Regularity

As mentioned above, motion and process are essential to 10 PRINT. The still images that archive as the program runs and are reproduced in this book are an incomplete representation. A full understanding of the program comes only through experiencing the pattern build one unit at a time and the surprise of the unexpected sequences and connections that form the maze as the left or right line are randomly drawn.

As we know, the traditional visual arts are static; think fresco, stone and bronze sculptures, and canvases. We create motion as we move around a work and our eyes explore the surface, but the object is still. The thrust of machines into life at the beginning of the 20th century was an inspiration to painters (the Futurists) and photographers (Étienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge) and also to sculptors who used motors to create motion. The origin of integrating physical movement into artworks in the twentieth century is often credited to Naum Gabo for his Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) from 1919-20. This sculpture created a virtual volume in space by mechanically hitting a metal rod near the base to send a wave through the object. Gabo was thrilled to bring motion into his art and his enthusiasm led to “The Realistic Manifesto”, co-written with his brother Antoine Pevsner in 1920. After rejecting the traditional foundations of art in an ordered list (1. Color 2. Line 3. volume, and 4. Mass) they declared:

5. We renounce the thousand-year-old delusion in art that held the

static rhythms as the only elements of the plastic and pictorial arts.

We affirm in these arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms as the basic

forms of our perceptions of real time. (Force Fields p. 228)

With kinetic rhythm as the base of all new art, Gabo's Kinetic Construction is an ideal demonstration. It's a machine without visual interest and no relation to the sculpture of the time. It performs the same motion precisely over and over. The work of art is reduced to a rhythmic repetition. While other pioneers of motion in art such as Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder worked with motors to create regular machines, by the middle of the century the dominant form of motion had shifted to the type of chance motion experience through the wind moving a Calder or Rickey mobile or the anarchic mechanical chaos of Jean Tingely. The essence of 10 PRINT is the relationship between both forms.

The next phase of the pairing motion and repetition in visual art brings us closer to 10 PRINT as artists began to create works for screens, first with film and later for CRT screen with video. Akin to the minimalist sculptures referenced above, there was a proliferation of minimal gestures within experimental film and animation. Starting in the 1960s, artists including Lillian Schwartz, John Whitney, Norman McLaren, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Paul Sharits explored repetitive physical movements and abstract motion with rigor. The Flicker (1965), a film by Tony Conrad, stands out for it's clarity. In figure ??, we see that without the semicolon in 10 PRINT each line in the program could be seen as a panel of a film strip. It's only a small leap to imagine the left line of the program as an unexposed film frame (clear) and the right line as the maximum exposure (black) to bring the fundamental mechanism of 10 PRINT close to The Flicker. The fundamental different is the larger arcs within Conrad's work. The pace at which the projection flips from pure light to black is slower at the beginning and end of the film to give it a beginning and end, while 10 PRINT maintains the same pace and is without a change at the end and has no fixed end.

Simultaneously to the exploration of repetition in film, a host of composers and performance artists based works on repetition A strong argument can be made that performance, including musical performance, is the area of the arts that is most similar to 10 PRINT. Like film and video, performance is temporal, but unlike these linear media, performances and 10 PRINT unfold in real time, with each step happening in the moment and potentially informed by the present state.

Piano Phase (1967) by Steve Reich is an iconic sound work built on repetition. In this approximately twenty minute composition, two pianists start by playing the same twelve-note melody continuously. One pianist plays the sequence faster so it moves out phase until they are back in phase, but the faster pianist is playing the second note, while the slower is on the first note. This continues until the faster pianist has looped so both are playing the same sequence at the same time. The piece iterates further from that point, but the same phasing technique is used until the end. In 10 PRINT, new forms emerge from the programs decision to display the left or right line, but in Piano Phase, new sonic forms emerge by playing the same sequence over and over, but with one musician at a different speed.

Step Piece by Vito Acconci is another performance work based on repetition that's interesting to compare and contrast with 10 PRINT. Acconci defined this work through a brief text:

An 18-inch stool is set up in my apartment and used as a step. Each morning, during

the designated months, I step up and down the stool at the rate of 30 steps a minute;

each morning, the activity lasts as long as I can perform it without stopping.

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The performance piece Dance, a collaboration between Lucinda Childs, Phillip Glass, and Sol LeWitt, is a work that integrates all of these strands together. [Short paragraph on Dance?]