Word: viewers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From the ceiling hangs a huge mobile by Britain's Gordon Pask that responds electronically to lights flashed on it by visitors. Wen Ying Tsai's sonically activated bed of strobe-lit steel rods sways to each clap of the viewer's hands. Taped sounds of computer-composed music fill the air, and computer-made poetry is on view. Some of it reads rather like Alice in Wonderland as rewritten by Charles Olson...
...best, the show proves not that computers can make art, but that humans are more essential than ever. For each of the drawings, a detailed program, painstakingly prepared by a human, was needed; the computer did no more than fill in the requested dots and lines. No genuinely observant viewer could ever confuse a vibrant Riley or a vertigo-inducing Steele painting with the computer's dry, mechanical variants on the original works. And, elaborate though Tsai's kinetic sculpture may be, it too needs a human, in fact two: one to build it and one to clap...
...mercifully un-Hammerlike private eye named David Ross. In the first program, Ross got his work done without resorting to brutality and heman seductions; he impersonated a millionaire gambler in an effort to trap a crooked cardplayer. Ross exposed the cheater and departed, having provided the viewer with a provocative glimpse of a cutthroat poker game. That's all, and that's enough...
...Knife in the Water (1963), Czechoslovakia's The Shop on Main Street (1965), Italy's The Battle of Algiers (1967). But movie enthusiasts tend to forget the undistinguished and unmemorable fare that made up the bulk of the programs. Even at its best, Lincoln Center offered the viewer only a few diamonds in a setting of zircons...
...cameras move from closeup to unsparing closeup with the agility of a spectator's shifting eye-a spectator, moreover, who must constantly feel that he is committing an invasion of privacy. It is to the film's credit that Faces evokes a slight sense of guilt: the viewer keeps watching, even when he ought to avert his eyes...