Carlin Brown interviews Maria Antelman on the occasion of her solo exhibition My Touch, Your Command, Your Touch, My Command.

Maria Antelman makes videos, photographs, sound installations, and sculptures using both new and traditional technologies. Conceptually, her art practice points to our interaction with machines and the complicated systems they weave around us. Her themes come from disparate sources like space exploration, crash test facilities, artificial intelligence experiences, and utopian possibilities. Recent shows include On the Exactitude of Rain at Ryan Lee Gallery (NY), A Nonexistent Event at Melanie Flood Projects (Portland, OR), Notes from the Field at the University of Melbourne, Soft Machines at Impakt Festival (Utrecht), Private Matters at Apexart (NY), Stigmergy at 247365 (Brooklyn), The Amateurs at the Agency (London), …But the Clouds… at Room East (NY), and Capsule Spaces at the Eugenides Foundation (Athens). Antelman received her MFA from Columbia University.

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CB: There are a few repeating motifs in your work; a hand collaged over footage, explicit references to science and science-fiction, and of course the machine. The title of your exhibition at Melanie Flood Projects, My Touch, Your Command, Your Touch, My Command suggests back to some of that same imagery. I think of voice command systems, tactile technologies, and Artificial Intelligence — the difference between the “touch” (whether physical or psychological) of a human hand or that of a machine becomes blurred. Technology and the machine is an extension of us. This is something you’ve addressed before, like in the sound piece The World of Blocks (2015). Can you speak to that?

MA: We used to handle machines. Now we command technology with a sound, a voice, a touch, a gesture, a motion. There is a relationship of power and a feeling of control attached to how we use it, and it’s intelligent. With the machines, the master and slave component was clear. Digital technologies are kind of sneaky. We create tools and then these tools transform us. We become extensions of the technologies we use. Objects are turning into information technologies and are entering our personal territories. An example is prosthetics: your bionic hearing aid is smart, and thus accessible by a third party (hackable). There is a vulnerability inside its intelligence. Also, on a larger scale, we become dependent to smart technologies serving us. We are losing the ability of doing certain things by our selves. There is always the underlying question: who is in control?

CB: There are also intimate and sexual connotations behind the title. What is the correlation between human intimacy and our computers? If machines are not an extension of us, how might you otherwise describe human-technology relationships?

MA: “We are gathered around the altar of high technology, transforming our loneliness into some kind of community”, a quote from a forgotten source.

CB: You grew up in Greece and studied history in Spain, but relocated to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, bust, and rebound of hi-tech. Starting from a place so rich in its own history and moving to a hub of fast-paced technology, your artistic practice seems to act as a bridge between these two worlds. How does the parallel of past and future exist in your work?

MA: Rich history can become a burden, while the hub of fast-paced technology can feel extremely empty. The poet says that thinking about the past connects us to our mortality and thinking about the future connects us to the idea of utopia. What conjures past and future is our imagination. My father was a political cartoonist, and I grew up looking at all these sophisticated comments on politics, economics, society. I loved how they were sad and intense but always made you laugh. Their effect lasted for a second, but that second was amazing. I really admire this quality: being comic and tragic at the same time. Maybe the past is tragedy and the future is a comedy, or vice versa.

CB: You’ve often made work that sits somewhere between video and still image by animating sequences to an audio track. The Repeater (2016) superposes slides of side-by-side photographs with the soft, echoing voiceover of a hired actor. How did you come to this process? Given that your new exhibition is a part of the series Thinking Through Photography, can you describe your relationship with photo as medium?

MA: “Death is a photograph, life is a movie”, wrote Susan Sontag. A photograph makes you wonder what happened, while a movie is an anticipating experience. The viewer is expecting to see what is going to happen next. So, I make movies with photographs, because I am interested in the contrasting feeling of these two reading responses. I started taking pictures very young and later as a cinephile, I felt great admiration for filmmakers. Years later, I came across a video editing program in a box with a user manual, and I started making videos using my photographs. I make these compositions, or rather juxtapositions of different elements (images, sounds, voices, texts, motion, etc), which question the sanity of our society.

CB: “If there is a copy of you, while you are still alive, then the real you ceases to exist at that moment. You can never know if you are the very same person, for fear of an unknown double running around somewhere else.” There is a really powerful message here — it makes me think about the way our virtual presences can succeed our “real lives” and in a way have a separate existence. Can you elaborate on this quote from The Repeater?

MA: This is part of a philosophical argument, also known as the duplication objection. It has been used in the film Total Recall with Schwarzenegger, a technophobic film from 1990. Arnold, the man-machine has had his memories duplicated in multiples. He ends up losing his sense of who he is. The best moment in the film is when Arnold watches a video recording of his original self talking to him, his physical duplicate. It is very nicely confusing. It makes me think of the way we are dealing with our multiple digital personas, which we curate and update constantly. These copies or representations inhabit multiple platforms and data banks. In the Repeater, the images transport us to a natural setting, on an island, with a bunch of amateur radio operators, far away from a dark machinist urbanscape. The radio operation is low key, a couple of stations set on the sand, surrounded by stray dogs, antennas facing the sea and a few careless tourists taking selfies. It feels harmless, and innocent, but the slight possibility of such duplication absurdity creates an intense feeling.

CB: In 2015 you showed in Portland for the first time with your exhibition A Non-Existent Event at Melanie Flood Projects. There are some clear aesthetic differences between the work you presented at that time to the work in MTYC, YTMC. How would you say your practice has shifted since your last exhibition?

MA: Then, I presented a photomontage series inspired by the J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World. The novel takes place in a post-apocalyptic tropical London with high-saturated color descriptions. I loved the feel of the story, the characters and the landscapes. I had shot these black and white negatives inside a metal shop at a NASA center, there where satellites and rockets are built. Again, I was thinking about the interrelation of the mechanical with the digital world. My photographs were shot with a mechanical camera and were about mechanical tools, but I was using digital tools to manipulate them. The result was an amalgam of these two technologies, dipped into the color palette of the Ballards descriptions. Then, I played a sound piece about one of the first inspiring AI intelligent program created at MIT. Two voices were reenacting the human machine interaction, highlighting tensions of knowledge and nonknowledge. Now, that I think about it, I could have used the same title for that show as well.

CB: The work produced for A Non-Existent Event includes photographs you captured during your visit to NASA centers in Mountain View, California and Hampton, Virginia. Can you describe your experiences visiting the NASA centers and how else those visits informed your practice?

Melanie Flood Projects ongoing series Thinking Through Photography was awarded a 2016 Precipice Fund. So thrilled to be included alongside so many inspiring projects. 

Recent PNCA BFA 2016 Camille Westerberg interviewed Teresa Christiansen on the occasion of her solo exhibition Indifferent Horizons about growing up in New York, working with the landscape and pushing the boundaries of contemporary photography.

Installation view of Indifferent Horizons, 2016

Indifferent Horizons is the third in an ongoing artist series at Melanie Flood Projects, Thinking Through Photography, an exploration of artists working with photography today. The series includes a comprehensive survey of contemporary photographic practices through programming that highlights experimental and diverse approaches to image making. Facilitated by exhibitions, artist talks, studio visits, interviews, and suggested readings which aim to expand the language surrounding photography, while also unveiling progressive work by local artists in the Pacific Northwest & beyond.

_On view from _April 1- May 15th 2016

Melanie Flood Projects 420 SW Washington #301, Portland, OR 97204

Installation view of Indifferent Horizons, 2016

CAMILLE:

How does a new project or series begin for you, where do you look for inspiration?

TERESA:

Satisfaction in making work comes for me from feeling that I am contributing to a conversation within contemporary photographic practices. Thus, the starting point for much of my work is a desire to respond to a concept, process or aesthetic that I have come across. As a professor of photography, both my instruction and my students expose me to a wide range of contemporary and historical discourse surrounding photography. I often assign myself just as I do my students, working through problems and questions with a set criteria as a way to generate work. I very much believe that process is practice, and so I will push myself to tackle the same question through as many different processes as possible in order to lead me to the next iteration.

For the series "[Indifferent Horizons](http://www.melaniefloodprojects.com/teresa-christiansen)" I decided to take on the contemporary representation of landscape in photography - a subject I have always been drawn to. I returned to a paper I had written in graduate school on Robert Smithson's use of photography and his relationship to landscape. Drawn to the distinctions he makes between "open" and "closed" landscapes in his essay "Art Through the Camera’s Eye," I asked myself how I could attempt to use my photographic practice to create a series of "open landscapes." They would adhere to the criteria put forth by Smithson, each presenting a landscape which "embodies multiple views, some of which are contradictory, whose purpose is to reveal a clash of angles and orders within a sense of simultaneity; this shatters any predictable frame of reference.” My process for this series continues a line of inquiry I have put forth in previous projects: challenging the seemingly transparent nature of a photographic image by drawing attention to its surface. Through cutting, folding and ripping the photographic print, I work to both interrupt the illusion of space, and to draw attention to the tangible nature of the photograph itself. This process is a response to artists I have observed that are working with similar concepts and intents such as Letha Wilson, Kate Steciw, Sara VanDerBeek, or Elad Lassry. Each are using the photographic medium to interrogate itself and to draw attention to its physical properties that have in the past been often repressed.

CW:

Growing up in New York and now living and working in Portland, how has this change in scenery affected the ways in which you photograph the natural world?

TC:

My early understanding of landscape was that which was made up of pure, untouched, wild nature, standing in stark opposition to the man made urban environment that I grew up in on the upper west side of Manhattan. Nature for me was most easily accessed through the pages of Ranger Rick magazine, National Geographic, or the tv show Wild America. From the 7th floor apartment bedroom shared with my sister, I counted down to summer weeks that would be spent on platform tents in a Connecticut summer camp, and yearned for a back yard and a dog rather than a parakeet and an overcrowded jungle gym. Upon arriving at college in Maine, I proceeded to fill a photo album with color 4x6" photographs of nothing but skies, in awe at the openness of it. When I moved to Portland, OR six years ago, green was the predominant color in every composition I made - whether in the studio or out on walks compelled to capture the explosion of green around me.

_ Shadowed Disconnection, 2016_

I’m not sure if my early purist view of “real nature” has more to do with growing up in a dense city, or is simply a reflection of a broader naive cultural conception. As I have studied and interrogated the complexity of human’s relationship with the natural world, and as my own relationship to it has broadened, I have come to think of landscape as a more inclusive term. I have found that the juxtaposition of man made, urban elements within an otherwise “natural” landscape view creates a tension within the image that says more about my experience of the natural world than an image of “pure nature” would. Again in line with Robert Smithson’s thinking, I am intrigued with finding aesthetic value in a post-industrial landscape. I am drawn to subjects that point back to my youthful yearning for nature, and as such embed the impossibility of its fulfillment. In my current photographic landscapes, I seek out subject matter that speaks to my own experience of and relationship to my surroundings. Photography is an organizer of space, and I am intrigued by the challenge to find order within this complex relationship to nature.

CW:

Your work continually pushes the definition of photography with the disruption of the image. When did you first start playing with the boundaries between painting, photography and collage?

TC:

I grew up looking at paintings with my father, a curator of European Paintings. Some of the most vivid childhood stories I remember were the lives of saints told through fresco cycles on Italian chapel walls, narrated by my dad. I studied and practiced painting for a long period of time before investing in photography as my primary artistic medium, and my work has always considered the relationship between photography and painting implicitly if not as one of its central lines of inquiry. 

I am a member of a generation of photographers who are among the last to be educated exclusively in darkrooms, learning photography as a physical process. Digital processes evolved as my artistic relationship to photography was maturing. In my use of photography I have always sought out ways to interact with the medium as a tangible form. A large part of my photographic practice has been dedicated to constructing sets for the camera in which every element in a composition is as intentional as a brushstroke in a painting.

Crystal Clouds from the series Real Artifice, 2011-2014

My work from the past five years has incorporated the manipulation and handling of inkjet prints. In some series I have re-photographed inkjet prints, inserting cut out prints into still life scenes such as in Real Artifice. Many of the images in this series intentionally reference the history of painting within the still life genre, and consider commercial photography's relationship to this tradition. For the project Trace Psychedelia I painted inkjet prints as a way to break the illusion of transparency of the photographic image and to point directly to the complex relationship and rivalry that photography has had with painting since its emergence. The work in Indifferent Horizons engages with the photograph's physical surface more explicitly than any of my past work. Through cutting, folding and weaving inkjet prints the tangible form of the photographic print is emphasized while at the same time the illusion of transparency of the represented view is disrupted. My hand is inserted into the process, and the trace of my actions is as apparent as paint on a canvas.

CW:

In your exhibition Indifferent Horizons the majority of works have been created with a consistent approach in the tearing and weaving of paper– what is different about Shadowed Disconnection and Sunny Nebulosity, how do these fit into the exhibition as a whole?

TC:

Most of the work in this exhibition engages with the surface of the support of the photographic image, breaking the illusion of depth through cutting and weaving prints on paper. In this attention to and treatment of the surface, this work bears a direct relationship to painting. The two pieces you point out are more invested in a dialogue with sculpture through a consideration of the installation and the physical presence of the print itself, both within the gallery space and in relation to the viewer.

_ Portable Tomb, 2016_

While the other pieces in the show disrupt the depth of represented landscapes by weaving two images together, _Shadowed Disconnection_ and _Sunny Nebulosity_ exploit the way the prints are presented to create a new kind of illusion of depth. I adhere to the belief that content and form must go hand in hand, therefore the form that the final print has taken in these pieces is driven by the content of the subject of each photograph. The folds and ridges of _Shadowed Disconnection_ follow the rows of branches in the image. The volume of the represented subject is both highlighted through these ridges but also flattened back out by the frosted glass placed in front of it, creating a confounding simultaneous flatness and depth. I chose to print _Sunny Nebulosity_ on a translucent silk surface and installed it in a corner of the gallery rather than up against a wall so that light could move through the image. The luminosity of the print mimics the refracted light in the pool of water depicted. I consider this pair of images to be a continuation of many of the processes addressed through the rest of the work included in the exhibition. These two pieces were made after the others, and they represent for me the most recent iteration of the concepts that have driven this body of work, leading me to the next work I will make next.