Writings about Art
- Ceccheto, D. and Hiebert, T. (2009) "Ghost Stories and Eidolic Speculations." Curatorial essay for the catalogue for Eidola an exhibition of works by William Brent and Ellen Moffat. Victoria: Open Space Arts Society.
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In a sense, every sound is a ghost. This is why we look for the sources of sounds, trying to place and identify them: we are never without sound -- we even hear silence, sounds of things that are not there -- and we are consequently always hunting down these haunted moments, to find out more about them, and to also always hear more as a result of our directed attention. It was Albert Camus who famously demanded philosophical accountability from the universe -- he was answered in silence -- and indeed, with this first story of silence as a guide, we might pause to remember that when all is quiet and calm, we can still hear blood circulate through our veins, and the feint rhythms of a heartbeat that insists on a regular rupturing of this universal quietude. The body is the ghost of a question such as this, a perpetual, if gentle, chatter and thump -- a rattling of corporeal chains -- that suggests that we too are ghosts and that to be alive is to be haunted... by the universe, by our own bodies... by our own imperatives to make sense where there is none...
- Hiebert, T. (2008) "Rorschach Realities: Paul Woodrow & Alan Dunning's Ghosts in the Machine." Catalogue essay for The Einstein's Brain Project: Ghosts in the Machine an exhibition by Paul Woodrow and Alan Dunning. Gíjon (Spain): LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre.
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... Knowing that ghosts rarely appear to the direct gaze, Woodrow and Dunning have provided an appropriately ambiguous architecture -- allowing not only for vectors of phantom emergence but also suspending judgment on the truth or falsity of the situation, preferring the aesthetics of speculative engagement to the politics of declarative authority. In either case however, the ghosts in this machine are at least partially imaginary -- as all sensory apparitions are required to be.
Formally, the installation is simple. A CCD camera is contained within a sealed, light-tight box -- a technological eye that is (physiologically) enabled but (environmentally) deprived. Within the darkness of this box that is also a coffin of sorts -- portal from which the ghosts are expected to re-emerge -- no visuals appear. What is required, then, is to value-add machinic processing powers to the equation; eyes that see with much more flexibility that their human counterparts, data gazes that scan whatever information presents itself, machinic upgrades that become what the French thinker Paul Virilio calls "sightless vision."4 These eyes that are not eyes are consequently also not limited by the darkness, imaging and imagining visual static that resides just below the illuminated thresholds of its human equivalent.
- Hiebert, T. (2008) "In Defiance of Impossibility: Reflections on the 2008 World Telekinesis Competition." Catalogue essay for the 2008 World Telekinesis Competition a Noxious Sector project. Victoria: Deluge Contemporary Art.
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Where does one draw the lines of impossibility, the lines that do not appear but which we nevertheless see, as demonstrated by the ways in which they govern self-conception -- as though seeing the invisible were not impossible enough, somehow we are also supposed to abide by this imagined rule. Much better are the rules of the imaginary, through which we draw our own invisible lines, testing the powers of the impossible, and making sure we were not lied to when told that it was, on principal, beyond our reach.
Are things as they must be or as we choose to agree? Do we do ourselves a service by believing in the impossible, or if there really is an impossibility, how close to it can we possibly come? Moths to a flame or players to game? Is there a limit horizon to the question of impossibility, and if there is, does this not itself deny the premise of the question? If impossibility is possible -- which is to say if such a thing as the impossible can be insisted upon -- then everything will always remain backwards. It can be nothing other than a redundant limit to conception that pre-empts the question of possibility with an answer that deems the imagination futile.
- Hiebert, T. (2008) "Standoff." Monograph essay for The Stand-Off an exhibition of works by Jackson 2bears. Calgary: The New Gallery
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Roland Barthes once invented a country -- Japan, he called it -- and then proceeded to describe the intricate inner workings of this supposedly fictive nation.1 While seemingly controversial, Barthes' point was actually rather simple -- no nation is so uncomplicated that it can be reduced to a singular or official perspective; and Barthes' "Japan" was also a contrasted attempt to understand the biases and the cultural nuances of his own nation -- France -- which was no more reducible to intelligible signs than his provocative example.
Following Barthes lead, then, I too shall invent a country, but mine will stay closer to the questions at home. Canada -- a nation represented by the coloured codings of the white and the red; the snow blanketed winter ground and the glowing red of the autumn maple, the northern lights or the red-breasted robin. But this goes further too -- from red-breasted to red-neck -- the quickly-complicated codings of colour carry their own icy connotations.
- Hiebert, T. (2008) "Blurs of the Natural." Monograph essay for HO an exhibition of works by Toni Hafkenscheid. Dawson City: Klondike Arts Institute.
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The French film theorist André Bazin insisted that photography "embalms time," like a death-mask for the eternally preserved moment.2 Bazin's analogy was to the gold-plated Egyptian sarcophagus, the guardian for the mummified flesh statues of spiritual perpetuity. Flesh turned into a model of itself; a model of times past and a full-scale effigy that allows us to imagine the perpetuation of memory. Yet mummification is not the only preservation tactic; gold is only one side of the alchemical divide, and statuary only one way to imagine. Consider another such story of gold: the Gold Rush of the Canadian North, and the permafrost fantasy of cryogenic preservation -- coupled not, in this instance, with monumental burial chambers of pyramid stone but instead with the dancing coloured lights of an ephemeral night time sky. Here, natural fireworks pierce the darkness of invisible night, and the result is larger than life. And this story too relates to photography -- for the dancing of lights has always been that upon which the image is modeled -- not with the entirety of the night at its disposal, but with something poignantly similar: the liminal presence of perpetually fleeting moments that, without photography, would never exit from the blur of time itself. There is a difference however, and it is that photography's debt is not to gold but to silver -- that alchemical ingredient which allowed the history of recorded images to begin. The dancing lights of the image world are, strangely, drawn to preservation within this black box of silver possibilities -- the camera is a capture device for the embalming not only of time, but of light as well.
- Hiebert, T. (2007) "Animated Afterlives: Arts of the Postnatural." Catalogue essay for Unpacked and Reheated an exhibition of works by Brendan Fernandes and Steven Rayner. Victoria: Open Space Arts Society.
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Gone are the days when we can retreat to the comfortable historical oppositions of technology and nature. Despite the rhetoric of artists, environmentalists and scientists alike, it is not that the power struggle is over, not that nature is unconquerable, nor that technology has already conquered, but something substantially more complex. The terms of engagement -- the oppositions themselves -- have commingled, copulated, consummated a relationship that we never thought possible. Some will call this posthuman, but if it is posthuman, it is also -- by necessity -- postnatural.
Consider the eloquent argument put forward by Katherine Hayles that suggests that "the posthuman is 'post' not because it is unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will."2 Might one not make the same argument with regards to the natural? There is no longer a nature that is clearly distinguishable from the cultures that surround it: even rain flirts with human acidity, air with the exhaust fumes of urban living, crops with a new and strange genetic debt that alters the innermost makeup of the plants themselves.
- Hiebert, T. and Jarvis, D. (2006) "Thinking in Hindsight: Ted Hiebert and Doug Jarvis in conversation." Curatorial dialogue included in the catalogue for Dowsing for Failure an exhibition of works by Benjamin Bellas, Nate Larson, Gordon Lebredt, Daniel Olson, Mike Paget, June Pak, and Anthony Schrag. Victoria: Open Space Arts Society.
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Does a failure to fail result in success, or is it not perhaps the other way around? The merry-go-round of failure is less merry and more rounded, one might suggest... or, at the very least, a trajectory of going is initiated such that the compounded merry-rounded results in a proverbial guessing-game of questions not yet bested, jestingly presented as a model of potentially interested engagement. Such is the nuance of collected gestures brought together in a loose reflection of dowsing for failure -- a self-cancelled alienation brought about through alien collaboration with that which never pretended to have an opinion in the matter. This thought reflected backwards. This thinking in hindsight. Or, in the words of Antonin Artaud: "this possibility of thinking backwards and suddenly insulting one's own thoughts."
- Hiebert, T. (2006) "Vulnerable Light." Catalogue essay for Vulnerable Light an exhibition of works by Isabelle Hayeur and Jennifer Long. Victoria: Open Space Arts Society.
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There is a deep, dark secret to photography, one of which most people are unaware. Photography is a practice of deceit, betrayal, and, inevitably, violation. But this has nothing to do with the photographic subject, nor with the photographer him or herself. This, rather, is a characteristic of the very medium and, as we all have been told, the medium is the message: "the camera is sold as a predatory weapon."2
If this is true, one must ask the necessary question: what is it that the camera preys upon? It is not the image, for the image is implicated in the act of appearance. At best one might argue that the excerpting of image from body or object constitutes the violation in this instance. Yet we have also been told that "it's the object that wants to be photographed,"3 and that "everything today exists to end in a photograph."4 Here one might accuse the object world of vanity, but this does not translate to an accusation against the medium itself. No, the betrayal of photography concerns something different, something neglected, something even -- perhaps -- unexpected. Photography, quite simply, is a practice of betraying darkness or it is nothing at all.
- Hiebert, T. (2006) "SuperModels: Maps from the Imagination Machine." Catalogue essay for Supermodels an exhibition of works by Chris Gillespie, Toni Hafkenscheid, Duncan MacKenzie and Tim van Wijk. Victoria: Open Space Arts Society.
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Jorge Luis Borges once spoke about a map so large that it covered the entirety of the territory it was intended to describe.1 This story is much cited by theorists of the postmodern and in particular by the French thinker Jean Baudrillard who will proclaim that when such an event occurs it means that the territory beneath the map, or in his terms the reality beneath the simulation, has entirely disappeared -- murdered by the map itself.2
We may think that the real persists despite the accuracy of our contemporary maps, but a simple question reveals the fallacy here: which real? No longer is the map simply the size of the territory. In contemporary times, the map is itself much bigger, much more detailed, a magnified map that forever reveals minutia of the territory that it never even knew existed -- charting everything from the microscopic to the telescopic, crossing virtual as well as material territory, including myths and imaginings and narratives, from media reports to political campaigns, genetic composition to historic and familial lineage, weather patterns to electromagnetic radiation. In short, we face precisely a map so detailed that one single reality can no longer be invoked as its source. Instead, here we find an excess of realities, a map so precise that it precludes the possibility of any singular unified perspective.
- Hiebert, T. (2004) "Nervous Control Centre." Monograph essay for Nervous Control Centre an exhibition by Christian Kuras. Calgary: The New Gallery. Reprinted in dANDelion 14.2.
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The technological creature has become mythological, reanimated by its self-grown fictions of mediation. Is it any wonder the control centre is nervous?
A recent exhibition by Christian Kuras has created monuments to contemporary mythology, golems to a revivified technological mysticism. Nervous Control Centre. Silent tongues of confrontation, gazes turned inward, wired circuitry and flesh, immobilized by technological union. What is the fate of the body in an age of machines? Not the site of resistance it is so often held up to be -- that much is certain. No longer can we justify the body and the machine as two different things -- one with agency and personality, the other a site of pure mobilization and creative/productive potential. Now rather, our own thinking -- our own nervous extensions of mind -- is the source of the problem -- the fear of entering into symbiosis with technology is also the fear of symbiosis with ourselves.
