Rachel Rossin,
Stalking The Trace (2019) Installation View, Zabludowicz Collection. Photo: Tim Bowditch
I watched an excellent conversation between interdisciplinary artist Rachel Rossin and curator Michael Connor, in conjunction with the exhibition
World on a Wire, a partnership between Rhizome, the New Museum, and HYUNDAI. This partnership itself is interesting in relation to our historical look at E.A.T. and Bell Labs, Alvy Ray Smith’s collaborations with JPL, and contemporary examples that pair artists, engineers, and scientists. Michael Connor, who is the Artistic Director at Rhizome, curated the exhibition and Rachel Rossin’s work
I’m my loving memory is featured in the exhibition. According to Connor’s curatorial statement,
World on a Wire “transforms the gallery space into a hybrid-reality vivarium of vivid, artist-made synthetic life forms, exploring the possibilities and poetics of simulation as artistic practice.” Rossin’s
I’m my loving memory consists of 3D virtual assets that are UV printed onto clear plexiglass, which is then melted with a torch and molded by the artist’s body. This index of virtual assets then reappears floating in the space through an Augmented Reality app on a tablet.
I initially watched this conversation during Week 1, but after the lectures of Week 2 I thought it might fit better in this response, as we began to examine the digital image, compression, entropy, and the computational image. Rossin’s work touches on facial tracking, deep fakes / cheap fakes, VR, AR, photogrammetry, holograms, entropic vision, programming, game design, and blockchain in experimental and thoughtful ways.
Rachel Rossin,
I'm my loving memory (2020–2021), UV printed plexiglass, AR application. Courtesy Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing.
Rossin talked about her 2015 exhibition
Lossy, which combined oil paintings of VR glitches with a VR simulation on an Oculus Rift headset, which feed off of each other in a recursive loop. In
Lossy, Rossin introduces the fascinating idea of entropic vision, as the photogrammetry scans of the artist's studio, apartment, and paintings in the VR environment are compressed, eroded, and disappeared by the tracked gaze of the audience. The VR simulation was rebooted every 24 hours, beginning the entropic loop anew. Rossin’s creative exploration of irreversible lossy compression aligns with our class discussion of Stan Douglas’ creative use of DCT (discrete cosine transform) compression in his Corrupt Files series. This notion of entropic vision also finds interesting resonance with the Epicurean and atomist philosopher Lucretius (c. 99 - 55 BC), as quoted in Tom Gunning’s essay “To Scan A Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision” that I mentioned last week:
Vision, Lucretius claimed, was carried by images (simulacra), which he described quite materially as films, "a sort of outer skin perpetually peeled off the surface of objects and flying about this way and through the air." He explained their effect on human vision as one of direct contact: "while the individual films that strike upon the eye are invisible, the objects from which they emanate are perceived."
Rachel Rossin,
I Came And Went As A Ghost Hand (Cycle 2), 2015, Still from VR
While Lucretius’ theories don’t entirely hold up under the current scientific understanding of vision and perception, it remains interesting in relation to Rossin’s visual manipulations of virtual simulacra, and the interactions between the physical and the virtual. It is also interesting to expand this perpetually peeling skins of simulacra to our contemporary moment of constant selfies and surveillance, the perpetual erosion of a subject.
Georges Seurat’s early pointillist painting
“la Grande Jatte” (1884), is also interesting in relation to Rossin’s enduring use of traditional painting techniques in combination with Virtual Reality. From this perspective,
“la Grande Jatte” can be envisioned as a precursor to the “point cloud” of photogrammetry, or as early visual synthesis as we begin to think about pixels, compression, and the computational image.
Still from Rachel Rossin's VR piece
The Sky is a Gap (2017)
Connor and Rossin also discuss Rossin’s VR piece
The Sky is a Gap (2017), included in her solo show
Stalking the Trace (2019) at the Zabludowicz Collection in London.
The Sky is a Gap is inspired by the surreal final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film
Zabriskie Point (1970), which features a montage of slow-motion explosions of domestic items. The Antonioni connection is an interesting parallel to Professor Legrady’s mention of Antonioni’s
Blow-up (1966). Rossin similarly constructs a virtual explosion of a virtual home, and along with it a surreal physics simulation of floating fragmented domestic objects. What is fascinating and innovative about Rossin’s approach is that she utilizes her viewer’s position and velocity in the space (as tracked and spatialized by the Oculus Rift headset) as a temporal cursor which scrubs the timeline of the explosion back and forth. The viewer not only examines the contents of this virtual world, but controls the flow of time based on their body’s position of space. I was fortunate enough to get to experience this VR piece in her DUMBO studio, when I tagged along with a friend's Yale field trip.
Rachel Rossin,
Recursive Truth, 2019. Still frame from digital video.
In her video
Recursive Truth (2019), Rossin uses motion tracking and facial tracking to create crude deep fakes that superimpose her face onto footage of a young Steve Jobs and footage of Marco Rubio discussing the political implications of deep fakes at a Senate hearing. Throughout the video Rossin keeps the curtain pulled back, revealing the artifice of her manipulation through python scripts and backend facial tracking with her webcam. The obvious artifice highlights the uncanny experience of “cheap fakes”, but it also points to a near-future where the illusion of “deep fakes” seamlessly blends into reality. Politically, we are already aware that deep/cheap fakes do not need to seamlessly blend with reality, the sowing of doubt, distrust, and confusion is actually effective enough.
Links:
Rachel Rossin
http://rossin.co/
Michael Connor
https://rhizome.org/profile/michaelconnor3/
World On A Wire exhibition website:
https://worldonawire.net/#list
World on a Wire: Rachel Rossin Artist Talk
https://vimeo.com/531959602
New York Times review of Lossy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/arts ... nting.html
ARTFORUM Interview:
https://www.artforum.com/video/rachel-r ... work-71956
Final Scene of
Zabriskie Point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guOmJM8xvHA