As a follow-up to my post on the Digital Aesthetics panel discussion at the Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University earlier this month, I'd like to post a brief synopsis of George Legrady's presentation. For those unfamiliar with his work Legrady is a pioneer in information visualization and new media art and a Professor of Interactive Media in Media Arts & Technology at UC Santa Barbara. Legrady is renowned for projects like his
data visualization of the ebb and flow of the holdings of the OMA designed Seattle Public Library as well as archival installations such as Pocket Full of Memories (related screen capture pictured above). Legrady's scheduled talk was entitled Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization, but for better and worse when he realized he was sitting in a room full of visual culture historians he decided to improvise and give a more autobiographical talk about the origins of his creative practice. The resulting presentation yielded an interesting window into his relationship with computation and memory.
Legrady started out as a photographer in the early 1970s with a self-described interest in how "photographer and subject could be mediated by technology and cultural points of view". Pictured above is an image from a documentary project on life in four Cree settlements around James Bay in Northern Quebec. This ethnographic endeavor saw Legrady documenting the struggle of Quebec First Nations communities in coping with the environmental and cultural repercussions of a new hydroelectric dam in the area. The statement for the project reveals that even as a young artist he had a keen interest in taxonomy:
My approach to the production of this archive of 2800 photographs was to provide a cultural overview based on personal experience: Portraiture, architecture, indigenous events/artifacts, social events, labor, the relation between the traditional and the new. There are approximately 650 portraits of young to old including nearly every elder in Rupert's House. There are 300 architectural images of tract houses, shacks, tipis and other structures... There are 500 images of 6 weddings including feasts and some other gatherings.
This desire to classify and archive would continue to be a primary area for investigation in his later work.
As much as I wanted to hear Legrady dissect his recent projects, given the crowd I think he made the right choice to personalize the presentation and discuss more auto-biographical work. Figuring quite prominently into his talk was An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (installation pictured above), a "personal excavation" that catalogued many of Legrady's childhood memories. Initiated in 1981, the project had no viable means of execution until 1988. By 1992, his father had died, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Legrady was invested in consolidating a significant portion of the ephemera from his family history. An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War was developed as an interactive, personal museum for Legrady to store and categorize memories pertaining to his family's early life in Eastern Europe under Communism. The installation organizes photographs, documents and narratives through a number of categories including propaganda, signage, travel diaries, interviews socialist iconography, etc. He describes his rational for the project as follows:
I am not a historian, sociologist, archivist or museologist but made use of methodologies borrowed from these disciplines to produce this interactive archive. It is not intended as an official history. It is rather about a way to situate stories through technological media. For instance, to create a platform where one's stories can engage in discourse with official history since one of the capabilities of the digitization process is that it reshapes information, erasing differences traditionally easily identifiable as belonging to official or personal documents.
The installation was exhibited widely between 1993 and 1998 and it is quite curious to look back on the interface at the heart of the piece. Legrady talked about not even having a technical means to realize this project until the late 1980s and what he developed more or less approximated a time based interactive movie, something the new media community has taken for granted for the better part of the last decade.
[George Legrady / Cell Tango / 2007]
What was so refreshing about hearing Legrady discuss his work was the fact that he made it very clear that he is an artist trying to make sense of the world. I won't call his visualization polemical, but many of his projects have a "personal" quality, one that transcends style. In looking at his portfolio you get the sense that he has a deep investment in exploring memory, nuance and the order of things.
A quick note about the project links in this post, unfortunately George Legrady's interest in "the order of things" does not extend to the realm of web design. I linked to specific projects and in doing so compromised the frames based interface to his site. The best way to examine his work is to browse from the base site.
Chema Cobo
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
