Bruce Charlesworth: ISEA.2

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Entrance hall, Çemberlitas Hamam; photo: Ming-yen Hsu

I bought my ticket, a yellow plastic tab, and was given a small cardboard box.  A cluster of topless Turkish men in plaid towels gestured toward one of the narrow staircases.  I climbed to the second level balcony where I was ushered into a wooden cubicle.  I stripped down, wrapped a towel around my waist and stepped into some plastic sandals.  The attendant asked for the yellow tab, then locked the room and handed me the key.

Clutching the cardboard box and key, I went back down the stairs to the lobby, where my burly masseur, Ahmet, met me and shook my hand.  After a quiz to determine my correct nationality, he led me into the cooling-down room.  He removed a small scrub mitt from the box, handed it to me and pointed to the interior of the empty box.  For a moment I thought he was about to do a conjuring trick, but then he pointed inside the box again, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and said the word “token”.  I pantomimed that all I had was a mitt, key and towel.  No hidden lira or euros.  He rolled his eyes, slapped me manfully on the shoulder and said: “later!”

Pointing toward the edge of the huge marble platform beneath the hot room dome, Ahmet guided me to lay on my back with my head on a small spittoon-like metal headrest, and then left me to sweat for fifteen minutes.  The heat and humidity from the platform was intense, eventually almost hallucinatory as I stared upward at the terracotta dome perforated by round holes.  Every few seconds, a drum-like boom seemed to come from deep inside the walls.

Turkish men and tourists enjoy a traditional bath in the historic Cemberlitas Hamami in Istanbul, Turkey, Tuesday, April. 27, 2010. Cemberlitas Hamami is one of the oldest Turkish Baths in Istanbul, dating back to the late 16th century, and was built by the famous architect Sinan. (AP Photo/Ibrahim Usta)

Hot room, Çemberlitas Hamam

Ahmet returned and started splashing me with buckets of hot water, had me sit up, roll over, stand and lie down again.  Next I could feel a softness glide over me and looked down to see soapsuds drifting upward over my shoulders and neck.  Ahmet began to scrub me all over, in different positions, stopping to point out an accumulation of dead skin on one of my arms.  I was doused with hot water again, massaged, taken into the cool-down room where he washed and kneaded my head.

Ahmet splashed me with cold water and returned me to the hot room.  Pointing to the marble platform, he gave me terse one and two-word instructions to lie down for no less than ten minute, take a shower, dry off with a towel, go upstairs and dress, come down and give the token there.  Not upstairs.  Down.

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Bruce Charlesworth is an artist, writer and filmmaker. He one of the pioneers of postmodern staged photography and among the first artists to use video and audio to power aspects of physically immersive “narrative environments.” He teaches in the Department of Film/Video/New Genres at the University of Wisconsin Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee. He previously reported on Ars Electronica in 2009 for Public Address.

Bruce Charlesworth: ISEA.1

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Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum: Spiral Drawing Sunrise

Arriving late Thursday night in Istanbul after a full day of teaching and a drive from Milwaukee to catch my connecting flight to Frankfort from O’Hare… I am jetlagged. I’m in Istanbul for the ISEA (International Society of Electronic Artists) Festival and Conference. Given that I am two days late for the festival, my account will be limited and personal. I’ve already missed much, and will miss more. Simultaneous events are scattered all over Istanbul, and navigation is tricky.

I made it to the conference in the sub-sub-basement of a financial complex, and sat through several sessions of artists and curators presenting papers. Topics included “The Body and Digital Space,” “Philosophy and Ethics of Bioart,” “Locative Sound,” “Robotics, Interactivity and Public Space.” For more information, click here and select Paper Sessions:

That evening, I groggily traveled by funicular and tram to the Sultanamet area of the Old City and went to a Turkish bathhouse to see Southern Ocean Studies by Tom Corby, Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie.

Projected on the domed entrance hall ceiling of the 427-year-old Çemberlitas Hamam, the artwork depicts the Southern Ocean circulating Antarctica. According to the artists, the project software runs in real-time generating the ocean currents on the fly, to which are mapped various other ecological data sets.

The back-and-white visualization of wind and tide evoked phenomena both small and large: lines of crawling ants and storm-tracking satellite maps. I like the idea of superimposing vortex-like imagery on a dome, and data from a cold place onto one that features heat. As with many new media works with a sociopolitical or scientific agenda, this one was more interesting to me in terms of its real-time data mapping content and symbolism than as a formal artwork. Both the intellectual and aesthetic impact of the piece might have been served by a larger, more encompassing projection in one of the huge domed hot rooms where bathers sweat on their backs while looking upward. For technical or cultural reasons, these options may not have been feasible in a traditional hamam.

I decided to have a Turkish bath.

Bruce Charlesworth is an artist, writer and filmmaker. He one of the pioneers of postmodern staged photography and among the first artists to use video and audio to power aspects of physically immersive “narrative environments.” He teaches in the Department of Film/Video/New Genres at the University of Wisconsin Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee. He previously reported on Ars Electronica in 2009 for Public Address.