Introduction

It is a teaching mode in which I find myself. As I began this thesis I had the notion that I wanted to create work in which the viewer found themselves implicated not only within the art work but by being complicit within the art, made part of a larger structure within the world itself. The pieces I envisioned manifested themselves within a long developed series of projections, a wall of sound which had formula but not a solidified content as of yet and the idea that video, as a documentary format, could offer a window into a reality which needed to be directly effected within the work. What I did not envision was the sort of performative work which I ended up also incorporating into the body of my thesis work, and using to derive insight as to the nature of that work. What became apparent as I continued a process of discovery and contemplation was that in order to have an effect on the world around me, I had to directly encounter that world with aesthetic creation. This summer, while considering the nature of my thesis, I wrote the following passage in my notes: "I need to find a way to encourage the viewer not only to take beauty and experience away from viewing my work, but also to take the effect of my work into their lives so that they may realize how the beauty and experiences they create for themselves are themselves art and the meaning inclusive in 'art' can be found in every moment. It is merely about a change in perceptionÑthe birth of seeing everything at once."

In the course of study I encountered an excerpt from an Allan Kaprow essay titled, Untitled Guidelines for Happenings. The tenets he sets forth helped guide my thought into the realm of the performative, dreaming of art that escapes the constraints of typical art presence and a typical art response. His notion that art can exist anywhere, and be unannounced as art struck me with a particular resonance in terms of my desired method and outcome. While my work has drawn influence from a range of sources including James Turrell, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Aldous Huxley and a multitude of other unnameable artists, writers, musicians, friends and experiences, Kaprow seems to be a godfather of some of the methods I would begin to employ, and whom I would like to credit with a widening of my perspective on where art could be situated.

Thus, enter, and bring yourself into the experience of my thought and my process.

The Nature of the aesthetic experience

We are dependent on our senses. It is impossible to escape this realm- that which we see, smell, taste, hear, and feel, and the basic structures by which we judge aesthetic value trace to this amalgam. We define our world by physicality, we understand through the only ways we can, by amassing data about the world before consciously and subconsciously applying the relationships which are formed by this process. Everything is defined by our ability to comprehend it. Our tools are extensions of our body, improvements on the limitations of the limited nerve system which transmits information only so quickly, and to only so great of a degree. It is only after great length that we find aesthetics, and it is completely defined by the familiarity of the content, formally or conceptually. Thus it is, after all, experience which defines aesthetic judgment, and it is in familiarizing ourselves with anything that we find we can appreciate it. What we should not forget, however, is that often the result can be that aesthetics encompass more than we understand, that there is more than what exists that can be beautiful. It is important that our memory is much less than static. The ability of our experiences to expand, and of the mind to perform recombination of these memories is what allows the creative and intellectual process to develop a complex aesthetic.

There are many formal basics which we stand on in our sensory relationship to the world. Some are easily recognizable such as being too hot or too cold, the pain of being cut, or the urge to sleep. Even these are complex understandings, built in time by your body's memory of the past. The body experiences discomfort as it realizes its faculties are diminished and thus reacts to temperatures in a relatively predictable way. Rapid transition from a cold climate to a warm one will create uneasiness due to the body's acclimation, its memory of the average conditions and sensations of the past. More complex is the body's imposition of pain. While pain is not helpful in any physical sense, and can often be a hindrance, the preventative urge which we heed prevents further harm. If it hurts to walk, the body is implying it would be a bad idea, and what little instinct we have left attempts to tell us to stop. Like the body's memory of temperature, it also remembers correct function and the lack of strain on its components. Our aesthetic appreciations are much like the subconscious memory of the body. When acclimated to a given mode of visual representation, when said mode is associated with bodily comfort, when we understand something, on an instinctive level or on a complex intellectual level, it can often be traced to the ability to associate it with familiar experiences. These experiences are in turn associated with the memories we gather through our senses, and the underlying structure formed by these memories acts as a bank of averages, a pattern of commonality which informs aesthetic value in regard to that which most repeats itself. We judge based on what we know. It is in this way that the very world which surrounds us forms the basis for our aesthetic judgments.

This tenet is supported by work in the field of psychology by Robert Zajonc as represented by his mere-exposure effect and the work that has been inspired thereby. The mere-exposure effect is best demonstrated and informed by experiments testing responses to various unfamiliar ideographs. In some cases these experiments tested for dependencies between the effects of repetition and affective primes. Showing unfamiliar ideographs, one experiment consisted of one test wherein the subjects were shown a series within which the ideographs repeated. The results showed that preference increased with familiarity. In a second experiment, subjects were shown ideographs shown in conjunction with subconscious affective primes. These subconscious images also affected the preference the subject showed for the ideographs. By testing these factors separately and together, it was shown that both factors played a part but were independent of one another.¥2¥ So, it is not only familiarity which causes a preference, but also a built in process of association between multiple stimuli. Therefore, the combinations of what we experience not only play a part in generating preference on a basic level, but also within a sub-cognitive process of association of these experiences.

The relationship between attractiveness and familiarity is also explored further in the specific experiment discussed in the article "The Attractiveness of Nonface Averages: Implications for an Evolutionary Explanation of the Attractiveness of Average Faces" by Jamin Haberstadt and Gillian Rhodes. The article directly addresses the possible flaws in the position that attractiveness is genetically predetermined by testing issues of prototypicality and familiarity against attractiveness in dogs, birds and wristwatches. While it seems their analysis of some of the variables within the rating of dogs and birds may not have been completely controlled, the implications of the data found for wristwatches supports the claim that attractiveness is directly related to familiarity. Specifically, dogs and birds are in fact rather large and varied groupings, casting doubt on the viability of judging the relationship between averageness and familiarity, and also fighting a distinction between the two variables that may not be easily determined by test participants. It seems that one is less likely to have a problem with determining the familiarity of wristwatches due to the variation possible within the group. Whereas, with dogs and birds, the variation of types of dogs and birds could throw off the understanding the participants have of what they are saying in terms of familiarity or averageness. For example, a dog or bird may have an "average" appearance, but, if the participant does not know the specific type of dog or bird, and yet it looks a lot like other dogs or birds they see often, the dog or bird could be rated as average looking, but not familiar. Thus, it seems that the statistical correlation found supporting the relationship between familiarity and attractiveness in wristwatches may hold while the statistical information found for dogs and birds, which shows a correlation between averageness and attractiveness, may be misleading. The concept of average in dogs and birds may be informed by familiarity without showing up in the statistics. Regardless, the relationship in the produced, less deviant subject group, wristwatches, shows familiarity directly correlates with attractiveness. What is most important in this paper, however, is not the issue of average vs. familiar in determining attractiveness, because I would posit that their method was poor since averageness comes from an idea of what a prototype embodies, which has to be informed by a participant's exposure to these objects (for example, one could not choose what an average dog looks like without a level of familiarity with dogs). Rather, it shows most importantly that the decisions made by the participants were influenced by the relationships between either familiarity or averageness to attractiveness rather than the possibility of an evolved preference for certain compositions. The importance of this lies in that familiarity and a concept of averageness are both informed separately from genetic influence, thus showing that attractiveness is informed by environmental factors rather than any sort of preference determined by inherited values.

This does not exclude the possibility for "deviant" aesthetics in any way, for our experiences can contain negative understandings of certain information. Just as we can find aesthetic that which we are familiar with, we can also aestheticize based on the familiarity of the negative, and comfort that comes from knowing even when that knowing is dissonant. It is possible, for example, to create a phobia in a small child by creating an environment of stress to the body by shocking its senses (with say a loud noise), and at the same time showing the child an otherwise innocuous object such as a stuffed toy. When later confronted with the toy the child will often re-experience the shock created by the stress. Not only has the child's sense of safety been affected, but as aesthetics is a judgment of beauty, and beauty is defined by our level of appreciation for a thing, it has also been given a formal aesthetic shift. The stuffed toy is now frightening and it seems that exposure to anything reminiscent of the toy would prove to be likewise. The formal imagery of the toy would become intensely unappealing (to say the least), and the child's ability to appreciate relationships of the forms inherent to the toy's appearance would be severely diminished. However, conflicting memories of the toy would also play into the reaction the child would have upon reencountering the toy. If there are enough good memories of said toy, they might outweigh the negative impact of the stress, especially as the immediacy of the memory fades. It is also possible that on the one hand the child would love the toy for their past memories, and yet fear it at the same time due to the sudden shift in its associated danger.

This is supported by Sheila T. Murphy in her paper studying Robert Zajonc's work in the mere exposure effect. In a study examining the relationship between repetition and judgement, Murphy used Chinese ideographs to present simple, unfamiliar stimuli.(Bargh and Apsley, 46) These experiments studied appeal, moral judgment, symmetry, affective size, and gender. The results show that repetition affects judgment of the first two categories, but that it was not a statistically significant factor in the decision-making for the last three. Therefore, the common was shown to create preference significantly as opposed to the uncommon, as well as giving a moral preference to the repeated ideographs. However, repetition was not shown to affect the judgment of symmetry, communicated size or the gender of the represented object.

The relationship between the senses and aesthetics is inextricable, even in the realm of the mind. Our experiences are gathered into groups, related to one another and in this way we generate concepts. These concepts then have been sown and grow only as far as they are fortified within further sensual data. In this way experience allows for the development of complex thoughts, and the development of a conceptual aesthetic. As a particular concept becomes more useful it becomes more beautiful and personally useful to an individual in relating to the world. The result of this is not only preference and taste, but also a structure for interpreting all sensual information, whether familiar or not. When one tastes a new food, an expected response is to compare it to a familiar one, and likewise in regards to other sensual information. It is natural that we attempt to create relationships such that the range of our experience will maintain cohesiveness, and have a method for placing a new piece of information. In this way we derive evocation from imagery. Imagine a series of lines which intersect and occupy a common visual space. It is reasonable to assume, when one is examining the lines, that they will attempt to fit the pattern into some sort of previously established category. One person might imagine what the lines could represent and establish an interpretation, while another might take the lines as a formal expression and establish an understanding based on the spacing and directions of the lines, drawing a conclusion as to what the lines can evoke. A child might scribble and attribute no meaning to it in forethought, but often the child will label a drawing after it has been done based on what emerges from the chaos. The intention of the child has nothing to do with the possibility of interpretation. It is the same way when one encounters an unknown language. All there is to go on when attempting to decipher meaning from such a word is its similarity to words in a known language, or the slight understanding of the structure and sound of some variety of languages which one has been exposed to. Just as the child's drawing might have no meaning, it is also possible to interpret a word with no meaning, a random jumble of letters following a syntactic pattern that then could be compared to other known languages and reasoned to have a possible meaning, where there was no meaning in its conception. It is possible that one might also respond to either the drawing or the word by ignoring it, but in this case the response is also informed by experience. The casting away of difficult or unfamiliar information must also develop in response to other attempts to decipher such information and what the result of such an effort might have been.

Needless to say, the desired result of any work of art is to create a response in the viewer, whether compelling in its formal accomplishments, its representational stylings or its conceptual dialog, but the experience of the viewer must inform them that the work is worth their time, or they must routinely take all encounters on equal ground. The artist can attempt to compel in many ways, but an unreceptive (or unshaken) audience will never comprehend, or attempt to comprehend the intent behind the work. Unfortunately, the ability of formal qualities to engage a viewer is not always sufficient because beauty is informed by a variety of experiences within each viewer. While style is an unpredictable asset, it is often an important aspect of any artistic creation. Stylistic choices allow the artist to create a voice within a formal aesthetic decision making process. Often style can inform formal choices by creating an evocative quality more easily accessible to any viewer. By utilizing a knowledge of the basic experiences and understandings of an average person, style brings connotations of the familiar into a formal or conceptual framework. While the formal organization and aesthetic should in theory be a primary method by which the viewer can understand the work, it is necessary that stylistic choices call upon referential knowledge, or deny it.

Roy Lichtenstein's imposition of print media stylistic signifiers upon brushstrokes, for example, is an excellent example to demonstrate how style affects the formal tendencies of an image. While Lichtenstein's stylizations accomplish a commentary on the loss of information in the use of stylistic choices, his work also demonstrates how the formal and conceptual qualities of an image are drastically altered in their content through the imposition of referential or evocative stylistic choices. Thus style, formal familiarity and aesthetic, and the evocation of tone are all built upon the language we define all understanding byÑexperience. It is experience itself which causes behavior and understanding to form, and it is experience which has the greatest impact on the nature of any person's realization of and interaction with the world.

Style is also important in the process of developing response to a work of art. When a viewer approaches a piece of artwork, their immediate response is informed primarily by stylistic and formal choices. It seems a popular notion that the underlying information in a piece of art cannot be communicated without first attempting to grab the viewer with a stylistic choice that influences their willingness to participate in the process of viewing the work. I am attempting, however, to utilize style to a different end. An unassuming style can work to self-select a viewer who is not prepared to approach an artwork in a manner conducive to its communicative attempts. The utilization of a disarming style can initiate a viewer into a process when they are willing to give the artwork the benefit of the doubt. The subtle and unassuming is losing ground in our media driven world, and increasingly the fine arts seem to be following its path.

The deliberate and subtle has its place as a stylistic method for bringing the viewer to a specific mindset, rather than just bringing the viewer to a specific set of information. In a series of video works depicting expanded time scenes of crafted human interactions, Bill Viola has created a work which challenges the notion of attention grabbing which permeates the art world. During the summer of 2002 I was privileged enough to see The Quintet of the Astonished, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Located in a darkened separate room, and rear-projected, the video piece, approximately sixteen minutes long and depicting five people going through dramatic changes in expression over the course of an expanded forty-five seconds, was approached by a variety of viewers. Some of these were attentive, giving the piece time to develop, while some grew bored by the apparent monotony of the piece and left almost immediately. In retrospect this behavior itself struck me as interesting, and instigated by the video it brought me to an interesting conclusion regarding my video, Simple, which I had made the fall after having seen the Bill Viola piece. At first response to the Viola piece I thought that it would be interesting to play with the concept of slow motion, and the development of a rich and developing landscape which approached a painterly quality. However, not having done this and having moved on and struggling with how to position and deal with the reality of a video I was very pleased with, I came to a realization. My video was informed by my realization about the reaction I had seen in the viewers of the Viola video. The realization that my video was as much about the communication of an order built out of power relationships emerging out of seeming chaos, it was also about the nature of the viewer's experience of sitting for twenty-three minutes watching the subtle developments in the behavior of ducks. The viewer is never given a hook, and for good reason-it destroys the viewer's ability to connect what they see with what it attempts to communicate: reality. The functional nature of the video also approaches a tone found in the work of James Turrell. In Turrell's work the viewer is not merely presented with an aesthetic object, but asked to stop and contemplate rather than have information itself presented. It is in contemplation and the giving up of energy that one finds the material which is to be found in much of Turrell's work, and I believe it to be present in my work as well.

Turrell's pieces primarily intend to create a self-awareness in the mind of the viewer. Creating experiences in which one is aware of not only perception, but also the infinite, Turrell aims to produce less about his own communication than he does to create a sense of awareness in the mind of the viewer. The success of his environments rest on the willingness of the viewer to accept and contemplate rather than on the environments' ability to overwhelm. This subtlety is apparent in his work and is something I strive for in my own pieces. This subtlety is utilized in order to create a different experience in regard to art itself. Just as Bill Viola's videos hinge on the viewer's willingness to slow themselves down and watch, Turrell's work hinges on the viewer's willingness to slow down and observe- not only the work, but themselves. It is within these two attitudes where I find the request of my work to be located.

The viewer who stays for the entire video (or even watches it more than once) is privy to a universe of developing aesthetic information which is unavailable to the quick glance viewer. So, in a sense the piece creates itself in the viewer as it builds not only patience in the viewer's wait, but also rewards focus just as the attention-span may begin to wane. There is an existing aesthetic beauty to the video which draws a viewer closer, but it is the viewer who learns from the process of sitting and watching the video who gathers the most. Fundamentally the piece communicates on multiple different levels, and what is garnered is based on the ability of the viewer to release an attachment to the fast paced and become absorbed in that which is presented to them. Simple communicates on multiple levels- formally, it presents the universal operation of interference patterns, present not only in the behavior of the ducks as influenced by the food and the geese, but also present in the water as influenced by the ducks. As one remembers the immediate impact of the formal visual plane the second level becomes apparent in the revealed diversity of influence and reaction among the ducks themselves. While the water changes with the movement of the ducks, it is fundamentally stuck and consistent in its response, while a variety of responses can be seen within the drama of the ducks feeding and swimming. Beyond this the video itself causes a reaction in those watching it, creating either a quick glance, betraying their inability to grant attention to that which does not command it forcefully enough in a rapid sequence of new and dramatic information or capturing the viewer based on their interest and inspection of the details which present themselves. Their responses become a reflection of their relationship to an aesthetic experience- entertainment or invitation? In this reflection we can view the nature of the aesthetic consumer, how they expect, and how they commit in the face of a created object. What follows is that the viewer becomes another body which is influenced- as the ducks and the water are in Simple, so, the viewer.

So what we arrive at is that aesthetics are developed in an extensive process spanning not only the life of one individual but in the process of a whole society interacting and re-communicating their own personal experiences. As each successive generation finds itself further involved in a world of production, we also find ourselves further detached from the aesthetics which originally were formed by the nature of man and the earth and their relationship through sensation and necessity. As we move further from a source we assume ourselves to be more independent, we forget that we are not purely masters of our own devising, and we at once turn to dependence of a different sort. This is a world of the self made. We read books, we watch films, we listen to the radio, and we forget that all is not our own. The inherited information we have made available to ourselves through planning and communication have created, without our notice, a society of those who learn by listening, watching, and reading. We have been given so much that we have forgotten to learn by experience, to pay attention to the things around us, and not to take for granted the knowledge we are given, but to question and learn with our own senses as well. For it is in solely inheriting our understandings where there is "data loss", where there are ideas that do not quite keep their meanings and a distance from the self which creates distrust in the senses and intuitive judgment. It is in this sort of world that we find those who are so familiar with things they have no personal experience with that they have unwittingly shoved their own personal experience aside in favor of someone else's attempted articulation.

Interactivity and the creation of a complicit viewer

What necessarily becomes the case as we examine the function and impact of the art experience is that the viewer must somehow be included in and excluded from the work. In order for the viewer to maintain interest, the art experience must both draw them in and tell them that there is something they do not yet understand, but it will not be so easily given to them. This is true in any art, and yet it seems at this point in my work it becomes necessary to draw attention to that structure. Therefore, a few concepts must be considered integral to my pieces which build a first layer to this project. The first thing is that the viewer must not be instantly aware of all the elements which make up the work. Whether it means a visual impedance or a conceptual non-sequitur, the work must be difficult for the viewer to grasp, or even impossible, in order for there to be an element of distance between them and the image, between them and the image maker. This distance is important in that it creates a lack, and for most where there is noticeable lack, there is want. Second is the necessity for interactivity. The viewer must be involved in making the work what it is, whether personally or in its physical manifestation. The combination of these two creates a moment of disorientation wherein the viewer is alienated and yet still implicit in the state of the work. They cannot escape the fact that they are and are not what is present in the work, and the disorder of this experience initiates a moment of reconsideration.

The nature of the hidden content of a piece can take on many forms. It can be very slight and literal, but it can also be abstruse, maybe even impossible for the average viewer to receive. What is possible however is the imagination of the viewer to allow them a possible place where this information could exist, and then build from there. In this backward process is ingrained a realization of the nature of the information held within. The hidden content becomes released from the formal qualities and the visual clues which the work provides. While these clues may not be given to a viewer immediately, an open approach benefits the viewer in finding their own path from one place to another, and in the end they will probably reach a similar conclusion. At the same time it is important that the viewer become confident enough that their interpretation, their passageway through the piece, be valid in itself. The experience of the viewer being of primary concern, their consciousness of that development process must be included in the aesthetic value of the work. As this accepts a departure from a dictating intention, it is the job of the artist to use a diverse enough range of material to make the viewer's self referential process possible, while also giving enough directive information so that the work leads the viewer in a certain direction without necessarily being aware of this process. This also acts as a sort of hidden information. Where the artist deceives and tells the truth at the same time is the beauty of the implication of reality and the commonality of experience between the viewer and the producer, and it is in the path that the viewer must become open to following where the art lies.

These traits manifest themselves in a series of projections I have been composing which are largely determined by their ability to include clear information which is hidden through illusion. These pieces are set up so that each image is composed of three separate projections acting together to form one unified image. Each projector contains a component of the final image, which is seen as one where the three projections meet the wall. There, combined directly on top of one another, they create a single composite. Each image is separated into components of red, green, and blue light. While the combined image may have a complete set of information, it is not until the viewer takes the step to interrupt the integrity (and let us say holiness) of the image that they might actually experience the complex nature of the piece before them. When the viewers allow themselves to disrupt the initial material, they are greeted by their own manifestation of presence in the work. Their shadow now acts as a revealer, breaking the continuity of information from one or more of the projections, thus giving way to a set of components of the image. When they block one projection, a patch of cyan might appear where the red of the image has been eliminated and yet the blue and green components still remain. Through their interaction they begin to learn that information is revealed, and at the same time, that information is being distorted by their presence. The viewer then changes the work as they become a part of it. Not only do they disrupt the image, but whatever it is they block becomes then projected onto them rather than the wall. In this way, the formal aesthetics of the piece are transitory, moving along with the actions of those caught up in its range, dependent totally on their ability to interpose themselves into the work's beauty.

And yet, in some way the viewer is not important. They are there so that the piece may manifest itself, and yet, as they facilitate its true nature by their presence, they are only referentially a part of its value. The piece does in fact exist without a viewer, which is somewhat complicated, but true. Because the information inside each slide is already diversified, the content has been determined. Nothing the viewer could do (short of destroying the work) would actually change any of the content. Once the viewer leaves they are no longer in any way able to change the formal qualities of the piece. Also, while the viewer's experience is itself part of the aesthetic value of the work, a lack is just as valuable to the work as a presence. The lack and the want play dynamic roles when it is necessary for the viewer to unlock a tendency of the work.

The holiness of the artist's creation plays a large part in the way we view work created in the art world- look, do not touch. Therefore, the viewer's refusal of interaction with the work reveals as much as their interaction, and the work still goes on, waiting to manifest whatever the next viewer wishes to find in it. It is this distance between the viewer and the piece which allows for the interaction to create disorientation. This disorientation is also found in the nature of the images I am presenting in this format. I construct each with an awkwardness that suggests a difficulty in its fullness, that there is something left out or that the image is not completely honest. The frame of the image is usually constricted, or when the image is abstract there is little to orient the viewer to the underlying data. The images are true unto themselves, undoctored photographs, altered in their status but not content, but limited in such a way that they appear slightly unreal in their constraint. In this each image mimics the projection format itself, in that there is a small space where the viewer is able to interact and realize the nature of the information, and likewise that there is a limited scope in which they can thus have any effect on the material before them.

This sort of interaction is also present within my sound wall piece, Background Noise. This piece consists of a screen in front of a grid of speakers. Each speaker is set to play one of a number of tracks of voices and ambient affective noises. When the viewer begins to approach the piece they can hear an indistinct jumble of sound which does not manifest itself as singular sources, amplified by the lack of a visual footing in which to locate any one speaker. When the viewer gets closer they become more able to recognize and separate the sounds and voices from each other. In the space in front of the screen, one sound becomes more apparent as another becomes more indistinct while moving from place to place. Voices also form a topography as one places themselves in a range of volumes. The sounds themselves come from multiple points on the wall at different volumes, emulating the nature of the echo which reproduces sound at a different volume depending on the angle and distance from which it is reflected. The voices discuss topics ranging from issues like the problem of communication to the banality of a recount of their day to day business. The inquisitive viewer is then allowed to achieve a distinction within the sound by looking behind the screen, which has a green curtain on one side, reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz and his perceptual trickery. When we search, we often find that truth is much simpler and less mystical than we would like, but that it reaches its pinnacle and can regain its sense of wonder when we return to marvel at the complication of the interactions before us. In each sound the complication is minimal, but as a whole they create a functional area to explore.

So, while the viewer is separate and distinct from these pieces, they are nevertheless constantly concerned with the presence of such a viewer and how that viewer might manipulate it, and how it remains static without the viewer. These pieces are also concerned with the interactions of a multitude of viewers, each attempting to grasp at information. While multiple viewers are involved, the pieces become an issue of negotiation. Not only do the viewers have to decide how to interact with the pieces, but also how to interact with the other spatially engaged viewers. In the projections, their physical interaction, as well as the interaction of their shadows on the wall becomes an unavoidable issue. Thus, as the first viewer is joined by others they lose the first ability they had, control over their environment. The interactivity of the piece all of a sudden has become complicated as the viewer gains and loses the ability to explore distinctions without interruption. However, much more is possible as you add more bodies to the toolbox of discovery. While multiple viewers complicates the experience, it also enriches it and presents the opportunity for more diverse manipulation of the light field. This, of course, depends on the ability of the viewer to make this realization. The sound wall functions in a less open manner, but offers the same possibility for distortion by interaction. With the curtain pulled aside, a note inside informs the curious kitten that they may change the volumes of the individual speakers which allow such a difference in the total structure of the piece. What a ball of string!

The viewer is put in the position of playing themselves in a microcosm. Their place in these pieces is congruous to their interaction with the world. They can leave a memory in the minds of others, but upon physical departure from a site they have no permanent impact on the status of the situation. They are also forced to contemplate the possibility of complexity in the face of sharing a space, and thus new images or sounds are formed as they do this. Doubt and inquiry drive the actions of the viewer, based ultimately on factors from past experience. On the other hand, these should be more than a viewing expeditions, and what the viewer will receive is an experience which, when properly examined, offers a new bearing- a new experiential understanding to complicate and simplify their world.

Acceptance and the invitation to an aesthetic stance

As I began my work on experiential aesthetics and the implication of the viewer at the beginning of the semester I slowly came to a realization about the limits which I had placed on my aesthetic production. The weight placed on experience and the necessary interaction of the viewer was not stretched quite far enough. I began to contemplate the necessity of the "command" of the art object. Normally a static or non-incorporative object imposes structured information on the mind of the viewer. While the information may not all present itself immediately, there is in the object an intent and an aesthetic structure, which is announced to a viewer before they approach. The viewer is impelled to contemplate aesthetic experience because they are conscious of a conventional nature of the art object. I found that this straightforward conventional mode led the viewer's thought pattern into too much of a hole, placing the aesthetic possibilities within a limited framework. I had already begun developing multiple pieces that necessitated the interaction of the viewer. These pieces were structured so that they would not function fully without the viewer's interaction. The projection pieces and the audio wall did this through the process of discovery through motion, and the video piece by forcing a relationship to be formed, by the viewer for themselves, between somewhat disjunctive sets of information. It soon came to my attention that the next stage needed to be attempted. I realized that, while still maintaining a sort of absence of obvious aesthetic from the work, I needed to very straightforwardly create experience for people without the need to label it art before or during the moment. The piece would take a form commonly associated with the prank, depending on the naivety of the so called viewer. This left much to consider as to the possibilities of generating aesthetic experience without the viewer's foreknowledge. Not only was the kind of experience which would be fair game to create limited ethically, but the ability to create and document such an experience would take a massive amount of planning and would still be in danger of yielding no physical product. Here I would expect the aesthetic experience to be created through the viewer's responses both openly and personally.

After much contemplation an opportunity presented itself. I had created a batch of fake $20 bills as a joke and after the completion of this joke the question arose of what to do with the bills. At first I was content with mere placement of the bills in random places, allowing a random passerby to be engaged by the visual bait only to be surprised by the true nature of the object. But there was some need to see the outcome of the experiment and to engage the possibilities implicit in such a weighted object even further. I began placing myself in conspicuous places to catch people I wanted to test as I would burn one or more of the $20 bills nonchalantly. It then turned into a more purposeful action as I began to use them to light cigarettes, attempting to create a question not only of the reliability of immediate visual information but also of the value of imagery based on the associations we place on objects. These encounters would not be generated under the guise of art as the previously discussed works are presented. On the contrary, this primary gesture towards deconstructing the necessity to announce an aesthetic experience to a viewer has been fundamentally successful. The viewer's lack of complicity in the art event which is crafting their experience changes what art must or can be.

There is a problem of predictability, however, and I needed to decide how the variation implicit in the work functions from viewer to viewer, from reaction to reaction. Since there is a division between myself as the initiating artist, sculpting the experience as I see fit and tailoring the details to an individual or crowd, and the uninitiated viewer, accepting a reality which is unmarked as a detour into an art experience, the reaction of the viewer is based on their past alone. Their reaction is based on the memories and experiences they have maintained and built into their personal arsenal of value judgments. Each person creates the work anew, and yet, as the artist I am aware of this- looking to emphasize such a variation. While my control over the reaction and the experience of the viewer is not complete, I do have enough involvement with both the creation of the initial event and its continuing flow in order to manipulate it. In any circumstance, the viewer is still having a reaction which is based on their past, and is then built into their arsenal of experiences which craft their conception of the world.

It becomes most apparent in this work, and hopefully in following manifestations, how the responsibility for the work shifts to incorporate both the artist and the viewer. In bringing a viewer into the work who is unaware of the fabrication of the event, they must encounter it as they would anything else. Becoming a medium in themselves, each viewer creates a response determined by the variations in their own personal composition. The viewer is invited to contemplate the purpose and meaning behind the event, and if questioned they are forced to examine their own response and its implications, or they might be left confused and on their own. Not everything is made clear to us in our time.

In this way I am in charge of crafting a scenario and forcing the contemplation of experience by the viewer; but the viewer on the other hand, is responsible for the nature of their contemplation. While I can attempt to sculpt a person or a group of people, they are an inconsistent medium, structured on environments as widespread as the history of man, and fixed in different aesthetic stances. Without guidelines for an aesthetic consideration, the aesthetic is the reaction and contemplation itself, along with any other responses evoked in the participant. It is here that the project gains a new possibility: that the aesthetic standpoint of the participant might be changed by a possibly non-aesthetic situation. This is akin to experiences which do not announce themselves and are not more than they are, that build up the aesthetic sensibility of any person as they wind their way through life, bringing them together in some fashion to form some sort of personal sense. In this return to the basics, an invasion of sorts into a sacred realm of untouchable reality, everything becomes questionable and possible.

It occurred to me as I was at a music show (Les Claypool's Frog Brigade) that there was a possibility that a part of the show that was hidden to most, but which I was privilege to, may have been doing exactly this. Present inconspicuously at the front of the crowd was a blind kid. He was at the front of a show which was bound to be raucous. The security attempted to keep things around him relatively calmer, but were generally unsuccessful. I pondered the possibility that he was planted there by the band. In a show filled with a sort of clever political and social commentary, shrouded in a guise of false inattention, here was a blind person at the front of the audience, in the middle of a dangerous situation. As the show progressed, there was a general attempt by most who became aware of him to try to either help keep things calm around him or move away, to avoid the situation. However, there were a few who, in their struggle to get to the front of the theater, closer to the band, were unknowingly pushing this kid around in their fierce struggle for their own power or enjoyment. By the end, a particularly guilty party finally realized what he had been doing and changed his ways, but until he had knowledge of the situation he was as aggressive as possible in his attempt to keep position at the front. It seems unavoidable to draw a governmental if not wholly societal parallel. This hidden aesthetic was just the sort of thing which should be underscored, and if they hadn't planned it, they couldn't have hoped for a better addition to the dynamic of their show. The point being, this was not only an aesthetic experience for me, but it was a beautiful hidden dynamic which I could spread into the realm of intention.

It is not only this way in which our aesthetic standpoints are developed, as mine has been, but a way of introducing aesthetic beauty to the entire framework of our human experience. Now, this does not make everything art, but it does mean that everything informs art, and that it is experience and real events which determine and strengthen the ways in which we view beauty. It is necessary then, that this conclusion be considered in terms of discovering and generating not only experience, but aesthetics itself. If it is possible to build a new experience through action, and experience is the foundation for the individual's aesthetic views, then the generation of experience is not only new experience, but also the introduction and strengthening of aesthetic viewpoints. The direct engagement of the viewer's aesthetic standpoint can be approached in multiple ways (which are not mutually exclusive): subversion, reinforcement or introduction. Each of these approaches delivers a different formal result, forcing encounters with different relationships between the artist, the artwork and the viewer to be formed. This can be seen in previous discussions of my work and how these works function in relation to the viewer. Also, these different approaches reveal different difficulties in their creation and communication.

And so I needed to consider the possibilities and problems inherent in creating interactive and guerilla art. Setting up an environment in which viewers are not invited in to a show, but instead the show is brought unwittingly out to them is in effect the best and only way to create an aesthetic which is not affected negatively by the "art viewing experience" mentality which can alter the expected behavior of the viewer. Allan Kaprow, a father of non-theatrical performance and the Happenings movement began to affect such efforts with work that sought to draw a comprehensive connection between art and the outside world. Kaprow wrote in an essay on video art, "Products do, of course, provide new experience and influence thought. Hallucinogenic drugs, water skis, even TV sets are examples. But art products tend to elicit stereotypical responses; very little fresh experience or thought comes about from them." I believe that part of the truth of this statement is evoked by the way artists expect their work to be produced and consumed. By placing the art object within a gallery space, the viewer inherently behaves as they would in a place of reverence (whether eventually feeling reverent or not) rather than being able to open up their art viewing experience to include alternate behaviors. Beginning with art-life sketches such as the burning of the fake $20 bills, and moving on to falsifications of being watched with the use of a pretend surveillance camera, I needed to move into an effort to capture one experience in one way and then engage the gallery viewer in a similar but appropriately attuned manner. It seemed necessary, then, to encounter the viewer with an assault on common notions of reality by joining them in their reality to change what can be seen as true, and by placing art in a place it is not expected to be. In a sense, it is a reverse take on Duchamp's readymades, bringing the art back into the realm of the viewer and the outside world, rather than putting the normal realm of the viewer in the gallery. This work challenges the viewer's conception of coherency. It finds itself as presented to the viewer in the money burning exercise, and also as further explored in a series of conversations which explore the nature of truth and the propagation of myth, what becomes one of the fundamental issues at hand when dealing with the creation of experience. These conversations are created to challenge the conflict between believability and skepticism, which is the a question I find missing from the contemporary art forum, and which identifies in the viewer just how far they believe the complexity of the world can go. Each conversation is ad-libbed on the spot and consists of a storyteller or storytellers and a participatory audience (the roles rotate as the event transpires). Before going to the selected location, participants are briefed as to the nature of the piece and instructed as to the nature of their story. Each story is given whenever the speaker finds themselves compelled, so as not to create an environment for those around which seems contrived. Each storyteller is told that their story should have something to do with a revelation, a lie or issues of truth, at least to some degree. The conversations has to be loud enough that others can hear them, and believable enough for them to trust the content, while absurd enough that the story will stick as unusual in the mind of the overhearer. The distinction between performance and these guerilla acts is the focus of the aesthetic product. Rather than creating an artist centered view of the aesthetics of the act, the intention is to place the focus, through the nature of the act, on both the artist, the art object, and the person experiencing the act or story or presentation. Their experience of overhearing that which seems unbelievable lends itself to the creation of a personal mythology. When the overhearing viewer believes the story and it sticks with them, they have chosen to include this story in their world view. Further, it is likely that if the story is strong enough to command memorization, the viewer may be compelled to share his experience with others, further spreading the myth through strings of trust and believability. The preliminary testing conversations have taken place in living environments, diners, and in social gathering spaces. The conversations are not as much focused on what it is that is said, but on the experience of hearing absurdity spouted with the expectation that there is no reason to lie to such an extent (whether directly communicating to them or not) to someone whose sense of truth you have no stake in. When the audience party believes the storyteller, an especially strong instinct arises to trust the overheard information. Thus, this expectation one has of the verity of the overheard conversation can be highly utilized to dissect the value of the tall tale and the behavioral relationships of ourselves with the stranger.

The morality of communication

So, there arises a problem. What is the place of the creator in informing the subjects and viewers of his work? It seems that the information must be available, but it is possible it shouldn't be available to the viewer who expects an easy return. However, this is how the world works in general, and I find that to be an exciting and notable factor within my work. The problem arises in distribution of thought when we begin to create a forceful interaction. If rules are applied, we limit the nature of what our viewer can experience. In an honest world, the viewer could destroy the work in an attempt to understand, but they are stayed by societal pressures. In the same way, I might destroy my own work, or leave no trace of it. What is right? In any communication or act we find that we make a decision as to the future of the surroundings we will place ourselves and others within. As a creator, I create content and environment and have my own inferences in these. The issue becomes one of control and arrogance. It is not only impractical, but also irrelevant and destructive for communication to become too detailed, too accurate, or too assertive. Thus, it is in the allowance and acceptance of the nature of choice within the mind of each person that we find we can only suggest, prod and nod. For, within each of the pieces I present, it is partly the process that reveals meaning for the viewer. This creation of possibility and journey is much more interesting than the creation of singularity. By creating environmental changes and structures (whether physically or not) instead of mere objects, I allow for the creative continuance of the viewer. It is the presentation and invitation of possibility, not containing and definition that finds the greatest possibility for knowledge in the receiver. So, instead of only the creation of words, I attempt to create language, instead of images, paint. This generates a path for the viewer, and allows for the generation of experience rather than teachings. By creating that which needs to be accepted and incorporated to be understood, the gain at the end for a viewer is greater than it would be if I were to create an answer instead of a formula or a process.

My second video piece, In my Own Words, attempts to generate such a pattern and free association in the wake of the difficulties inherent in communication itself. Consisting of a speech in sign language, with an overlaid sound track of disconnected noise and language, this piece connects more than any other piece a direct structural attention to communication and the nature of information in the visual, aural, and lingual frameworks. The typical viewer in most cases has no knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL), and is thus contained to the realm of structural interpretation of the direct lingual information. On the other hand, the viewer has direct understanding of the, while little formal givings in the audio track. The viewer who likely has knowledge of the ASL in the video will have a specific set of information to attempt to base the understanding of the sound on, while those with the most direct knowledge of ASL would not be able to receive the audio portion of the video. With a conflation of the visual plane and its ability to communicate and the audio track's lack of structural communication, the video stands on a balance of the difficulty inherent in true communication. The experience of either viewer is one of piecing together the notions brought to fruition between the visual information and the audio, while only a specifically educated portion will have full access. This distinction stands on the difficulty of deciding where to place priority- which sense gives the most true account, and which cognitive process, structured or freely associative, will allow a greater understanding of the nature of the communicative value of the piece. And thus, this is the communicative value- neither the structured attempt nor the freely associative, but the balance between the two and the process of integration and interpretation. It is, again, within the viewer that the art becomes reality.

It is, then, a question of distance. Intimate connection with a communicated method and perspective lends itself to bias. Bias is the basis for conflict. Communication not only lends itself to the purveyance of bias but of misinterpretation, for misinterpretation often forms its root in the bias of one meaning over another. This is impossible to avoid, so by working in structures and formulas it is a less likely situation that the artist commands a sort of lordship over his audience. Putting the viewer in control of their understanding is a prime way to open the range of the communicative value of the work, and leaves less room for misinterpretation. While certain chords might resonate more strongly in one piece or another, the overall gesture is towards the creation of experience- to be taken as the viewer will, but in that process to learn something about themselves or the world. It is a gesture of attention-bringing, calling the viewer's mind to stand forth in its own world as more than a passive player. By drawing attention to the processes of interaction and construction which develop a view of the world, each viewer is open to reveal their own bias, and thus bring themselves closer to a true understanding, or at least one which is self-concerned.

The burning of the $20 bills still comes back to bear strongly at this point. It has been interesting watching the fallout from this experiment. Those not brought in on the joke are still convinced. Some reactions initially were strong or baffled, concerned or mad. This actively obtained the creation of myth, for it was brought up months later as a reference point for a realization about the nature of the material I had used. There is a risk in these projects, which is that of using an undisclaimed self in order to purvey information. I begin to become what I have done, for in the action of using myself and the reactions of those around me I lose the protective barrier that is "art". Art becomes life, life becomes the medium for art, and then there is a structural complication of the very medium I have been attempting to communicate in and about. Thus we come back full circle to the issue with communication itself, for in communicating we change the nature about that which we are communicating, and at once amplify and exemplify it in itself. It is unavoidable, and necessary, all at once.

Conclusion

The process of identifying the issues at hand within our perceptions and aesthetic judgment to realizing the nature in which we attempt to become the purveyors of that which forms these contemplative materials is in the end the nature of the work I had set out for myself. It is a body of work which identifies experience, integrates it, begins to come to a deeper understanding through that integration and then creates the experience itself, and calls for others to participate in this process. I feel that in giving over to it, I began to experience this process, bringing myself conspicuously within the material I began to explore. In the end there becomes no way of escaping the personal effect of any process, any experience. We are inextricably part of our world, and in entering a world of diagramming experience I can in the end not escape diagramming my own in circumscription. This is the problem with the problem of analysis itself. In analyzing it becomes impossible to divest oneself from that process, and one can never be sure of the sureness of one's end product, but it is then impossible not to completely accept and move forward as if there was no analysis to begin with. It is only the hope that we have taken the right path that drives anyone forward, motivates them to prove their choices, driving headlong into the world, participating and reacting all the same.