Error 404. Noise in Electronic Media Arts / Ewa Wojtowicz, Ha! Art” Magazine, Poland, 2012
Although most works by Marcelina Wellmer emerge from the realm of painting, their visual message is enhanced by a generative factor and connected with electronic devices. In generative art practice, an artist programs initial parameters, leaving most of the work to be processed out by a computer. This hybrid of media is enabled by contemporary computing technology, however the artist’s attitude is not purely technological.
The randomness is one of their most important qualities, changing an image derived from an industrial cityscape into a set of variable figures and colors. The processing software, responsible for the changes, is provided by the artist as a part of the artwork and it is as important as the physical painting on canvas. Marcelina Wellmer uses the software as a fully-fledged artistic medium, as well as the traditional visual arts’ media. However, even in the case of paintings, the artist is conscious that the screen media are the dominant media nowadays. Therefore even looking at a painting on canvas, we should be aware of the previously mediated experience.
The relation between the screen (Bildschirm) and the painting (Gemälde), analyzed by Lev Manovich, is crucial for the relation of the subject (the viewer) and the image. The picture’s frame is both real and symbolic, and, as Manovich stated, the picture, understood in a traditional way, is non-existent, as the refreshing images make a coherent picture, being nothing more than flickering light . The ambivalence between the medium and the image, analyzed by Hans Belting in his book Bild-Anthropologie (2002), is one of the possible contexts we can perceive these works within. Another one is the context of generative art, with its relation between the human factor and the artificial intelligence of a machine, a computer in this case.
Marcelina Wellmer in her generative projects Error 502 – Bad Gateway (2011) and Error 502, 404, 410 (2012) approaches the phenomenon of a server error, enhancing its audio qualities. Rarely noticed sounds accompanying technical errors, are normally not perceived in terms of aesthetics. The embedded microphone the typical hard disk errors or connection failures hearable. This work, revealing the audio side of technical damages is based on customized hard disks. This is an example of “reverse engineering” enabling a translation between media. The noise accompanying the series of breakdowns is revealed and exposed with a scientific approach, having also aesthetical framework. Although the disks turn in the endless loop, their rhythm is disrupted by a randomness factor. It’s not the viewer who decides on how the disks would be turning, but the letters engraved on the surface of the disks. These are the names of the particular errors that make the loop stumbling, being readable only when the disk stops. It is a paradox, that attempting to access the information about the work, we lose contact with it, and while experiencing the artwork, we are unable to read the text. This cognitive dissonance is derived from a reflection on an error as one of the most immanent features of a computer as a cultural machine. If software is a set of formal instructions prepared for a computer to follow and fulfill, this work negates the software functionality. As Inke Arns notices, analyzing the issue of code experiments: “It oscillates in the perception of the recipient between assumed executability (functionality) and non-executability (dysfunctionality) of the code; in short, between significant information and asignificant noise”.
Ewa Wojtowicz
PhD, University of Arts in Poznan
http://ewa-wojtowicz.net