Anne-mie Van Kerckhoven: 'Headnurse'
In: Annotations 3: Frequencies: Investigations into culture, history and technology. Edited by Melanie Keen. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1998,
pp. 76-81.
Over the last twenty years, my practice as an artist has evolved through using technology as a medium. In this time I have kept records of nude women and soft-porn magazines, and I have stored these images on a computer for at least three years. As my collection grows larger, I pick out elements from the series and combine them with words that I have also collected and stored. The images and words are drawn together by the reality that surrounds me at that time. There are a lot of things around me in everyday life that I do not understand, and by using, re-using and mis-using all the relevant information, I have a clearer understanding of what is going on around me.
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Computers began to play a significant role in the production of my work since 1977, when I was asked by Luc Steels, a student in Linguistics, to make a video-animation film to support his degree at the University of Antwerp (UIA). The area of study was called Computer Simulation of Parser, and it was Steels' aim to inject some life into a dry and academic theory, and describe the inner system of a new parsing machine. When he became a doctor and an expert in artificial intelligence and artificial life, I had the opportunity, in 1981, to work as an artist-in-residence in his AI-laboratory at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). This opportunity arose because my investigations in art and the secrets of image-making ran parallel with his explorations in the field of knowledge representation. In 1980s, when art was mostly dealing with the notion of art itself, the AI-Laboratory was trying to locate the origin of creativity - thinking about thinking. It was a continual and profound search in the why and the how. I kept going there until 1986 studying their books and trying to master the artist-unfriendly machines at those times. I was very glad to be able to generate images in such a free environment, not disturbed by the weight of art history and other dogmatic codes.
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I use my computer to store images and words to create systems that reveal things. I use the databank as a tool and it becomes the canvas on which I work. The information becomes paint, mixed with storage of the past, present and future intelligence. I have always been fascinated by what tears things apart and brings them together.
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In 1994 I wrote that the systematic use of technology in art will completely change the relationship between money and art. The potential for rapid reproduction, mass audiences and almost instantaneous distribution is capable of undermining the power that the economic apparatus has maintained over revolutionary ideas. The single condition needed for the freer exchange of creative ideas is, of course, the optimal access to and use of technological facilities and this applies to both students and professional artists. Should this be realised, I think that the severed relations between feeling and intellect, art and society, the ego and the other, will finally be restored again. The speed, sophistication and the immateriality of modern technology will open up an increasing number of worlds that function on creativity's wavelength - creativity being the quality that transforms an entity into a living organism. It is worth noting here that communication becomes part of the creative process. Modern society differs from its forerunners through the constantly changing nature of social contacts: in fact we see far too many different people. The dominant social codes and behaviour patterns were created for a far smaller number of people, and it is quite obvious that technology's languages can provide rewarding means for the safeguarding of one's privacy: the individual can define the nature and depth of communication through technology, which as such, will function as an extra limb. This area will, in my opinion, also be an extremely interesting and fertile ground for the art of the future, because art, first and foremost, entails a simultaneous high and low level communication.