would like to develop than I had room for in any work. So I often repurpose a work. For example, this is a book that I created from the gigantic installation, which was something that one could put on ones shelf. It’s meant to be an artist’s book and as you can see I put the mask in it. This is the female side of it. The other side has the male side. This is actually the book so I can pass this around. This is the male side. Creating the book was a very different experience for me because it took a huge amount of preparation and I’m mentioning it because it’s the last book I did where all the images were prepared in the dark room. After that, they were done on a computer and the computer would then spew out the film. This book goes back to the early 90s and because of its complicated aspects I created ten tableaus from the original material. The original material was like 12 or 14 minutes long. Actually, creating the book meant that I had to compress a huge amount of material, but it also meant that I could create these tableaus which (next slide) allowed the viewer, the person looking at the book, to decide which way to go through it--whether it’s from the back or the front or wherever. I feel that a book is like a participatory kind of project any time you look at it. In this case, you could move the changes but you could also open and close the little flaps that you see. You can see that it was very abstract and very much in keeping with the idea of montage where you would look at everything and then you would create a kind of meaning from it. The advantage of the book was that it allowed you to have much more time for contemplation, especially since some of the thesauruses and things were more difficult. I felt that they should be more poetic and intellectually demanding for you to look at since there’s no actual text in it. The only text in the book is actually at the end. It’s a little pamphlet, which tells you the story of Theseus and Ariadne. It tells you about some of the historical uses of the concept of a labyrinth which has been thought of as sort of symbol for the journey through life that we take, like the choices that we make. It’s a very famous theme that’s been used by all sorts of artists and musicians as well. I felt that it was important to really give some background to it in this little pamphlet at the end, but the main thing was to create a visual experience, one that would challenge you. Next please.
You can see that in these slides we even have Freud. There are lots of appropriated images in there. By the 80s when post-modernism arrived, it became possible to use appropriated images. You can see that I’ve placed all sorts of chances for you to make different associations in these pages. So I’ll pass this book around and you can take a look at it. Next one please.

That particular work called Labyrinth was made in 1988 and it had five slide projectors. This one, called Black Box was made in 1992 and again, it was a gigantic installation but it was about issues dealing with the future. I became very concerned about whether or not Labyrinth had to do with issues of media and stereotyping and issues dealing with identity and questions of power. The context for this one though was being catapulted into the future. So it was meant to be the year 2025 and you were supposed to be in this spaceship looking back at 1992. I was trying to engage the audience in an experience of realizing the kind of danger that we’re in. The New York Times reported yesterday that President Bush said something like, yeah, we have all of these problems with the environment, but we just have to get used to them. Even though the ice caps are melting and we’re going to have these tidal waves and we’re going to have this, that and the other thing, which scientists have been having a difficult time getting him to really acknowledge, that is his only solution. But back in 1992 I guess I was more idealistic. Some of the questions that I felt needed to be answered in this work included, what are we headed in to and what affect is it going to have on us? What do we expect from the future? You can see there’s a little set of books that are lined up on that small pulpit place, and each one of them has a question on it about the future. The idea was that people coming into the show would actually write down in the books their thoughts about what they expected of the future, what their hopes and dreams were regarding it, or what their criticisms of where we are now were. That was one of the first times that I tried to get people to participate, to such an extent, in my work. The reason I called this work Black Box was that--I don’t know if you’re all familiar with the fact that when a plane crashes the first thing that the experts try to do is find the flight recorders which are called black boxes, even though they’re not black. I found out that they’re orange. I did go down to Washington to the Federal Aeronautic Department and I did see these flight recorders and I was actually able to borrow one for the exhibit. That’s it there; that little orange box. So I suppose it was a metaphor that I created in order to try to get people to understand the truth of what is happening at the moment. That’s the only way we can figure out what really happened.

So as you went into the entry point of this installation, you went down a hallway and you would see these large test tubes. They were gigantic test tubes that I created in my campus lab, and they were growing bacteria in them. I was trying to give the idea or dramatize the idea that people were on this space ship and they had to leave the earth because things were in such terrible conditions. For example, there was rampant disease like AIDS, which caused a big problem in people’s actually being able to protect themselves. That, plus the environmental issues that I mentioned earlier. Next slides please.

This was the inside of the installation. It had five large scrims and each one of them represented a different set of issues. On of them had to do with genetic issues, one of them had to do with AIDS, one had to do with the environment, and another one had to do with family relations or disruption in family relations. So these were hanging scrims so that you could walk into the spaceship and you could wander around inside of it as the projections moved. Again, they were computer slide projections with sound, and in the center of this large area, towards the end you could see what looks like two eyes. That was the first time that I actually used video and it showed a landing scene. That’s the slide projector--I think you can see it. Next set of slides please. No, you can’t really see it too well. It’s in the center of the image on the right-hand side. The slide projector was in the center of the installation and it had words that were in white that were moving around on a diagonal around the room. As you were standing there these words would pass over you and the scrims with the images on it. In that way you would be aware of statistics regarding issues that were important at that time like AIDS or environment issues and what not. So that was my way of trying to get people to be aware of the seriousness of what we were involved in. As you can see I used quite a large variety of different kinds of images. There were hundreds of slides in this with sound. Next please.

This piece is from 1993 and it’s a sort of end of the century piece called Anamnesia. Amnesia, you’re aware of, has to do with losing your memory as a result of some trauma, and anamnesia is the ability to actually recall memory. Being able to recall memory is part of a healing process that we can go through and we’re all familiar with that. Whenever something very traumatic happens to us, it’s important to talk about it and to find out what happened. If we don’t remember, it’s something that can deeply disturb us; we need to recall it to memory in order to understand it and heal ourselves. So that’s the idea behind this work, and I again use the question of AIDS. I was very impressed with the fact that this giant AIDS quilt had been created and installed in Washington and went over all of the area around the memorials there. I’m going to show you a brief segment of a video documentation on that piece. The experience of being in the piece was that there was one main projection area since it’s done with video rather than slides, which was manipulated through the use of a new program called Premier. I was able to create a kind of wipe session where one image went past another and there were large images hanging on the sides of the room, which referred to the 14th and 15th century disease, the plague, for example. The other things in the installation were containers, which were giving off mist and then words were actually projected into the mist. It’s very difficult to be able to capture this affect using photography, but you can get a sense of it in the image on the left where you can see the words on the floor. There were words that were white that would be projected into the steam, and as a result give the impression that they were hovering in the air. It’s rather hard to describe this, but it was a quite powerful kind of evocation of memory, where you would see the white words sort of hovering in the mist. Then there was music, of course, that went with it. The idea of healing the body and the mind and creating a new way of looking at our past. Of course looking at the past was something that we started to do around 1993, when we began to look back over our century. So many of the things I included in the images that were in the video projection had to do with multiple kinds of issues. Next please.

So I included questions of technology and how technology is a boon but that it also has a paradox involved in its other side. Also, the images of illness and questions of the body being affected by many, many things. The idea of the wound or the scab came to me very strongly in this work. I’m still pretty interested in the idea that we all have different scabs that serve as imprints of wounds that we have suffered at different times in our lives. There’s usually a story behind these wounds so I was trying to evoke that in people who were looking at this--that we all have these stories that are embedded in our own bodies and in our own psyches.

Now let’s do the video please. So I’m just going to show you a brief segment of Anamnesia. This is the AIDS quilt. The idea of us as a witness and us being the midst of this particular time period is was very important in this work. If you’re students who are intending to be artists, it’s very important to really understand that very clearly. You have a position that you can take on issues that can be important. That’s what I’ve always felt in my work, that I should be like a witness. This is a very early form of Premier that allowed me to use still graphic images with small video clips imposed upon them. So you can see I was still interested in having multiple images.

(Screening of video)

Okay, let’s cut the video now. I don’t have time to show you this whole documentation. In that you could not see any of the words that were projected into the steam. It is very difficult to do documentation of projected images, as you probably all know. It’s one of the most difficult aspects of photography. I even had to try to find someone who really could do the photography for me. He was a person who is a theatrical photographer and who had the equipment to be able to do that. However, my work seemed to be very difficult to capture so it really challenged him. Could we have the slides again please?

This is another work that I did from 1995. I just want to mention that with both Anamnesia and Black Box, I created a couple of books. I didn’t bring them with me because I didn’t think there would be enough time to look at them all. I can’t show you to them as slides either, but they’re available at Printed Matter in the city. One of them is called The Book of Plagues and the other one is called Paradoxic Mutations. They were both influenced by my work on those two installations you just saw. This work called Parthenia came about as a result of my actually getting a grant to go to India in order to explore a question that I had been long interested in and which had to do with domestic violence. I had already done a lot of research but while I was in India I was able to actually make contact with the issue also work with some dancers who helped me do the choreography for this work. I was working with people in my community--that was one of the reasons why I actually got the grant. I started working with an Asian woman’s group who were working with victims of domestic violence. When I came back from India we continued to work together and we thought about doing large things in the streets having to do with domestic violence. When I was in India I found that there were groups there that were actually using walls to draw images and to create slogans about it. They also did a lot of street theater and things like that. I was very impressed with what they were doing. So we thought about walls, and then we thought about how difficult that would be, so we decided to actually send out a brochure around the country to collect both writings and visuals on the subject of domestic violence. So what you see on these walls at the Queens Museum are actually some of the submissions that came back from all around the United States and Canada having to do with drawings. Some of the writings were poetic; some were just stories; some were memories that people had about the issue of domestic violence.

So this piece was called Parthenia and I called it Parthenia because the word means “she who creates herself.” A lot of the domestic violence, probably primarily the greatest amount of it, is directed at women, so that’s why I chose that title, which I thought was an apt one. I didn’t want to create an image that showed a lot of violence in it, rather I wanted to create a memorial to the victims of it while at the same time drawing attention to the issues themselves. So I built this ten-foot high wall and painted it black around the memorial. As you came down the steps, you could look at all of the writings or images as you went along. Then there were again, swirling words that went around the museum. Next slide, please. I created a pillar of light towards the end. It was a very high, triangular-shaped gallery and in Indian culture the triangle is actually a symbol of women’s power. It’s called the Yentrum, so I used that as the base of the color and you could see the words that were going around. I again used video and was able to actually computerize the images so that I could have three to four images going on at the same time. The graphics that you see these images embedded in were actually the choreographic notations that I made for the dancers. I met a wonderful group of dancers in India and was able to create the movements and the ideas for this choreography, which we were able to complete during the three months that I was there. So you can see in it that there were different kinds of gestures and different kinds of mythological references that went on throughout this work. Next slide please.

The idea was to evoke questions of resistance and healing through this piece even though it was very abstract. At the same time it had gestures that seemed very simple and understandable in relation to the graphics as they went by. Now, this was the time of the Women’s Beijing Conference in 1995. I had done so much research for this work and had all these statistics. I had huge amounts of material that I tried to display in one gallery corner, but it just wasn’t really enough. I felt very passionately about this issue because I worry that domestic violence is something that is so deeply embedded in our society--now we’re even going through it with the question of abuse in the church itself.

So there’s really something that is deeply there, and it’s not only in our society, it seems to be very international. Eventually, I thought that I should create a website. It was at that time that it was possible to actually create some graphics. I remember the first browser in 1994 and being able to go look at the Louvre Museum in Paris on the Internet--it was absolutely an amazing moment. It seems that we’ve kind of lost some of the excitement about the Internet. Everybody is so used to it now that it doesn’t seem to have that romance, but for me it was very exciting to have the possibility of creating a site that would be able to make use of the words that had been sent in on the brochures; to create something that showed the statistics; to be able to take people to a place where they could leave stories of their own. It ended up becoming much more of a community tool. For me, that’s what the web means, I suppose, in my work--it has the possibility of creating a space. It is a space, a community space, where people can go to leave something of their own or to gain something. That’s the way I think about it.

I’m not going to be able to show you the Internet version that I created right now, but you can keep it in mind and when you’re at your own computers. You can look it up at www.parthenia.com. It’s just a question of the projections here.

I’d like to show you briefly a section of the video documentation of Parthenia. This is a fish-eye view.

(Screening of video)

Again, lots of trouble getting documentation of this. Okay, the documentation is difficult, but there was quite a response to the website. This was a large installation, so the website was used as a repurposing of the material. I seem to be doing that either through book form or in this case through web form that evolved through the context of the installation. So these content and context questions and repurposing of material are very much involved in my work, as you can see. And I’m moving from one medium to another in order to make something that has a much more powerful affect. I’m very interested in the experience of viewers and participation and the possibility of participation.
I’d like to show you now a video from Salvage. I don’t have slides from that, but it’s a video that was made in around 1997 and it was my first attempt at creating a participatory installation. It was a multi-user situation where the viewer would go into the installation and be able to touch sensors in the piece in order to get changes in the program. This one had to do with, again, with healing. It’s based on a poem by Adrian Rich called “Diving Into the Wreck” where she speaks about the psychological issues of diving down and retrieving old memories that would help you to heal. Of course, her poetry is something I’d like you to refer to as well, because it’s an absolutely marvelous poem. I’ll just show you a small section of this so that you can see how it works. This one I did as a collaboration with Miles Dudgeon. Here’s someone entering the installation. It was a rear-view projection in this case and these were the sensors. When a sensor came on you could push on it and different programs would come up in the central scene of the underwater area. They were images of rape and different kinds of accidents and traumas. When you push on a sensor, you may even be able to move into another part of the site, which would then have to do with the point where your memory would undergo a kind of transformative period. You would actually change that memory into another kind of metaphor for yourself as a form of healing. Then the last part of the piece that you might come to during your explorations of using the sensors would be the process of being back from underwater.

So I actually worked on these small vignettes here with dancers and they collaborated in the way that we decided to portray these, though we did create them as more abstract tableaus. And that’s, again, someone pushing on a sensor. This piece was very complicated, and for me it was very experimental. It’s one of my works that I’m not quite sure about. I don’t know whether any of you have done anything like that, where you’re not quite satisfied with something. Perhaps one day I’ll go back and make changes to it. This is the middle part. The first part of the piece is called “Probe.” This part is called “Myth” and the last part was called “Resurgence.” So the dancers had great fun. I projected images on their faces of gods or animals for that. This work was all done using animation programs that had just become available. This is a torture scene.

Another brief one that I’d like to show is called Storm from Paradise. This is another installation that I thought would be interesting to show you, although you can’t really see very well how the projections are placed. The projections went through about eight scrims that were transparent so that you could actually walk in between the scrims and have the projections on you as you went through. I don’t really have good documentation of that, but you can imagine that you’re in a large room and there are like eight gigantic transparent scrims where the images are being projected onto them, and you can be part of that. You can actually walk through them and feel involved in it. It’s based on a text by Walter Benjamin called Storm from Paradise where he actually talks about the future as being a problem. “Like an angel that is being blown backwards and sees the pile of debris in front of him as the future.” It’s a very despairing kind of quote, but on the other hand, it seemed to resonate a lot with the kind of environmental situation that we’re in. Again, I was thinking about the end of the century when I made this. Okay. Could we see a section of this please? Again, made with Miles Dudgeon and again we used an animation program. We used still images and animated them. This should have sound.

(Screening of video)

So anyway, it’s hard to get the experience of that without being in the room with the scrims, but that was the intention of having this work projected.

The last piece that I’d like to show you is my new work called Turns and it’s about the website yourturningpoint.com. I hope you’ll make a note of that. It was actually just shown in the Whitney Biennial, and I think you can still go there to see it even though they’re dismantling that show now. I can’t find it on the computer the way it’s organized. Monica, could you come fix it? Anyway, the best thing is to go on your own computer and find it because you’ll be able to spend time with it. It’s a generative work. What’s happened to me as I progress through being more and more interested in participation of viewers with the work, is that I now want more than ever for people to be part of the work and that’s possible on the web. It was possible when I did the Parthenia website, but now, of course, it’s far more easy for people to access a website and to actually feel comfortable about studying it and leaving part of themselves on it. In fact, when I created this work I was really giving up my control of it to a much greater extent than ever before. As I was working on this it became very important for me to realize that I was creating a site that I expected a large number of people to be able to actually go and navigate. As a result, the site had to be very, very simple and it had to be very easy to navigate. It also had to be something that would encourage people to contemplate their own lives since it’s about an event that changed your life; a turning point that caused you to, let’s say, go to graduate school or become a museum curator in the Kinsey Institute, or whatever. So I think everyone has a major turning point that has a story behind it, so that was the idea of the website. Let me just go back to the beginning.

The way the website starts, it’s meant to be as though you’re on a beach, you know. Originally I’d hoped to have a beach area in it, but because the site has to be small so that a larger number of people can access it on a computer that may not be so powerful, I decided to just use a sort of black night idea and have images or words coming out of it. These words are all sentences taken from stories that were received on the site. As you go to Turns, you’ll read these sentences that I think are really very powerful and of great interest. They evoke a lot of different kinds of thoughts that viewers might have. They come in like waves at you, and then you can skip. Let’s skip. This takes you to the home page. You can see that it’s organized according to stories on the left. When you click on “Stories” you can go up to “Read.” So most people when they go to the site will go to the “Read” area. Oh dear. We don’t have enough stories on here. There should be hundreds of stories on here. I wonder what’s wrong? There should be a lot of small yellow shapes that are there. Each one of them is a story, and there should be about 100 of them on there right now. I’m not sure what problem we’re having. Normally it isn’t a problem, and you can actually search the stories according to these different categories. Bringing it back up will take too long, so I’ll just describe it to you and then you can experience it. There are about 100 stories on here in these little yellow shapes, and there’s actually now over 400 stories on this site. There’s also an archive area where you can go in and call up the next batch of 100 stories to read. There are also categories that you can click on. Can you read that? “I was in a car accident and lost a best friend--that’s when I realized that life is way too important to let little things like no seat belt get in the way.” Anyway, that’s just a very random story. I think what we could do is go back. By the way there’s also a place for responses. Can you see the responses at the bottom? So no one left a response to this, but there are a lot of responses to the stories that you can look at as you go through the site. Okay, let’s go to the archive and let’s pick out stories. Let’s go to the top and pick out those. It’s now loading more stories. Let’s say you pick out “Family/Growing Up.” All the stories about family/growing up will go into the center of the zone and then the others will go out to the side. Let’s click on “Family/Growing Up.” Then you can pick out stories that are closest to the red dot in the center. This one is a long story that has a lot of interesting things in it. This is story #6; some of them I know because I had to collect an early archive of stories in order to start the website. Let’s see if there are any responses to this one. Yeah, there are. So when you go on line and you decide to leave a story, you’ll get a little yellow pebble on your navigation bar the next time you go to visit the site. So let’s return this story. Then you can also go back to “Stories” and click on the “Share” area where you leave your story. Let’s look at “Topics,” which is another way of filtering the stories and figuring out different ways of looking at them. You might want to find out all the stories according to gender or ethnicity or age. Let’s go up to the top. Let’s look at “Crisis/Epiphany” stories. All of the stories now are organized according to those categories, and the crisis stories are all in orange, so you can search them that way. We don’t have time to read them all, but I hope you’ll take time to go and look at them. Let’s return this story. By clicking on the topic buttons on the side you can also look at male/female or ethnicity and you can also look at time. Let’s go back to “Time” for a minute. It’s just a slightly different way of looking at them. This way you can see when the turning point stories happened. So there are a lot of interesting things that allow you to filter the stories and to understand them from different angles. There’s also a links button that takes you to different sites. Let’s to go “create maps” first, which allows you to leave your story as a visual. It gives you tools to draw your image or your life map that represents a turning point. You can also import photographs onto the site and draw on them if you wish. Let’s go back to “Life Map” and let’s look at “View Maps.” The maps are like shards that you might find on the beach. Again, we can examine them according to the topics to see which ones are male or female. Let’s go by number this time. Let’s pick out #19. Let’s just go and look at any map. Just pick out one. These have been done with the tools, so there’s the response. I must say that not all the maps are great works of art, but a lot of them are fun to look at. Well, I haven’t been deleting them to their art status. A lot of them were done at the Whitney. It was very interesting that there were actually line-ups at the site. There were more maps made than stories written during the Whitney show. That was an interesting fact for me--that people were very interested in this more visual part. Thank you.

We could go on looking at this more, but I’d like to leave a little bit of time for questions, and I think we’ve gone over the time. You can see that the work that I’ve done has a lot more to do with context and with creating a different kind of context for people to be able to participate in the work. I create content that calls for people to be involved as much as possible, and to create. I suppose I think of it as a social community kind of document. A new form of community that is possible through a database form of representation that is the web. So, thank you.

Any questions?

Audience: Hello. My question is about your installation Parthenia. What made you choose to go to India?

Lovejoy: Well, that’s a good question. Because I live in Queens, it’s a very diverse part of New York. It has the most diverse population of any part of the country and I’m rather proud of it. A lot of people look down at living in Queens but I’ve just been amazed to see what has been going on in Queens in terms of the enormous changes happening there. It was always something that I wanted to tackle, this idea of diversity, and I began working with this Indian group before I applied for the grant to India. One of the premises for the grant, the international one, is that the artist go and not only work in their own community, but also work in other communities internationally. So that’s what made me decide to do it. It was not a reflection on the fact that I thought that the problem of domestic violence is worse in India than it is anywhere else. The statistics show that it is just as bad here as it is there. So that was not my problem at all. I didn’t show that in the statistics that I provided because that was not the issue. But I felt that it was important, also, to have a cultural aspect to it, and for me it was very important working with Saki because of their commitment and their strong desire to work in the community itself.
Audience: Did the fact that this could actually perpetuate the misconception about other cultures ever come out from this work as a response from people?

Lovejoy: I don’t think so. I felt that producing the website, particularly, if it fit very much with the U.N. conference in Beijing, which was really globally attended, plus having the kind of statistics that I was providing, which were international statistics on the website, would give a very clear picture that it was not just grounded in any one place. However, as an artist I had to actually choose to work in one form or another. I could have tried to, in other ways, do things that showed greater variety in terms of race or ethnicity, but I only had about five months to go there and create the work and install, so I didn’t have more time than that to actually go farther. Yeah, it was called a work in progress but I felt that the website itself goes farther than the installation did. Did that answer your question?
Audience: I had a question regarding the web piece. There’s been a lot of discussion about identity and the shedding of any kind of bodily identity or gender or racial identity when it comes to the space of the web. I was wondering if you could address that and perhaps what effects that may have.

Lovejoy: The shedding of identity? Well, we didn’t allow it. I didn’t show you the submission areas but let’s say you’ve gone to the “Share” area and you’re putting a story on the website, you need to leave a little bit of information about yourself so that it can be reflected in the way that the stories can be filtered. So for example, you need to say whether you’re Asian or male or what age you are, or when the event happened. Also, whether it was an epiphany or a crises, for example. So all of those submission details are fed into the database of the computer and then you can search that way. Now, as far as your question is concerned, I think that Sherry Turkle has described it very well in a book called Life on the Screen. I would recommend that you read that because it is a really interesting topic. It’s not fully explained, but I think there are a number of sociologists who talk about this need for experimentation with identity.

Audience: I’m interested in your process of developing content and putting it in context. In terms of technology, what kind of time do you give yourself to learn the technology in order to put your content within that technology?

Lovejoy: Well, you can see that I collaborate. I can’t possibly learn everything as fast as I would like to. I’d say the main kind of criteria for me is that I feel like something is going to help very much in getting out ideas or creating new experiences. I feel that the content for me is more important than the technology. In the sense, that the technology is a vehicle for new experiences and as a way to reach larger audiences. That’s why I’m attracted to the use of technology. For instance, with Turns, it took me about two and a half years to create the site. I usually spend a lot of time doing research, not only on the subject matter but also on what would be suitable technology. So I went to Banff on a residency and I spent a lot of time talking to people there about the technology and about other kinds of work that was being done. It’s basically just a lot of reading and doing critiques with things that I was considering using. Since certain projects are going to be seen by a large number of people, it seemed to me very important to actually get into discussions with people about it. Of course, while I was there, I tried to gather stories for it. I had to find out if it was going to be feasible to do this. That took really a lot of time. Then I had to form a team when I returned to New York. I had to find someone that could further advise me as to how I could actually make those stories move. I had the idea for the stories as well as concepts all in place, but then I had to find a consultant who would help me figure out the best way to approach it and how to find a program that would help, since it’s not possible for me to do programming. So I do believe in collaboration very much, and I don’t think it’s possible to do works these days completely on you own. I’ve always worked with a musician or I’ve worked with people that have knowledge in different areas, and I think that’s very common in more advanced projects. Certainly we’re used to it in terms of film; it’s not expected that one person is going to do all the shooting, the writing, the music, etc., and I think we’re entering into the kind of genre that artists are gradually losing this idea of a single identity. As a matter of fact, when the piece was shown at the Whitney, I felt that there should have been more prominence given to my collaborators. I mentioned to you that I did two of these works in collaboration with Miles Dudgeon, which was a total collaboration. There are different kinds of collaboration, where we jointly came to decisions about things. As far as this work was concerned, it was a collaboration, but it was more of a team with a project director, so I became the project director and had the main say in what happened. So that’s my process.

Audience: Hi. I’m interested in your focus on the therapeutic value, pretty much all the way through. Specifically with Parthenia and Anamnesia and also with the most recent turning point project. In the two earlier ones that I mentioned, there seems to be more of a kind of importance placed on the side of the body since you’re dealing with dancers, for example. Part of my question is if you could speak a little bit about your choice to focus on dancers as opposed to non-dancers in order to locate this idea of domestic violence. Also, in your transition into web-based work, you’re now dealing with something where you’re obviously not emphasizing the body at all. So could you talk about that a little?

Lovejoy: In terms of the Parthenia and the other work I did called Salvage, I also worked with dancers on those. I think when you’re dealing with questions of trauma, we’re so used to seeing violence on television that it doesn’t make us think much anymore. It rather turns you off. So I was trying to create a suggestion of trauma, which would be, maybe a more artistic version of it. The abstraction of it could suggest the idea rather than spell it out, which in many cases is more important. The hope is that you as a person could imagine the rape or you in person could imagine the results of a torture. We’ve heard so much about it and we’ve seen it so much that that’s really why I did it I guess. I felt that if you’re doing an artwork than you have the liberty or the license to actually approach it on a more poetic level.

Going to the web, this was a very big experience for me. It was a very big change in my work, actually. I actually threw out everything that I created at the beginning having to do with this work. I used a lot of the type of images that I was used to, you know, the kind of images you’ve seen me use here. When I went to create Turns I realized that I had to give that up in order to create this framework that would be the most essential part of the work. That is a generative piece that has been created so that people can think of it as their own. I don’t feel any kind of ownership of it because, how could I? There are 400 stories on there that are not my stories. They’re everyone’s stories now that they’ve been submitted. I should tell you about an experience I had recently. I just received this enormous box from Taiwan. It was a huge, enormous, heavy box that arrived on my doorstep. Actually maybe we could turn on the slide projector and I could just show you this view of what it was like in Taiwan in the Contemporary Art Museum. I didn’t have the site in Chinese, but they were interested in having the work in their new museum, so what I did was create a real net. I created a net, which had these--you can see these elasticized lines and wooden rings--which were tied to them. We created real submission forms so that people could have something to write on. Then I also created a video that had all of those sentences that you saw rolling in when I first started showing the site and translated those into Chinese so that as the visitors came into the gallery and saw these sentences rolling across in waves. It had the sound of waves and the waves coming in, and then they could go and read these stories that were in the rings. So it was the opening night of the museum and it was a brand new museum, so people came flooding into this room and they started reading the stories and they immediately got the idea. I didn’t know whether they would or not! But they immediately went to the tables at the sides of the room and started writing. At one point there were so many people writing that they were starting to do it on the floor and putting their paper up against the wall. It was the most amazing experience. So anyway, this box arrived two days ago and it has about 600 stories in it--in Chinese! So I think it’s an international thing, and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to get the site changed. I wonder whether it can be used in different languages. I’m now feeling like I need to think in those terms but first I’m looking for some translators. Some of the stories that are on here are ones that I brought back with me when I returned, so they could be put in the computer as well.

Younger: Thank you so much!

(Applause)