Mobile Projection Unit: A Conversation with Sarah Turner and Nanda D’Agostino

Oct 23

Oct 23 Mobile Projection Unit: A Conversation with Sarah Turner and Nanda D’Agostino

Sarah Turner, Nanda D'Agostino, and Hilary Tsai collaboration with Open School North, NEO | MYTHOS, 2019, Outdoor mapping projections — Sarah Turner, Nanda D'Agostino, and Hilary Tsai collaboration with Open School North, *NEO | MYTHOS*, 2019, Outdoor mapping projections

Artists and curators Sarah Turner and Nanda D’Agostino have been collaborating on an upcoming project, Mobile Projection Unit (MPU), that combines mobile technology, artistic collectivity, and public space. MPU intervenes within a larger history of public projection, asking what it means to galvanize community support and foster collective practice among artists as a means to challenge monolithic histories of space, exclusive access, and economic structures. 60 Inch Contributor Laurel McLaughlin spoke with Turner and D’Agostino to hear about their upcoming lineup of projections, scheduled October 2019 through February 2020.

Laurel McLaughlin (LM): Could you both tell me a bit about your individual practices in Portland and beyond?

Nanda D’Agostino (ND): I’ve been an installation artist since 1984, and video has gradually become part of my practice. Now, it is the main part of my practice. My installations are all interactive and immersive, and focus on creating an environment that the audience can enter into. Recently, I’ve increasingly used creative coding to amplify that interactivity. To support my studio practice my day job for many years was being a public artist. I am one of the first public artists to use video projection at a large-scale in public spaces.

Sarah Turner (ST): I’m an experimental electronic artist, working in video and TV arts and immersive installation art. I do a lot of curatorial and community-building through art, particularly with emerging to mid-career artists in town.

ND: —In a transformational way. Let’s just say that because Sarah is a big change-making transformer.

ST: Yeah, a big part of my practice is reshaping the art economy in Portland. How can we reshape the model to actually support people to get paid? And how people make art, since the typical funding streams that we’ve been depending on for the past 50 years are not working.

ND: I also want to throw in here that “we had grandmothers living in next door villages in Italy,” maybe because of that cultural history both of us are matchmakers—putting people together saying, “you should meet so-and-so.” That’s a really big impulse for me and my observation of Sarah is that it’s a deep impulse for her. Thinking about, “what happens if we team up?” or “what happens if these people team up?” It’s getting away from the model of art being some heroic individual pursuit.

ST: Art should not be in a silo. That’s so boring. And can sometimes be egotistical. I think, “more is more” and the more people that are involved, the bigger and better something can be. Collaboration is key. In our first few meetings of the Mobile Projection Unit, the room was fucking stacked with really badass video artists in town—all of whom I really look up to in their practice and expertise. We’ve all been learning from one another. It’s good to get into spaces to share with others and work together. Sometimes it’s easy to stay in our own silos, working on our own singular practices, we would still be making, but this is a totally different dimension of an activity and collaboration. That’s not achievable if everyone is ding their own thing.

LM: The siloing is a problematic phenomenon in the arts. Often artists work alone, writing grants, trying to make it from A to B in terms of economic resources. It sounds like this collaboration, the Mobile Projection Unit (MPU), is so needed for the community. How did the MPU come about?

ND: I did a project down in San Francisco with Collective Action Studio with Justin Hoover, for a series of performances and shows last winter. One of them was using the Grasshopper, which is Collective Action Studio’s mobile projection machine. I came back and showed that project to Sarah and I didn’t say, “Oh let’s do this,” but then she came up with this whole thing.

ST: Yeah, simultaneously I had been doing “Nightlights,” which is a nighttime projection series through Open Signal and RACC. We had been growing the project and trying to be more site-specific by creating an artist residency to make new work for the project. Even at that time, I had aspirations to grow outside of the program. We needed a new model, as the funding was restricted in where and how we could do it, so I started scheming. Open Signal has many resources and they had all of these Mobile Production Units, so that’s where we inspiration for the name. They had these boxcars with complete studios. They ended up decommissioning those vehicles, so we weren’t able to co-opt them. Soon after, the majority of funding for art programming at that institution dried up, and halted a lot of the planning and projects there.

ND: That was a tragedy.

ST: Yeah, and it was a big trigger for us to think about how we can keep the momentum going around new media. So we started meeting, and talking through ideas until we decided to land on pursuing this Projection Unit idea. It coincided with the Precipice Fund deadline [through the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art], and so we ran with it.

LM: Do you view this as a curatorial endeavor, artistic collaboration, both, or something else entirely?

ST: I would say that I’m wearing multiple hats, and one is definitely curatorial. I specifically selected people that would be badass to show in this context. The cohort’s split between video artists and video mappers. Many of them would consider themselves both. But not all of the video artists have technical training in mapping. So, the idea is that video artists would learn these technical skills and we would collaborate to create larger installations within architecture to dimensionalize the work that they’re doing. The video mappers would be able to use their skills outside of the corporate entities in which they work. Many of them work for advertising clients, which is dope because they pay artists really well, but the problem is that they don’t get to let their freak flag fly as high because they’re focused on producing a product.

ND: Another thing that we’ve done through Open Signal, in the community-building realm, was to work with Jodi Darby at Open School North. It was mind-blowing to actualize what we were capable of, given almost ideal circumstances. We had all of Open Signal’s assets: staff, trucks, multiple projectors, speakers, tents. So, we were able to wrap the entire building in projections. Jodi’s work with the kids produced great content. That was interesting as a collaboration because Jodi had never done mapping before. It was important to her that the kids’ content be highlighted, and the mapping enabled the capstone of her project to be a big extravaganza. The art, curating, and tech really came together.

ST: With traditional video art, it’s thought of on a linear plane. So, we wanted to introduce spatialized storytelling with the kids. Jodi Darby worked with the Middle School Students to create videos in the theme of new mythologies based on Arachne, Midas, and so on. We decided to amplify each narrative video by holding one main focal point with directional sound, and supporting it with additional content, edited by Hilary Tsai and me around the perimeter of the courtyard. This really helped to establish the context of the stories, and create a more immersive environment directly on the school. Hilary Tsai and I acted as mapping VJs with dynamic narrative content.

LM: And this responded live?

ST: Yes, we responded via improv to specific cues coming from Nanda’s channel.

ND: I pre-programmed a scene for every kid’s individual work to make sure their content was centered, and then wildly collaged around it. Jodi and I spent an afternoon refining that wall of the building.

LM: That’s really helpful to understand how you’re mapping out this video projection. I don’t think that this technology is always seen as legible to a general public beyond the scope of commercial TV/radio. And I’m also curious, before we get into the conceptual specifics of the project, about how you selected the cohort of artists for the project, which includes: Sharita Towne, Sabina Haque, rubén garcía marrufo, Jaleesa Johnston, Craig Winslow, Megan McKissack, Victoria Wells, Hasan Mahmood, and you both.

ST: I have worked with many of the artists in the cohort in some capacity before. I’ve previously curated one of Sabina’s exhibitions in 2016. Jaleesa and I worked on numerous new media projects together this past summer. I thought it was important to be familiar with each members’ work and feel strong in our work relationship to collaborate on this deeper community building. For instance, Sharita and Sabina have a very deep practice in relational aesthetics and placemaking, in that they have a very long running projects with POC communities in town, and this project can act as another leg in amplifying their already established work as a transmedia communication device. There are also huge communities of people who have lived here a long time and have important stories that need to be positioned within a larger collective narrative. I’m particularly interested in having a proactive discussion about it rather than a reactive conversation. I want to focus on a celebratory notion of bodies in space. Less politics, more art. These artists can do that through their practice and the images or aesthetics within the content to portray these stories. And to then use Portland as a backdrop of an architecture and spatial formalities, while utilizing projection mapping to conceptualize these works on the landscape, helps to bring that point home.

LM: You’ve mentioned many key terms that I think really speak to the contemporary nature of this curatorial and artistic venture, specifically: mobile, Public Art, and public space, and many others. But can we start with mobile? Why does this have to be a mobile projection unit and how do you see mobility within the project? What type of mobilities are afforded? Of course, the apparatus moves, but how does that play into the moving image and its possible use as a political and aesthetic tool, and how does the ideological framework that you’re constructing move throughout a city as a kind of non or anti-institutional structure?

ND: Well I think it allows us to create our own spaces and to not be tethered to these institutions that are A—very fickle, and B—are vanishing. The MPU itself is still under construction, but we have an apparatus that goes on the roof of our cars and a generator, projectors and laptops. With those tools we can go anywhere in the city and as long as we’re not obstructing traffic, we can project wherever.

ST: To follow-up on that, a huge part of it, is to take the tools of production and put them into our own hands. And not to have them behind a paywall—that’s huge. And another idea that we talked a lot about at Open Signal, is the idea to take resources to people where they are, rather than forcing them to come to a cultural event in the middle of the city. We will take stories to people where they are. This is especially important when thinking about gentrification and how neighborhoods are disappearing—it’s a weird conversation about narrow-casting, where you create content and distribute it in the same place that it’s created—that’s what public access TV is—

ND: Museum shows are a different form of narrow-casting in terms of the public they attract. One of the inspirations for me was this festival I was in a few years ago in São Paulo called Video Guerilha. It was created by a Collective of artists called Visual Farm whose commercial work is producing large spectacles. In São Paulo, there’s a street called Rua Augusta. On one side are the favelas and on the other side, wealthy Sao Paolo. Miguel and Visual Farm wanted to use large scale projections to bring those communities together. Visual Farm invited JR, myself, and a group of video artists from Time_Frame and the Netherlands to map the entire length of the street. It was strong art AND the sheer spectacle of projections that big motivated people to get out of their social safety nets. Getting back to the mobile production unit, they had JR set up with an MPU and a green screen and were projecting people from the favelas on buildings that were 18 stories high. People loved that and by mapping so many building simultaneously they were and to get a mix of high and low.

ST: And that’s an important part of it too, to kind of position this type of art as both “big A” art and then accessible too. New media is, in some ways, the most public-friendly because everyone has a phone and are immediately media literate. When it’s cast up four stories high it becomes spectacular. So, it breaks down, why do we need institutions to host this type of art? Particularly in Portland, there’s not a lot of money that comes through institutions. We’re in the process of developing alternative funding models to help it sustain itself. A big purpose of my work is a redistribution of wealth.

LM: In our conversation from earlier you mentioned political directives through projection, which Portland saw from activists Mike Horner and Harlan Shober in 2018. There’s a contemporary history of these political projections with recent stagings from G.U.L.F. Labor projections on the Guggenheim Museum façade in 2016, and then Robin Bell’s “Emoluments Welcome” projections on the Trump Hotel in 2017. Then there’s an even longer aesthetic history of public projection, and even early VJing, at the New York club Hurrah, where early video artists showed their work alongside punk music and club dancing. Of course this history is embedded within an even more expansive history of the projected image, in which spectators have a variety of occasions to interact with the image itself. And from these histories, in resonance with the works you’ve mentioned from the MPU, I’m thinking specifically of the role and/or effect monumentality—along the lines of Shimon Attie and Krzysztof Wodiczko. These works already have and will continue to have a deep impact on community and yet, they’re temporary—how are you thinking about these structural realities with regard to this project?

ST: It’s interesting to think about the project in terms of monumentality. I think of context of the recent confederate monuments—I grew up in Virginia and they were fucking everywhere—and they projected a view of what the society’s values were. What we don’t want to do is project a propaganda machine, but there’s a fine line between using the form to display art to make a proactive storytelling model and not hit people over the head with a directive.

ND: I am interested in how to thread that needle in an immediately responsive way. I worked with mapping in my recent installation at the Portland Art Museum mapping [Borderline, 2019], and had strong responses to that work. I had taken all the inner turmoil that I was feeling and distilled it into an immersive space. I am disturbed by our current political context, and thinking about the scale of the protests in Hong Kong—I worry that we don’t have that same scale. I’ve seen people respond in the moment to political situations with large-scale public projections that are also art, and I’m interested in investigating how to do that here.

LM: Both ways of making seem to be needed.

ND: I don’t want to put something blatant into the public domain, what I was suggesting is more subtle. Maybe it’s like a haunting, where it would get under viewers skin and make them feel uneasy. Creating that sense of dis-ease is something I’ve always been interested in. I’ve made my living as a public artist, but my studio practice deals with making people uneasy. In traditional art spaces, only certain audiences might see that kind of work, and we need to make more of a large-scale impact. Today there is so much censorship, even in the news there is a reluctance to make people uncomfortable. Like, I remember when the Vietnam War was going on and we saw that image of a girl on fire. It was everywhere in the media. But now they don’t show the consequences of our policies. It’s not like I want to project that unfiltered content into the public space, but we need to somehow get under people’s skin and disrupt their complacency.ST: Exactly. From working at Open Signal and then working at Freeform as a VJ, I’ve gotten familiar with FCC standards and how the government regulates what can and cannot be on air. Thinking about that in terms of Public Art in that there’s always a “Big Brother” scenario. There should be a focus on media literacy and understanding censorship.

LM: In preparation for this conversation, I was rereading Margaret Morse’s essay, “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between,” 1990 on video projection and its aesthetics as she was coming to terms with its ontological contours and how it functioned within society. At the end, she talks about how it was “wide-awake encounter,” disavowing a purely dreamlike and transcendental experience. This seems to be what you’re discussing with regard to feeling a purposeful sense of unease through the encounter with the projected image.

ST: I don’t know if you’re familiar with the publication Radical Software, but I get a lot of inspiration from that with TV and public access as a form of prankster vibes, but in a potent way. It can combat traditional forms of control.

ND: For me, one insight from learning to program, is how it’s almost Pavlovian the way our whole lives are controlled by algorithms and codes. The way interaction is set-up in our current virtual worlds is so manipulative. In my own work I’m really interested in putting people into a space where the interactivity is not quite so 1:1. Right now, Sarah and I are laying groundwork to use an infrared sensor to recognize a body—we were just on a conference call with a guy from Berlin—and we got to the point where Sarah’s body in Isadora was mapped in each joint. And Theoretically I can link those dots to code in order to manipulate a video image. There are ways to take all of this powerful innovation and use it. Why let the corporations who are extracting data have all the fun?

LM: Exactly! And so, maybe just to bring us to upcoming milestones in the project—how has your collaboration process been and what are your projections for the future (pun intended)?

ND: I think something that’s really great about our collaboration is that it’s intergenerational. Sarah’s younger than my daughter and yet she’s such a visionary. There’s a famous curator that came out of Portland, Kristy Edmunds, and when I met Sarah, that’s who I immediately thought of with her ideas and energy. I feel like between the two of us, with her energy, and me, as the little old lady from Pasadena (it’s a surfer song), and I’ve been around the block and done a lot of public art for about 30 years, we’re coming at it from these two different generational ends. And that’s something that’s unusual in the art world. But installation require collaboration and that’s a sensibility we deeply share.

ST: Yeah, we’re hoping for possibly a caravan of MPUs or a larger van. With the cohort, we’d like to include more people each year to have different voices. We want to provide opportunities for artists to get paid to do these projections. And we’ve been interested in partnering with various organizations and festivals.

ND: Just before you came, we were discussing how this could be curated possibly with performers—perhaps working with the opera or dancers of some kind. And eventually opening a space that might, in a different way, direct this project in a larger way.

For more on the Mobile Projection Unit screenings, see: https://www.facebook.com/pg/MobileProjectionUnit/about/?ref=page_internal.

Bios

Nanda D’Agostino: Since 1984 Fernanda has completed twenty-five public commissions and fifteen solo exhibitions, many incorporating moving images in novel ways. She is known both as an innovator in the use of large-scale projections in permanent public art. The world is layered with narratives that are rich, confusing and contradictory. Fernanda’s work brings these layers to life and allows viewers to move through, probe and engage with them. Interactive spaces are created using new media, artist’s books, architecture and landscapes viewers are invited to explore. Creative coding for live sound and video allows the choreography of experiences that respond to viewers in real time, immersing them in an ever-changing milieu. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her work has been recognized by a Bronson Fellowship, a Flintridge Foundation Fellowship, Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, Ford Family Foundation and state fellowships in Montana and Oregon.

Sarah Turner: Sarah Turner is an artist and curator in Portland, Oregon. She explores the depths and artistic capabilities of a public access television station, through experimental programming and artist residencies. Sarah's curated installations and events are centered around collaboration, experimentation with technology, and community building. Sarah worked at Open Signal where she started a video synthesizer library and programmed workshops and meet-ups to give artists access to analog gear and a community of tool makers. She has curated Peripheral Forms to present Glitch, BPMC to install Glitch Garage, and LZX, Lumen, & BPMC to co-present Cathode Ray Video Collective at Open Signal. Sarah is also a member of B.A.B.A., an offering of Venus Drip that channels collaborative energy from fellow priestesses practicing glitch/witch:ticism and multimedia Magick.

Laurel McLaughlin is a writer and curator from Philadelphia, currently based in Portland. She received MAs from The Courtauld Institute of Art and Bryn Mawr College and she’s currently a PhD Candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her dissertation traces how contemporary migration informs identity formations in performance art by womxn-identifying practitioners within the United States, 1970–2016 and her writing has appeared in Performa Magazine, Monument Lab Bulletin, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, among others. She has presented her research at Performance Studies International, Calgary, the College Art Association, New York, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Hong Kong, held curatorial and research positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Slought Foundation, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), and the ICA Philadelphia, and curated exhibitions and programs at FJORD, AUTOMAT, Vox Populi, Arthur Ross Gallery at UPenn, PAFA, and Bryn Mawr College.