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When labelling son:DA we should note that son:DA did not begin to use expressions like art collective, tandem, duo, cooperative for itself; these have been propagated by other authors when referring to son:DA. Moreover, different sources render the name son:DA differently, including son:da, sonDA, sonda, zonda, SON:DA, and SON:da. Different labels or uses of the name may arise from the linguistic or syntactic problem posed by the unusual name ‘son:DA’. Following Slovene syntactic rules, we are forced to intervene in the name, manipulate it (deform it – e.g. when declining the name, we alter the word ‘DA’ – however, we also create it anew, The world of digital
technologies, of electronic sounds and images, seems to be the natural
surrounding for son:DA. In their work, though, they are not fascinated
with the endless possibilities of new technologies. rather, they are critical
and ironical towards such fascinations. The constant multiplication of
new technologies and their effects turns into noise, just as the actual
physical space gets crowded with electric wires, cables, and piles of
hardware that used to be brand new, cutting edge technologie. The works
of son:DA are often deliberately simple and restrained, sometimes using
very basic technical possibilities that stress an "underground"
feeling. The tandem son:DA belongs
to that area of art characterised by the linking of various technologies
and media, as well as a new approach to group work. son:DA is active in
the areas of installations, computer drawing and audiovisual performance.
Characteristic motifs of this group are electrical cables and the rest
of the electrical menagerie, such as outlets, telephones, a computer;
in short, elements that represent connection and the communication methods
of modern society. The tandem son:DA creates art with partners who change
according to the needs of the project. They are replacing traditional
authorship with various forms of participation. Impurity and hybridisation
are characteristic both in their individual processes as well as at the
level of content. son:DA uses a fresh approach to reinvigorate the irony
of modern society as seen, for example, in the films of Jacques Tati.
Similar to how the main character in the film ‘Mon Oncle’ becomes
tangled in an enormous number of plastic hoses, son:DA would intertwine
a figure with cables in their computer-generated drawings. All of this
serves as criticism of the absurdity of technologised modern society and
its alienation. Even though the works
of the artistic tandem son:DA appear predominantly in multi-media and
new-media art exhibitions, and even though its members represent the typically
urban, mobile, always-available artists that are armed with all possible
means of communication, the team’s work within the context of new
media technologies is paradoxical on several levels. Within the international
context of contemporary art, son:DA is known for large, computer-generated
drawings that are printed on canvas for presentations in museums and galleries.
Although the process involves direct use of technology, the results are
visually attractive, figural drawings with simple and effective narration.
The story is always the same: in large, half-empty interiors, overwhelmingly
dominated by technology – cables, sockets, mobile phones, computers
and then cables and more cables – tiny human figures are captured
in everyday, personal interactions with media technologies. These images
are discomforting because the viewer can identify directly with them:
nearly everyone, to some degree, depends on media technology, living and
working among thousands of cables and within extreme concentrations of
electro-smog. Images of helpless human figures locked in daunting profusions
of electric cables exaggerate this situation to levels of almost comic
absurdity. Technology’s terrifying dominance leaves people exhausted,
drained, tied-up or even dead. The drawings, intertwined and pasted with
cables, generate almost unbearable anxiety. Yet the artists do not stop
there. In so-called ‘constellations,’ they use sound and moving
pictures to deepen the experience. By means of a computer mouse, viewers
can manipulate technology to alter and create images and sounds within
the frame of the work. For example, one such constellation offers a claustrophobic
space the size of a phone booth that is monitored by a camera. The technological
basis of this ‘low-fi’ constellation is a simple sound buffer
– a coaxial cable attached to the monitor that reacts to the flow
and deflections of electron beams within the monitor's cathode ray tube.
The pictorial composition, prepared in advance, represents the musical
score and is the preliminary material for the sound component of the constellation.
The duration is determined by the length of the pictorial composition/score,
and improvisation is possible only by operating and projecting the sound
signal into the room. The visual material, selected and prepared in advance,
only can be manipulated by technical disturbance. Thus, son:Da creates
frustration where communication could potentially take place. By using
relatively simple technology, the artists only intensify the effect of
disturbance and global "noise". These ambiances, constellations
and situations have their background in an anarchic, hard core subculture.
Yet transferred into a sterile and safe gallery environment, they lose
their socially critical impact and become a simple disturbance in a more
traditional space. son:DA is pessimistic, creating in its work a dark,
existentialist counterpoint to the wireless utopia of the digital revolution.
The pieces evoke fictional dystopias in which machines overpower and enslave
helpless human beings. In their works, son:DA’s artists are cautious
and sceptical users of technology. It only is employed to achieve appropriate
distancing effects; the direct use of new media and creative exploration
of new possibilities for their application are not principal interests.
According to son:DA, constant communication is less fantastic advantage
than sinister threat, with the technology that enables networking also
supporting systems that monitor our private, public and economic space,
as well as our bodies. People today use so much time to acquire information
and to communicate through various technological tools that they have
proportionally less time for direct, sensual communication. To connect
has become our greatest need and through this need we are easy targets.
Communication and cooperation is becoming privatised and colonised; the
Internet is arguably the most monitored medium of our time. There are
two forces at work in the team’s creations – one is a direct
and sharp commentary on the damning effect that high-tech society has
on the individual, whereas the other finds pleasure in the formal use
of technology as a game. The first employs a traditional means (although
by using the computer) of generating images, easily appropriated and commodified
by the system of art. The second involves the concept of an open work,
incompleteness, communication, and is therefore much more indefinable.
This creates a schizophrenic oscillation between image and space, between
object and process, between the static and the dynamic, between the final
and the incomplete. In their system of representation, son:DA artists
successfully balance between two opposites, with an obvious tendency towards
an open structure, connections and interaction. But within a guarded atmosphere
of ironic technological dystopia, which – in their case – acts
as the final shield from the total and excessive connectedness of the
modern world. Artistic partnership
son:DA (Metka Golec and Miha Horvat) belongs to the generation of artists,
which are defined by digital technology and constant technological progress.
The use of digital media in art can be limited to their 'benefits' or,
as is the case with son:DA, to their direct 'abuse'. Enthusiasm over modern
technology and its infinite possibilities translated into cynicism and
irony. The irony raised by questioning the global connectedness of the
world is manifested on different levels: drawings made using a computes
mouse whose content always refers to electric gadgets, illogical use of
cables and their (un)aesthetic value, low tech audio-video performances
or presentations of usual communication tools in a humorous way. The classic
phone, the mobile phone, charger, socket, cable, radio, television, the
computer, and electric wires have become a part of our world which we
do not perceive anymore, which have become self-evident details of everyday
life. Perhaps this is why they become so unusual, interesting and even
bizarrely funny if placed directly before our eyes. Metka Golec and Miha
Horvat, the two members of the art duo son:DA, describe their collaboration
as an alliance for discussion and communication that produces joint art
projects in common cause. Their creative work extends to the fields of
audio-visual performance, multimedia installations, and computer drawings
and prints. Artistic duo son:DA’s
narrative or portraying, seducingly aesthetic computer mouse drawings
talk about the coldness and the estrangement within the globally connected
world. The process
of using a computer mouse as an interface is a meticulous creative act,
that refers to the history of adapting new media in a kind of transition
phase from traditional to media art, and creates a parody to the digitally
created shiny and perfect imagery. son:DA also works and experiments in
the field of audio-visual performance, site-specific installation and
sound. son:DA fetishized peripheral
ordinarily subjects of technological age, such as socket, plugs, cell
phones, cables. son:DA creates icons, drawn with computer mouse, that
in opposite with paradoxial ilusionismus of Rene Magritt speaks: »This
is socket!« Exactly this, which hid for armoire, will now as picture
be installed on wall before armchair and admired minimalized aesthetics
and functionality perfection of technical building. Without them –
the sockets, there is no communication in this alias with this world.
On the other hand, it is building in image-story that is showing conditions
of residence. Fetish forms are the essence of suspension in metaphorical
scenography: people wrapped in cables and hanged on cables with plugs
alia exuperien cabled person, that carries red flower instead of life
one is turning his own planet in space, for force of circumstances in
engaged postindustrial environment, full with wires, that came from everywhere
and they are waking up paranoia. And what are drawings doing together
with a space and sound installatons? Effect of disturbances, of noises.
That's why the image of socket is perfect. In spite of still life atmosphere
there is neverending anticipation of connection. We hear electric noise. Over the years Metka
Golec and Miha Horvat created their own artistic language centered around
the signal-to-noise ratio and the illusion of connectivity through modern
day technology. Their installations, which they combine with graphical
interventions, consist of broken wires, incompatible plugs and sockets,
wrongly connected cables and stripped hardware. The line between parody
and reality of today’s networks has never been as thin. son:DA provides the
collective at the PC with ideas of rationalisation; everyone is sitting
on the toilet like the guests at the erstwhile dinner party in Luis Bunuel´s
"Le Fantome de la Liberte"(1974); then, one by one, they occupy
the toilet in order to eat. The artistic tandem
son:DA combines audio-visual experimenting and the study of sound, space,
moving images and still pictures. In their work, the artists focus on
different techniques and media, they work with different materials and
use different methods – from digital to analogue processes. So, these
computer images are created in the Photoshop software, where each line
is made by hand using the mouse as the interface. The drawings depict
detached, impersonal high-tech environments where they themselves belong,
just like the artists themselves belong to the same paradigm of information
technologies. Due to the plastic material serving as the surface onto
which these images are plotted, they can be used as some sort of contemporary
tablecloths, rugs, or simply paintings. The impreciseness of the perspective
is masked, or perhaps even emphasized either by the surface-like two-dimensional
net of cables, or by an almost ornamental pattern of repetitive machines.
In the image showing the rear side of computers, the innards of machines,
and the connections between them, we do not see a face in either the machine
or the human being. But this is not to be mistaken with bashful concealment
– for the second image shows us the users of this computer hardware
as literal de-personified machines, sitting naked in the middle of an
intimate internet experience, or simply immersed in their own consumerist
pragmatism. This seemingly naïve visualisation with the trembling
line and the choice of dull pastel colours is a clear and precise criticism
not only of the rapid rise of consumerism but also of the consequential
understanding of work as a market commodity. Obsessively drawn networks
of people, machines, cables and (in)compatible adapters present, at once,
both the image of detached communication and the utopia of community.
General criticism of evolutionistic myths of technologic development in
the context of a small and young country which has affirmed its visual
identity through the advertising campaign for mobile telephony, or the
metaphor of disconnecting from the old stationary/static network as a
pre-condition for new, wireless global interaction, provides additional
identifying weight to the works of the tandem son:DA. Themes of the drawing
made by a computer mouse are fetishized detalies of modern interior, such
as sockets, distributors, cables, plug-ins, mobile phone chargers... These
are installed on the walls in the exhibition and public spaces in almost
sacral manner, although satirical connotations to technological world
are obvious. More monumental formats include genre images of the 17th
century Holland interiors (common people in common environments), but
they are transferd into future. Allusions are made to paranoid visions
of the captured urban person, who is connected with cabels to a tarumatic
social enviroments of survival. |
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