Page 23 - Cyberculture and New Media

14 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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A similar deconstruction of planar perception is central to the work
of Andrew Neumann, whose series of electronic sculptures, Industrial Wall
Panels, expresses transformal conjugation on a variety of levels. The material
choice of these sculptures accentuates one such distinction, as the organic
role of the back panel, comprised of unpainted plywood, contradicts the
mechanical and optical operations of the mechanism that figures over it. In
opposition, too, is the stasis of the panel against the motion inherent within
the metallic machinery of self-observation in continual oscillating movement
like a laden pendulum or a Duchampian rotorelief whose expressive
dynamism has been translated from a circular contour to a horizontal one.
The layering of planes stipulated in Neumann’s work is emphasised by the
presence of one or various cameras trained on kinetic details of the work’s
own rotary motion rail system, or conversely of an abstract line painted
directly onto the sculpture, a recursive act that fills the distance between
conceptual forms with a new reading of the work, a reading rendered by the
work onto itself. These elements orchestrate simultaneously in Phase
Cancellation with Sine Wave (figure 2), in which each half of a double rail
structure, stacked and harmonising like the staves of a piano score, sets into
motion an electronic component. The bottom module, exposing its circuitry
so cryptically as to render it unrecognisable, is a camera assembly whose
focal interest is a horizontal sine wave painted onto the panel beneath the rail.
The top element in this duo, accommodating a compact LCD monitor whose
image is the signal of the sine wave captured by the camera, moves across the
panel to the rotation of its own helical screw rail. Each element, camera and
monitor, paces horizontally across the surface of the panel in entirely
independent rhythm, so that the reality of the painted sine wave becomes
relativized and deconstructed in an act of scanning that is itself explicitly
decomposed into an endless continuity of states combining viewing in one
direction with presenting in another. Neumann’s work typifies how the
transformal encoding of perception through planar differences destroys the
transparency of mechanism and medium, replacing the intuitive assumptions
of integration with relentless conspicuousness on implicit processes
themselves.