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donald.rodney:autoicon v1.0

Project produced and copyrighted by the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), STAR, Signwave & the estate of Donald Rodney.
CD-ROM + linked website.
inIVA, 6-8 Standard Place,
Rivington Street, London,
EC2A 3BE, UK.
Internet: http://www.iniva.org
Tel: +44 20 7729 9616
Fax: +44 20 7729 9509
ISBN 1 899846 31 X

Reviewed by Mike Leggett

legart@ozemail.com.au

AUTOICON is a dynamic artwork that simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney who - after initiating the project - died from sickle-cell anaemia in March 1998. It builds on Donald Rodney's artistic practice in his later years, when he increasingly began to delegate key roles in the organisation and production of his artwork.

AUTOICON was developed by a close group of friends and artists not only as an epitaph but as a device to 'supercede the necessity of sculpture'. The work achieves this on several different levels, some with a greater degree of presence than others. The 'conversation' with a database of sounds and images drawn from a collection made by the artist, picks on keywords in the text line keyed in to the interface. The window that opens runs a short movie or sound file and produces a short statement or fragment sampled, for instance from a monologue about growing up as a child of black immigrant parents in Britain in the 60s ('...my progression from brown to black...) Or maybe a line from a Bob Marley song ("... higher, like the Lion, from Zion...") or Stevie Wonder ("...people keep on learning...") Each delivery upon completion then awaits a response from the interlocutor through the keyboard, and so the conversation continues, forcing the choice of words or phrases away from those that have gone before, occasionally encountering tropes such as 'Changing the subject slightly?'

The screen accumulates windows of movies, images and sounds. The browser hybrid interface includes a toolbar not at first obviously avaialble, providing access to an exhibition element outside the conversation that otherwise proceeds. There are Activities which include an Image Montage - an engine scanning and raiding the hard drive for sustenance from which a continuously changing amount of visual material is likened, in the accompanying readme file to 'a sketchbook of ideas in flux.' As an auto-wunderkammer this relies heavily on the user seeking stimulation from the detritus found on various attached magnetic surfaces but is hard to link with the ideas and attitudes that the rest of AUTOICON stimulates. A short Slide Show of image-word work helps in this respect and was presumably made for one of Rodney's final exhibitions (Foucault, Poe and Haraway feature) where as movie, an empty wheelchair is recorded patrolling the space.

This is a conversation with Rodney's auto-presence that is strained by repetition, with this writer's imagination left running back to several encounters with the artist as a young graduate and the distance between us then, created by two cultures, the white culture (unconsciously) attempting to subsume the black. The disease he suffered from, specific to black people and which eventually killed him, is the metaphor he decribes for the disease of racism, equally specific. The work of inIVA, of which Rodney was an active supporter, has been hugely influential in bringing about the realisation of cultural eclipsing and re-establishing black visual culture in Britain and internationally. This has led on to the kind of collaboration between white and black artists that the production of the AUTOICON project has achieved.

Besides being a series of epitaphs the interaction occasioned reproduces a different encounter with the artist each time and enables the user to Save As..., (perhaps pausing at yet another re-presented conjunction of meanings), the work delivered uniquely to the screen in front of you.

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