Q & A - Peter Nelson
Q & A - PETER NELSON
Article published in Framework, Vol 4, Issue 2: VIRTUAL. IDENTITY. DISPLAY, June 2016
Peter Nelson, Extensions of a No-PLace (Wen Zhengming), animation still, 2013, Image courtesy of the artist
Emma-Kate Wilson: How did your practice start to develop into the digital hyper reality? Moving beyond the physical space of known objects, completely restructuring the ready-made?
Peter Nelson: The MOP Projects show Landscape Tractate was the first animation I’ve made without a video camera, just using image manipulation and 3D animation tools. It more or less still comes out of my initial background in painting and drawing - fabricating spatial environments and composing images, but this time with a time axis. I wonder if a different concept adjacent to the readymade might work better - “instance” maybe? Each form in the animation is 3D modelled and textured, however if it is repeated, as in the case of the buildings or letters in that animation, it is instantiated - various instances of the same 3D model, no original, just a spawn of a model that can be used ad infinitum.
Emma-Kate Wilson: I’d be really interested in exploring this idea of digitalised “instance”. Are the animations instances that are responding to each other in an organic manner or it the process planned out? Secondly, how do you perceive the audience experience a recontextualised digital exhibition?
Peter Nelson: My use of instanced copies was mostly in the animation Landscape Tractate, but it is also how my new computer game works operate. In both cases, I make a set of 3D models that make up the vocabulary of the work. Some of these models would only occur in once instance in the 3D world that the animation depicts, others would appear hundreds of times. For example, one sequence of the work recreates Le Corbusier’s Spatial City. To make this, I only modelled one building, then made instanced copies to produce a city block, then instanced copies of the city blocks to make the entire metropolis. In some sense, the computer program treats all these buildings as if there was only one there. The computer games work in a slightly different way. I make objects, such as the grotto, the stairs, other architectural features, and then where necessary, they are copied and pasted to produce either a higher staircase (in the case of the Grottspace exhibitions), or to make an entirely new exhibition, I can open a file with the blank gallery in it and start inserting and programming a new exhibition. In a computational sense these are more like a copy and paste thing, where the computer does perceive each object and each duplicate, but I think conceptually, it can be spoken about in parallel to both ready mades, duplicate objects (Walter Benjamin Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?), and possibly modular approaches to painting (Lothar Ledderose’s argument for how Chinese painting repetitively recycles modular motifs to create an infinite variation of landscape images). So to answer your initial question about instances and planning, often I start by making objects, which turn into environments, which turn into either time-based animations, or real-time environments such as computer games. For Landscape Tractate, Sydney sound artist & musician Peter Farrar made a sound composition for me, based on our conversations regarding the content of my 3D environments, and then I animated sequences using the timing inspired from his music.
For Grottspace, the timing is based on the navigation of the player/audience, and the arrangement of 3D models in the space is based on my relationship with the artists and how their work was curated into the digital gallery. It’s hard to say how audiences will respond to the exhibitions in Grottspace. At this early stage in the project, it is sort of an experiment for me, one to see how accessible the gallery is to people, and how they navigate through the environment, and then to see how it is perceived, and these are co-dependent. In terms of navigation, I tested the work with a bunch of people before releasing it to SafARI, and it is a steep learning curve for me to understand. A work like this requires an audience to both work out how to, and have the motivation to want to explore the exhibitions and find things that might not be immediately apparent. The degree to which the space is explored fully, as well as how this process relates to the audience’s perception of the decontextualised digital exhibition, is something I am still learning about, based on what people report back to me.
Emma-Kate Wilson: Grottspace is a curious concept, how did you find the making of a digitalised show? How was SafARI was received in the end? Ledderose ideas are quite interesting, the repetition of line and form being a distinct motif throughout traditional Chinese art. I found Hong Kong, as a city, has that feeling, the constant duplicating of buildings. Has living there influenced your work? To quote Ledderose: do you find yourself adopting “a distinctly Chinese pattern of thought”?
Peter Nelson: By recreating a historical site I am creating a disjuncture between the representation and the represented. Because it is a navigable interactive space, perhaps it exaggerates the liberties and differences we can enjoy between the image and its referent. Because so much of the history of the grotto is tied up in colonialism, property and wealth, stealing the site into a digital realm where I can really do whatever I want with it allowed infinite liberties, little things like putting TV screens in the grotto was fun, because I didn’t have to pay for the TVs, or worry about a source of electricity. It sounds weird, but maybe it’s because I used to run a small art installation business, that these things are such a paramount concern in installing media art, but when it is in a virtual realm, you just put stuff wherever you want.
That’s also the simple side of it, because as you start to program more interactivity into the space, objects cease to be objects in the represented sense as they might appear in an animation or still image, and their interactive properties assert a hierarchy of importance. At that point the distinctions between the real world object and its represented other certainly become more distinct.
Honestly, it’s hard to know how the SafARI work was perceived. I was in Hong Kong at the time of the festival, so I can only really tell from people who played the game and recounted it back to me. I know that people found some aspects of navigation difficult and finding the other exhibitions, which gave me pause for thought in how I could better design future versions. Others I think enjoyed the idea of the digital ‘other’ to the works also physically exhibited in SafARI. Out of interest, have you downloaded and played it? [you can do so here: http://www.xn--0ee91b2i4c8jrd.... grottspace ]
Living in Hong Kong has had an influence on my work, but it is hard to trace exactly how that has worked. I am here in a PhD program, living on campus, spending half my time researching, half the time making digital work and the night times painting. That rhythm is so different to how I was living before I left Sydney, so this change in routine changes so much before I can even think what Hong Kong has done specifically. I’ve been living and working between Australia and East Asia (Taiwan, Hong Kong, China) on and off for about 5 years, so there are certain rhythms I’m adapted to living in, however each of these places are so different to one another, so I think I just live in a sort of flexible rhythm, informed by familiarity of these places, but I don’t think that would equate to a Chinese pattern of thought. Perhaps a sympathy and an ambient understanding of what that might be, but happy to admit and own my outsider visitor status in all of these communities. A curious and grateful guest. www.peteracnelson.com
