Jennifer Steinkamp: Animation and Abstraction
This conversation was conducted via phone in November of 2017, on the day of the opening of the artist’s new public artwork Winter Fountains in Philadelphia.
The interview originally appeared in edited form as Animation and Abstraction: Jennifer Steinkamp in BOMB Magazine online which can be viewed here along with selected video clips.
Jennifer Steinkamp. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
SEAN CAPONE: Jennifer, thanks for talking with me because I know how busy you are today.
JENNIFER STEINKAMP: I like to get things off my plate right away.
SC: You are definitely in the zone. So, the idea with these conversations is to feature artists working with animation, and to talk about the idea of ‘animation’ as an art practice in itself. We are speaking as you are preparing to open a new public art installation Winter Fountains in Philadelphia. Now, I’m really interested in moving-image art as a form of public art. It seems to me, in a way, a more natural vehicle for media art than a gallery space. Can you talk about this new piece in consideration of your experience with gallery exhibitions vs. public art installations?
JS: Well, I think the largest difference between gallery & public art is the audience. As we’ve been installing in the park here, at night… people stop and get so involved, they’re in awe, it’s incredible. I don’t think people react that way in a gallery, they’re a little more reserved.
SC: But you get away with doing things in a gallery that you can’t in a public space, with shadows and projection.
JS: I actually like the shadows, I would love to be able to project low, continuously, because when people walk through they become part of the work, their shadow becomes part of the work and become an active participant. When I first started out the projectors were low but it became a kind of a hassle because people would fool around with the projector — I had a gallery in NY, after the show had been running a while, I went in and one of the projectors was zoomed out, way off, and they didn’t even realize it.
SC: So sometimes it’s not so desirable to let the public have their way. Can you describe the setup for Winter Fountains? I assume people will not be interacting with the screen?
JS: They can create shadows if they go up close, they can actually touch the screen. The screens are 26’ wide by 13’ tall fiberglass domes embedded with glitter. There’s four of them placed along a mile-long parkway, surrounded by three art museums, two science museums, the first free library, churches, a horticultural society, and an art school. It’s the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, quite a cultural center. It’s the 100th Centennial of this parkway. I was tasked with researching all these cultural institutions because they’re all sponsoring the piece … to look through their collections and respond to them. I must be insane to do something like that! But I did it, then I thought maybe I should research Benjamin Franklin — because I had already researched the life of Madame Curie, for another piece. Turns out, he’s touched every aspect of culture in every conceivable way. He’s incredible, one of the most important scientists and politicians in our history … he’s done everything.
Jennifer Steinkamp, Winter Fountains, November 30, 2017–March 18, 2018, sunset until midnight. 4 domes. 26 feet x 13 feet each. Courtesy of the artist.
SC: Maybe it’s interesting to note you were tasked to research this material on behalf of the sponsors, the commissioning agents. The difference between gallery versus public art is that it opens up new audiences but it creates other obligations, makes it feel closer to client-based work.
JS: Right. Although the way they might look at it, from their point of view, they’re not hiring an advertising firm, they’re hiring an artist. So they’re expecting artwork, there’s a limbo in between. There was a review, informally — I created simulation images and I wrote a description. There was an approval process.
SC: I’m jumping ahead a little, let’s come back to that. I’d like to circle back now to talking about animation. Nowadays we take digital imagery for granted but you started at a time when there was a harder point of entry to animation, especially as an art form. What drew you to animation, specifically the more special-effect, computer simulation type of imaging, as you moved away from traditional film/video production?
JS: Mm-hmm. I guess it happened when I was in school. I was an undergrad at Art Center College in Pasadena, they had an exchange program with CalTech. So I took a class at CalTech with a teacher named Gene Youngblood who had published a book called Expanded Cinema. Structuralist filmmakers, including animators, were taking film and presenting it in ways that were not theatrical. They were experimenting with what you could do with film as an art form. Stan Brakhage was drawing on film, Hollis Frampton was showing film without film, just the light from the projector… Gene also showed us some of the first computer animation made by artists, Ed Emshwiller for example. So that’s how it started… I dropped out of school and started working in Hollywood, and just landed in the right place, a crazy place that had computers. I just kind of learned on the job. I didn’t even know what a ‘hard drive’ was, there were no personal computers yet. I was just clicking points and typing in coordinates, I just picked it up.
SC: Yeah, I remember reading that you studied with Gene, whose Expanded Cinema concepts were visionary and of course a part of everybody’s curriculum, if you studied video art. So you were able to take those threads, experimental art and Structuralist cinema, and combine it with other ideas happening at the time: California Light & Space, psychedelia …
JS: MoCA, when they first opened up in downtown LA, they had a Light & Space show of those artists, the installations had a profound effect on me. It did take a while for me to figure out how to do it.
SC: Were you looking at other animation that was being done? You had to create your own language to enter into this.
JS: Hmmmm. Well, it was more like … if I watched a Disney film, I would watch how they did the water. Or 2001, the corridor sequence was really inspirational. Maybe I was looking at Hollywood but from an odd approach.
SC: This was before there was access to the more experimental stuff being done?
JS: No no. You know what, actually, back then you could go see films from artists like Jordan Belson. I was living back and forth between NY and LA, and in Los Angeles, you could go to UCLA’s theater, and some other places as well, which would play Structuralist film. Right now it might be more difficult to see them. You could go online, I guess, but I think they’re films that should be seen as films.
SC: So, as an animator working in the vein of expanded cinema, you aren’t concerned with telling stories. Your work uses loops and non-narrative cyclical action; you treat the image more like a dynamic system. Was this influenced by the projection loops of those film artists, like Fischinger? Because right away you discovered that the loop is a natural structural language for digital animation — it’s always ‘on’, with no narrative arc.
JS: I began as someone who deeply appreciated abstract art. Loops seemed to be a way to work with abstraction and less representational forms. Non-narrative came as part of the package. Both non-narrative and abstraction are on one end of the spectrum of the real. Perhaps these two forms are less concerned with endings and death.
SC: Before we started the interview, you made a joke about how “the art world only allows one artist to be the one working in animation.” Do you think the art system, the art market, has a tendency to pigeonhole artists into being the official representative of any given issue, or discourse around a medium?
JS: This seems like a loose rule, some artists like Janet Cardiff and Bruce Nauman defy this law. It seems to me artists are more responsible for their choices than the art world.
SC: You’ve sometimes used the titles of the works to convey more political, literary or cultural narratives which might not be so apparent, which get subsumed in the hypnotic visuals. Have you ever tried approaching these themes using more explicit representations? Your work started as more optical/abstract experiences, then the theme of flowers and still life, and now these motifs of fruit and molecules. There’s a procession of increasing levels of 3D verisimilitude.
JS: Well, first, titling is the most difficult thing to do. Harder than making the art, and animation is tedious work. But, in the beginning, the projectors were really low resolution, not very bright, and the pixels were huge. And the software, it was really difficult to make anything more realistic.
SC: You were creating these overlapping projections, creating these abstract, experiential spaces. Thinking about the image…
JS: … the image dematerializing the space.
SC: … whereas now, the closer to reality the image gets, the more people want to ascribe a narrative to it. You know? Putting an expectation that something’s going to happen with it, that maintains its connection with ‘reality’.
JS: Yeah. Hmm. My favorite piece from my past was this piece called TV Room. It used the architecture, causing the architecture to feel like it was moving, because the animation was shifting and really made [the viewer] think about the physical experience of the piece. That’s happening with this new one as well. The images curving around the domes, so as you experience the scale and your relation to it, there’s kind of a feeling, it’s like knowing through your body, maybe like a dancer would ‘know’ something. It seems vague, perhaps. But that’s what I was really interested in, in the beginning — dematerializing architecture, asking “what is this experience between the real space and the virtual image”, and how do we understand that.
SC: Well it makes me think that now, in the years since you’ve been working, there’s risen an entire profession devoted to ‘projection mapping’ — artists projecting these effects and loops on facades and at concerts and so on.
JS: Whoaa. I know! I’ve been amazed at that (laughs).
SC: These guys are all super-proficient technical animators and technologists — where do you see your relationship to that as the technology has gotten so much cheaper, easier & accessible? Do you ever feel like the tech is driving the work ahead of the art?
JS: I’ve never felt limited by the technology, ever! We actually learned a whole bunch on this project — so, no. There’s so much you can do and learn whenever you need to learn it, whatever you want to be or do. That’s how artists work, right? If you want to learn how to be a sculptor, or a painter, so you learn about paint and what it can do — it’s the same with animation. Artists always think they can just do it, and they figure out a solution, and make it, and do it.
SC: I’m just thinking about how video, film, even photography, had the same problem. People were putting the technology between themselves and the art production method. As opposed to more easily understood art forms that didn’t have that kind of mystification.
JS: It’s funny because I think I’ve been really lucky. On the technical side, there’s a professional organization called SIGGRAPH — another one in Europe, whatever it’s called. They’ve never really accepted me! I’m so lucky! You can get caught up in that kind of world, but it’s a whole different mindset compared to thinking about art and what art does. I enjoy both mindsets, and if the ‘technical’ people would have accepted me, grabbed onto what I was doing when I was younger, I probably would have gone the wrong direction. Who knows. I’m strange enough that probably never would’ve happened.
“I’ve always been an advocate of making the technology seamless and simple. People used to be afraid of technology, I don’t know why they’re not anymore.”
SC: I studied new media, video & animation under the artist Jim Pomeroy. His approach was very kitchen-sink, very guerilla-media — the limitations of the technology necessitated that. So my own built-in conception is that tech-art is better expressed notionally or metaphorically. You have to work your way around technology rather than through it, and the ‘slicker’ or more ’professional’ a piece looks the more suspicious you should be of it.
JS: (skeptically) Well… (laughs)
SC: But now those boundaries are falling apart too, because the otherworldy power you get out of computers now is very seductive. And this new work you’re doing, when I saw Still Life at ACME earlier this year, the sophistication of the imagery really blew me away.
JS: I got to use the higher resolution, brighter projectors, so you can have a lot more detail, and you have to pay attention to that detail more, too. Before, the older projectors would kind of wipe that out.
SC: <laughs> It would smear out the errors! Well, putting the technological discussion aside, I am also thinking about the relation of the work to other forms & genres. Baroque decoration, the still life, religious painting…
JS: Yeah, I was always thinking about Dutch painting.
Jennifer Steinkamp, Still-Life, 2016. Double projection, 38.53 x 12.75 feet. Courtesy of the artist.
SC: But using animation, you’ve taken these forms and ’released’ them, put them in motion. And you’ve allowed viewers to come into it, to add their own motion and silhouettes into the illusion. An early review called your work a “walk-in painting”, rather than an “expanded cinema experience” or something.
JS: Uh-huh. Early on, I’ve been more related to painters, and collected by people who collect painting rather than video art. I think that’s great, and all the things that have kept me on this track, somehow —
SC: They’ve been through an understanding of more ‘traditional’ art. And do you feel a connection with this ‘new’ technological art culture, like with virtual reality, interactive animation etc?
JS: I probably need to know more about it. I just started teaching VR to my undergrads…I’ve done an AR piece but I’ve never done a VR piece. I did it for 7x7 for Rhizome at the New Museum. It’s not documented. Unfortunately the woman who was running the AR piece for us, her eyes were wider set than we anticipated. It was really cool, a great piece but frustrating for me. We didn’t have time to rehearse it. Like, she had really wide-set eyes.
SC: Ha. The technology is flawless but the body always lets you down.
JS: Life goes on! I liked that software. It tracks facial recognition and equates them to different emotions, which is used to control [the game engine] Unity, which I’m starting to use more now. I’ll end up making a VR piece… my students certainly are! And, a lot of it’s too grunge. “Post-Internet” art, I guess, people making things that are intentionally really ugly, in order to make you take it seriously … it’s making me crazy.
SC: I’ve noticed a definite aesthetic with younger VR artists, that is really energetic, pretty brutal, pretty punk in a way. It’s a formal mode of discovery these artists are involved in right now.
JS: I’ve seen people, my students, work through that.
SC: It’s interesting to see how this kind of realtime animation takes the literal space of the body and the environment into factor. Your work does adhere to an idea of painterly ‘flatness’ — still dealing with the surface of architecture. Moving forward, will we start seeing actual spatial environments, actual bodies in your work?
JS: I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s so exciting, But it’s kind of annoying your audience has to wear this VR headgear. It’s very lonely. Maybe, I think one should use that conceptually, this loneliness, in the piece. Like an Edward Hopper kind of loneliness.
SC: An interactive experience which is really unenergetic.
JS: I think that’s a good idea for someone to make.
SC: In your production process, do you sit down with a preconceived idea, or is there first a mode of exploration where you see what surprises the software might have to offer, that inspires a piece?
JS: It’s always random, it’s always a surprise. I work with dynamic simulations a lot. I render them over and over and you decide if you like it or not. (sounds of bustle and noise) We have to start driving over to the installation now, but we can keep talking.
SC: Ok, one last question. Back to what we first started talking about. One of my goals is to demystify some of the practical and economic factors of maintaining a moving image art practice. You’ve worked in the commercial entertainment sphere as well.
JS: Not for a long time, not that much. No more client work. Anyone coming to me now is coming for my artwork.
SC: So what is the object that you sell to collectors or institutions?
JS: Well, for example, if they buy a Tree, they get the animation, a computer, maybe some help setting it up, telling them what projector to buy. I’m switching over now, but they get Blu-Ray discs that have an archive of much higher resolution file that can be sampled to whatever display device will be in the future. My work is pretty much rendered to 4K. I’m not ready for 8K! There’s been points where I’ve re-rendered all my work, and I’ll have to do it again. That’s a drag.
SC: See, that’s interesting to me, the responsibility you feel towards up-scaling and upgrading the work. I just went through that, with pieces from just a few years ago, you can hardly look at them now on today’s high-res monitors. And being 3D and generative, you have that temptation. You go in and make it bigger, cleaner.
JS: Yeah, as long as the software lets you! But then when you do that, you end up changing the work. Museums never give a painting back to a painter. I change it, when I rez it up, I can’t help it.
SC: Doesn’t that take it more into conceptual territory? The art’s just a series of instructions that will change form according to the scale at which it’s being presented. Like a Sol Lewitt.
JS: Yes. Some work can translate, like the Trees. Madame Curie, I’m extremely fussy about where that shows. I think it’s important, I’ve always been an advocate of making the technology seamless and simple. People used to be afraid of technology, I don’t know why they’re not anymore.
SC: Well, technology has been integrated into our daily lives more than anyone thought possible. Mostly because of cell phones and universally available wi-fi. Which reminds me, one last thing, I have a confession to make. Some years ago, I cornered you in at Lehmann Maupin at an opening, and interviewed you with my crummy flip-phone back when I was first imagining myself to be a ‘blogger’.
JS: Oh, okay, that’s funny. (clearly does not remember).
SC: Glad to say, nothing every became of that. So thank you for agreeing to talk with me today, I’m very happy to complete the circuit.