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| Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2003 > November-December 2003 | ||||||||
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11/10/2003
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| Lynn Lukkas, photograph by Sara Jorde |
In a far corner of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the new Regis Center for Art, Lynn Lukkas is turning on Respirae, her contribution to "Art Moves: 2003 Department of Art Faculty Exhibition." To a visitor, the components of this artwork—a small bench, video equipment overhead, the blue speckled image projected onto a large screen, and a tiny microphone dangling nearby—seemingly have little in common with one another. Then Lukkas demonstrates how Respirae works. She sits on the bench and breathes, soundlessly, over the microphone. Suddenly, particles on the screen begin to shift and reconfigure themselves into mesmerizing patterns.
"Breath is the interface that controls the image," explains Lukkas, an associate professor of time and interactivity in the University of Minnesota's Department of Art. More specific, the artwork blends two technologies—a Bio-Radio 110 (a biomedical device used to monitor bodily functions like breathing) and Max mapping software (originally developed as an electronic music program)—to create a "feedback loop" by which the body's interior functions, such as breathing, are externalized via computer-generated imagery.
"In academics, we often have rigid boundaries about what a discipline is," Lukkas says, fiddling with the microphone. "Work like this shows how disciplines are informing and intersecting one another. With this work, I'm able to explore poetic relationships between art, technology, the body, and consciousness."
Exploring the relationships between such seemingly disparate disciplines is at the heart of Lukkas's Bio-Sensor Projects—artworks that map such involuntary bodily functions as breathing, heart rate, and brain waves to images and sounds—of which Respirae is just one example. In turn, Lukkas's artistic exploration is also just one example of creative scholarship or academic research being undertaken by faculty whose departments—art, dance, theater, and music—are located in the newly completed West Bank Arts Quarter.
Creative scholarship, according to Steven Rosenstone, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, is just one of three responsibilities with which University faculty are charged. Teaching, which includes not only lecturing in front of a blackboard but also mentoring and advising, and service, within the University community and the community at large, are the other two. When asked what constitutes academic research in the arts, Rosenstone says two components come to mind.
"There's research in the sense of reading books, writing articles, building theories, thinking about history, and codifying how it all comes together and works, which people do in music, dance, theater, and art. Art history is, of course, all about that," Rosenstone explains. "Then, if you're using the word research to cover creative activities, there are the faculty who, for example, choreograph the new dances, compose the new music, write, interpret, and perform a new script. All of those things belong under the tent of creative research or scholarship in the arts. And they're all going on in the Arts Quarter."
At first glance, arts research—whether a bio-feedback art installation, a theater project involving diverse communities, or a new composition of electronic music—may seem to have a less tangible effect on society at large than, say, a vaccine developed by scientists to prevent illness from a deadly virus. Artists, however, approach their research, and the need for it, much differently. "The artist's perspective is not to create an aesthetic vaccine," explains Mark Pharis, director of the Department of Art. "Arts scholarship operates for most people on a much more personal level.
"It's a fundamental part of our nature as humans to go through life with shared and intersecting experiences, to participate in such universal themes as death, birth, pestilence, survival, family, joy, love, the pursuit of knowledge—all of which describe the human condition," Pharis says. Walk through any library, art museum, or music store and it's evident that artists have explored and interpreted such themes for centuries—through novels and poetry, painting and sculpture, music, and dance and theater.
"Artists investigate questions that are universal. They identify needs that don't yet exist," Pharis continues. "And they have the freedom to examine the conventions and expand the nature of objects into other forms."
For Lukkas, investigating the edge between art and science, and the philosophical questions that arise when the two disciplines intersect, allows her to take on issues that arise in "a complex culture where questions of bioethics can become questions of art," she explains. "By providing other ways of understanding human experience, artists are a creative force that benefits humanity."
As such, creative scholarship doesn't always produce "things you can hold in your hand," Rosenstone says. "But it may produce feelings, quality of life, awareness, alertness, connection to others, joy or angst. It may force you to be reflective and question, or may give you insights you've never had before. The arts force our minds to think in more thoughtful and precise ways about important issues. It's about the kind society we're going to be in and the kind of people that will inhabit society."
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In 2002, Sonja Kuftinec and her students wrote and produced There Is a Field, a theatrical response to the terrorist attacks of September 11. In the program notes, Kuftinec, associate professor of theater history and literature in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, wrote that the piece focused "less on documenting a singular history, or representing a particular people or place, and more on how we as a collaborative group negotiate our relationship to the Middle East."
While creating There Is a Field, the students worked with guest artists skilled in Arabic music, Jewish folk dance, physical theater, installation art, and narrative. They explored stereotypes and popular images of Jews and Arabs; concepts of home and exile; and the history of, myths about, and contemporary media representations of the Middle East. During workshops, students shared stories about Arab or Jewish ancestors that were incorporated into the script. More than 50 people consulted with the students as designers, advisers, producers, and participants. A Saudi artist living in America who creates installation pieces about what it means to be a liberated Muslim woman, for instance, created a piece for the show.
The intent of the production, Kuftinec concluded in her program notes, was to share with the audience "a series of events designed to impact you viscerally, while stimulating your thinking about how you receive and process information associated with the Middle East." During one post-performance discussion, the German-Jewish grandfather of one of the actors, whose story of leaving Germany and moving to Palestine was written into the show, told the cast "that just seeing young people engaged in the questions gave him hope," Kuftinec later recalls. Asking ethical questions about how people live in the world is precisely the function of the theater she creates and in which she engages her students, Kuftinec adds. "It's not about finding answers, but about living the questions."
Over the years, Kuftinec's research and scholarship in community-based theater, theater and identity, youth and women in theater, and performance and social change have resulted in productions in Berlin and Romania with Bosnian and Croatian youth; videos and published articles about those performances; her role as a facilitator for Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings together youth from the Middle East; and her book, Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, which examines the complexities of community theater.
"On the one hand, doing theater together is a way of unifying community in a world in which we've become more alienated from each other. The act of working together makes visible the lack of cohesiveness," Kuftinec explains. Community-based theater "helps us understand the complexity of race, class, and ethnicity; how people negotiate their relationships to each other; and the changing boundaries of who they consider to be part of their community."
Creative scholarship like Kuftinec's, says Michal Kobialka, director of the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, exemplifies "our call as educators, which is to engage students in critical thinking." In contrast to the stereotype of academicians conducting research in an ivory tower, the University's theater and dance faculty are collaborating "with people who exist outside [the tower's] walls," Kobialka continues, "and are thinking about the world at large, their own scholarship, and how it intersects with their art and with their students."
At the point where arts-faculty scholarship and teaching creatively intersect, "the distinction between research endeavor and teaching endeavor goes away," Rosenstone says. "It all connects." Then, when a work like There Is a Field is performed at Rarig Center in the Arts Quarter, an audience experiences how "the University is engaged in issues of contemporary concern," Kuftinec says. "It's not just this place of incomprehensible thinking that's divorced from everyday life."
Kobialka asserts that the location of the Arts Quarter, which straddles the University's West Bank campus and Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood—"that liminal space at the edge of the University, a crossroads between the world of the University and the world at large," as he describes it—itself provides an "unprecedented opportunity for us to engage in a dynamic investigation of what we see, how we see it, and why we see it.
"Theater is not necessarily an institution, but a mode of thinking that's always dynamic, changing, malleable," Kobialka continues. "Same with the Arts Quarter. Now we can move our experiments—our collaborations between the arts—a step further. The Arts Quarter is expression of what is thinkable."
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Decades ago, few musicians would have thought to explore the artistic intersections of computer-generated sound, traditional musical instruments, and visual media. But that's exactly the arena of Douglas Geers's creative scholarship. An assistant professor of music composition and director of the electronic-music studios at the University's School of Music, Geers has composed and performed works for the computer and the violin, the acoustic guitar, even a big-band ensemble.
One of his works is Appliance, an improvisational, interactive performance installation for violin, electroacoustic music, and mechanized sculptures done in collaboration with sculptor Thomas Charveriat and violinist Maja Cerar. During the performance, the violinist wears a sensor glove on her bowing hand, each finger of which communicates with a Max/MSP patch (software similar to that used by Lukkas), which in turn controls computer samples of violin and percussive sounds. A small microphone on the violin has a similar function.
Meanwhile, the violinist also operates a foot switch that controls the sculptures' movements and sounds. Each sculpture—made up of motorized elements mounted on a metal sheet and laid into a burnished-aluminum suitcase—has at least one microcontroller chip programmed to define that sculpture's behavior patterns. The sculptures are all connected to the computer network to coordinate their activities, and each one is miked so its signal can be mixed with the violin and computer signals.
"I'm fascinated by and interested in seeing how different sensory stimuli and artistic components can interact with each other and fit together," says Geers, who has also recorded several compositions on CD, lectures at electronic-music conferences worldwide, writes on electronic music for a variety of publications, and last year produced the first Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art in Minneapolis.
"For me, psychologically, the role of art is to take people outside of ordinary experience and present them with something from a different point of view," Geers continues. "It can be educational, entertaining, or even uplifting. Today, there's such a wide range of new possibilities because of technological advances in the last 50 years, that it just seems natural to me that these things should be used to make art and make music."
Earlier this fall, Geers was caught in the New York City blackout, an experience that confirmed the importance of his artistic endeavors. The sudden lack of working phones, computers, radios, and televisions, he says, "pointed out how much we rely on these technologies everyday. Using them in artistic expression helps people come to terms with these things and see how they fit into our lives by looking at them in different contexts."
Music, in fact, regardless of the instruments or technology used to make it, is such a universal form of expression that its presence in our lives is almost taken for granted. "Ask people what they do in their spare time and, more likely than not, they do it with music," says Jeff Kimpton, outgoing director of the School of Music. Students surveyed by the school have hundreds of music CDs, he adds, "and they talk about music almost as if it's an addiction."
A recent article in The New York Times, "We Got Rhythm; the Mystery Is How and Why," by Nicolas Wade, muses on why "the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival." According to the article, researchers have reported that music "[activates] similar neural systems of reward and emotion as those stimulated by food, sex, and addictive drugs." Throughout human history, music has also been associated with courtship displays and used as a way of "cementing social relationships and coordinating the activities of large groups of people." Still, music remains "a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in skills that researchers are trying to tease apart."
According to Kimpton, "understanding the pervasive role of music is the reason faculty do research," whether their scholarship focuses on writing and performing interdisciplinary compositions; surveying children's play habits and their relationship to future creativity; or studying cultural trends and attitudes about how people use or perform music over time. That research, in turn, Kimpton says, "helps us understand how the mind works in terms of its creative expression and the role of the arts in cognitive development."
Artistic minds at work throughout the Arts Quarter, in new and creative ways, energize endeavors throughout the entire University, which in turn influence how people live, work, play, and interact in the culture at large, Rosenstone says. While the results of those endeavors are sometimes difficult to quantify, they're nonetheless "a core part of what makes us human and the world we live in worth living in.
"There are many things that must come together to get societies, and humanity, to work; to make the world we live in the kind of place we take joy and comfort in," Rosenstone continues. "Some of that comes from people eating healthy food and living in safe communities and having bridges that don't fall down and having trains that don't run into each other and governments that work and policies that are efficacious and economies that don't collapse and legal systems that work. And some of it comes from all the things we do in the Arts Quarter, which, in the scheme of things, are just as important in creating our culture, our society, our way of life."
Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul freelance writer.