Jesse Fleming | Episode 5

Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts Author

06/23/2021 Added

10 Plays

Description

Jesse Fleming is an Assistant Professor in the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. He has done work in film, multimedia, and virtual reality. His latest research is in how VR can be used to teach mindfulness and visualize quantum physics.

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[00:00:01.797]Welcome to ArtsCast Nebraska
[00:00:03.598]a podcast about the creative
[00:00:05.186]activities and research of the faculty
[00:00:07.195]and alumni of the Hixson-Lied
[00:00:09.066]College of Fine and Performing Arts
[00:00:10.718]at the University
[00:00:11.589]of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:00:13.358]I'm Chris Marks, Associate Dean
[00:00:15.317]of the college, and it's
[00:00:16.638]my privilege to share with you
[00:00:18.067]these conversations about the
[00:00:19.537]fascinating work that our
[00:00:20.787]faculty and alumni do
[00:00:21.844]in the fine and performing arts.
[00:00:24.453]In this episode,
[00:00:25.715]I speak with Jesse Fleming,
[00:00:27.522]Assistant Professor in Emerging Media Arts.
[00:00:30.261]He spoke to me about his
[00:00:31.747]interest in mindfulness, perception,
[00:00:33.943]virtual reality, and art – and
[00:00:36.819]how they all merge in his
[00:00:38.292]research and creative activity.
[00:00:40.362]Jesse is the founder of the
[00:00:42.011]Perceptual Technologies Lab
[00:00:44.221]at the Johnny Carson Center
[00:00:45.771]for Emerging Media Arts.
[00:00:47.453]I asked him to tell me about that lab
[00:00:49.693]and its work. By way of answering,
[00:00:52.040]he shared a lot of his own
[00:00:53.374]personal history with meditation
[00:00:55.096]and art, eventually leading him to UNL
[00:00:58.047]and the Carson Center.
[00:01:00.268][Guest] Well, I moved to New York in 2001.
[00:01:03.735]I moved into this big loft in the
[00:01:05.682]South Bronx. I was pretty lost then,
[00:01:08.818]I had just done a major piece,
[00:01:11.432]I had, um, driven across country
[00:01:13.739]in a black and white police car
[00:01:15.701]um, as a performative work,
[00:01:17.751]wearing gray uniforms, ah, with a
[00:01:20.147]like a copilot was a video camera.
[00:01:23.426]The piece now marks a level
[00:01:25.333]of maturity then, and it was
[00:01:27.587]to me, in a way, a spiritual work,
[00:01:30.574]in the sense that I wanted to
[00:01:33.087]drive one side to the other, uh, invisible.
[00:01:37.493]Under this sort of working philosophy
[00:01:41.746]I had been developing of
[00:01:45.156]making what I was calling "neutral" art,
[00:01:48.387]like "zero" art, something that
[00:01:51.149]stood between binaries.
[00:01:53.765]It was intended to span
[00:01:55.481]both cop and criminal, authority
[00:01:59.351]and, um, disobedience simultaneously,
[00:02:04.333]to create a sort of like vibrating, ah,
[00:02:09.280]camouflage that existed in this
[00:02:12.194]in between place.
[00:02:13.966]That was maybe the best I could do
[00:02:16.743]at understanding void, then.
[00:02:21.626]So there I was in New York and, uh,
[00:02:24.458]9/11 happened a couple months
[00:02:27.302]after I arrived
[00:02:29.256]and again, looking back, I
[00:02:32.312]just didn't have the maturity
[00:02:34.043]to understand consciously how
[00:02:36.915]intense that was. Um,
[00:02:40.606]but I was pretty lost in my life
[00:02:43.075]at that point in certain respects
[00:02:45.166]and wound up looking
[00:02:47.202]in the neighborhood for things
[00:02:48.657]that I could relate to and
[00:02:50.192]one of them was a community center
[00:02:51.470]that had classes like photo classes,
[00:02:53.932]uh, graffiti class, um, and I went
[00:02:57.274]over there to see what was going on,
[00:02:59.066]and, I saw this little, um,
[00:03:03.623]flyer with an illustration of a
[00:03:06.674]for a yoga and meditation class, with a
[00:03:09.138]illustration of a guy sitting under a tree
[00:03:12.181]meditating and looking very serene.
[00:03:15.558]And something about it just got me curious.
[00:03:18.454]And I got really involved, I went
[00:03:20.439]and got very very deep into this, um,
[00:03:24.235]space and practicing for about a year straight.
[00:03:28.705]It seemed to reveal that there was
[00:03:30.807]thousands of years of inquiry that was
[00:03:33.799]answering some spaces that I had
[00:03:36.331]fallen into pre-dating the cop-car piece
[00:03:39.449]but through other artworks.
[00:03:41.538]I kept my sort of inner exploration life
[00:03:47.643]separate from my externalized life
[00:03:51.391]of being an artist for a good while.
[00:03:55.292]My work meanwhile had continued
[00:03:57.823]to be kind of in exploring ontology,
[00:04:00.671]like the nature of being.
[00:04:02.597]And very much sort of anchored
[00:04:06.659]or chiseled into this dichotomy
[00:04:10.321]I think we all experience of
[00:04:12.516]"Are we an independent self?"
[00:04:15.891]or "Are we part of something
[00:04:17.779]much bigger than that?"
[00:04:19.537]And that psychology that bends
[00:04:21.747]between those spaces, right,
[00:04:24.270]it like kind of determines
[00:04:26.154]our state of misery I would say, almost,
[00:04:28.155]you know, like
[00:04:29.249]New York on the subway
[00:04:33.236]with millions of people,
[00:04:34.522]can be one of the most
[00:04:35.943]heart-wrenching experiences.
[00:04:37.602][Host] Lonely, in a way.
[00:04:39.246][Guest] Yeah, lonely –
[00:04:40.357]or ecstatic.
[00:04:43.041][Host] So was it in LA that the
[00:04:46.017]the sort of philosophical thinking
[00:04:48.340]that you're describing merged
[00:04:49.426]with your art work, or did it
[00:04:50.718]happen before that?
[00:04:51.981][Guest] Well, so I continued to practice
[00:04:53.777]meditation, ah, through different lineages.
[00:04:57.501]And, at a certain point, you know,
[00:05:00.108]it's so much about the perception
[00:05:02.771]of world through the senses.
[00:05:05.448]What helped me, I think, in LA,
[00:05:08.826]of "coming out" to the art world
[00:05:12.319]of being a meditator,
[00:05:14.683]was, um, I started getting involved with
[00:05:18.530]UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center,
[00:05:22.038]which was one of the first mainstream
[00:05:24.721]and academic markers of
[00:05:26.607]thousands of years of contemplative
[00:05:28.457]strategy and technique colliding with
[00:05:32.206]and mirroring into
[00:05:34.321]the culture of West
[00:05:35.848]science and technology
[00:05:38.224]as a measurable, repeatable space.
[00:05:43.683]And, so, instead of it being
[00:05:46.002]a subjective, it could be objective
[00:05:48.741]in the same way that it could be measured
[00:05:51.322]through scans, like, MRI, etc.,
[00:05:55.014]so I did a show at this art, uh, organization
[00:05:59.443]called 356 Mission Road and started
[00:06:01.888]teaching meditation workshops
[00:06:04.472]during the show, I brought in
[00:06:05.783]a teacher and, um, I wound up
[00:06:09.462]teaching meditation there for
[00:06:11.014]two years every Sunday
[00:06:12.339]to art communities.
[00:06:15.096]So, perception, technology, art,
[00:06:20.771]and this kind of cross current
[00:06:22.851]of exploration – eventually I went
[00:06:25.680]to graduate school a year after
[00:06:27.715]I finished a teaching credential
[00:06:29.319]from the MARC Center at UCLA again,
[00:06:32.091]the design media arts program,
[00:06:33.634]and I was looking for, ah, in
[00:06:38.357]sort of researching how I could take this
[00:06:40.701]concept or strategy for conflating
[00:06:44.857]technology, arts, and contemplative practice
[00:06:50.302]into a something. I wandered into
[00:06:53.668]virtual reality that time.
[00:06:55.988]And I really was in opposition of VR,
[00:07:00.033]I thought it was a real, it just
[00:07:02.599]the whole idea of putting something
[00:07:04.183]on your face and secluding yourself
[00:07:07.277]from the world, but I had some experiences, um,
[00:07:10.537]sort of like sharing a virtual space with others
[00:07:14.366]and that changed me there, and then
[00:07:16.899]I started to recognize that it was this
[00:07:21.304]reverse engineering of human perception
[00:07:24.719]in order for it to function - like,
[00:07:26.885]it needed to fool the system
[00:07:30.372]our system; it needed to engage
[00:07:33.506]with our senses in a way that
[00:07:36.039]was as true as our senses perceive
[00:07:40.195]this space that we're sharing now
[00:07:42.781]as a reality in order for it
[00:07:45.263]to be a virtual reality.
[00:07:46.960]And so it became like this
[00:07:50.049]uh, big moment of, um, intrigue
[00:07:55.528]and also a cautionary space
[00:07:58.873]so in VR, in under 10 seconds, your
[00:08:04.618]whole life of sensory conditioning
[00:08:06.807]is duped.
[00:08:08.682]And, I think, in that moment
[00:08:14.154]a seed is planted.
[00:08:18.552]But the seed is that we may not know
[00:08:21.868]what all this stuff is that we
[00:08:23.765]we think is so solid.
[00:08:26.625]Yeah, so here we are
[00:08:29.921]and have this incredible opportunity
[00:08:34.034]and sort of you know, support
[00:08:36.965]of people that were interested in this
[00:08:38.972]sort of philosophy of making work
[00:08:43.964]through the senses
[00:08:46.226]using technology and the arts
[00:08:48.193]and, um, ah, examining our perception
[00:08:53.508]and how that somehow reveals
[00:08:57.415]or questions the nature of being,
[00:09:00.129]our sense of ontology, so
[00:09:02.081]that's what we do.
[00:09:04.237][Host] The Perceptual Technologies Lab,
[00:09:05.939]what, what do you hope to achieve
[00:09:09.304]with it, like what, you know, I don't know,
[00:09:10.930]say a year from now, what makes
[00:09:12.172]that a successful venture, not
[00:09:13.961]that it'll all be done a year from now,
[00:09:15.556]but you know, what's your hope for it?
[00:09:18.955][Guest] One of the goals right now
[00:09:22.777]is to try making efficacious work.
[00:09:26.954]So, I'm working on a grant proposal
[00:09:30.981]that, um, collaborates with the
[00:09:34.407]Center for Brain Biology and Behavior
[00:09:36.237]here. The working proposal now is
[00:09:39.182]a virtual reality-based mindfulness program
[00:09:45.037]that basically trains us to use sense
[00:09:50.581]experience as an attentional anchor
[00:09:53.821]which fosters present-moment experiencing.
[00:09:57.782]So, it's using this immersive space of VR
[00:10:02.110]and simulation to train us in the way
[00:10:06.463]that I've been trained for the last 20 years
[00:10:08.906]as a contemplative,
[00:10:10.784]to train us to anchor, investigate our
[00:10:15.219]sensory contact. So the idea is
[00:10:18.467]that it's a conditioning space
[00:10:20.383]and then when we get out of the
[00:10:23.039]simulation, we start to naturally, um
[00:10:27.883]attach to this kind of tactile experience
[00:10:32.802]of living.
[00:10:34.312]It's like it, um, proceduralizes
[00:10:37.698]this background processing
[00:10:40.744]due to the exposure of the virtual space,
[00:10:44.450]the virtual training simulation.
[00:10:46.081]And we're looking at, um,
[00:10:48.987]using this as a, um, intervention
[00:10:52.520]for drug addiction
[00:10:54.035]and then to test it under
[00:10:56.637]like an A/B study against other
[00:10:59.887]forms of mindfulness training
[00:11:02.703]to see how well it's working.
[00:11:04.383]I think all art is helpful,
[00:11:06.498]but, and this is wanting to help
[00:11:10.201]in a sort of exact way, um,
[00:11:14.681]and so, it rides a line that I think
[00:11:18.275]can be rightly criticized sometimes
[00:11:21.472]within the art space of being "didactic"
[00:11:25.104]or efficacy should not exist,
[00:11:27.921]like it should not be a measurement tool
[00:11:29.765]of the successful work of art.
[00:11:31.702]So I think to me that's a big leap, um,
[00:11:35.559]that is a space that I want to
[00:11:37.456]at least try.
[00:11:39.110][Host] One of your pieces,
[00:11:40.491]"Jane the Baptist", a video piece
[00:11:42.231]was recently acquired by the
[00:11:44.524]Cedars-Sinai Medical Center collection
[00:11:47.474]and that - I was struck by the fact that
[00:11:50.419]it was acquired by a medical center.
[00:11:52.138]And I wonder if they, if they
[00:11:55.480]sensed or if you intended
[00:11:57.880]a therapeutic value to the video?
[00:12:00.094]Maybe you could explain what the
[00:12:01.057]video is and how it came to be part
[00:12:03.299]of that collection.
[00:12:04.843][Guest] Yeah, that's a great question, so -
[00:12:07.526]Cedars-Sinai, they have one of the world's
[00:12:11.544]greatest art collections, and this
[00:12:15.147]was the first video work ever
[00:12:17.767]accepted into the collection.
[00:12:20.181]"Jane the Baptist" is a 13-minute
[00:12:26.865]and 37 seconds or something video
[00:12:30.214]which is meant to be played as
[00:12:31.776]a seamless loop
[00:12:33.715]infinite.
[00:12:35.409]Um, as an installed work, that is
[00:12:39.271]projected large enough that
[00:12:42.497]it fills your periphery
[00:12:44.233]and the seating is quite comfortable
[00:12:48.149]in a way that it, uh, your body
[00:12:51.135]doesn't have to stay active,
[00:12:53.330]I mean, like a beanbag.
[00:12:55.005]And it has a quadrophonic sound
[00:12:59.697]so it dopplers around.
[00:13:02.279]The content of the work is
[00:13:04.524]uh, car washes in the LA area
[00:13:09.040]which are sort of like cathedrals,
[00:13:11.498]they're very, it's like, if you
[00:13:14.339]could make a baby from
[00:13:16.418]uh, Detroit's auto industry
[00:13:20.034]and like facory line, with
[00:13:22.568]Disneyland and you know, like
[00:13:25.573]Christianity, you would have
[00:13:29.322]the car wash experience in LA,
[00:13:32.080]which I think is like for me the
[00:13:34.769]car wash for many years was always
[00:13:37.381]this, um, perfect space because it was,
[00:13:41.193]engaged all the senses.
[00:13:43.215]Um, it's also spatial, it's three-dimensional
[00:13:46.675]and it's, the way it plays out
[00:13:49.346]and your body is kind of by default
[00:13:54.756]engages in sort of a zeroed out space
[00:13:58.967]because you're on a track
[00:14:00.410]and they really go all the way,
[00:14:03.151]like, LED lights, and uh multicolored
[00:14:06.693]uh, soaps, and skylights and,
[00:14:12.604]you know, full-on.
[00:14:14.165][Host] This is not the car wash
[00:14:15.482]experience I'm familiar with.
[00:14:17.142][Guest] Yeah, right, so like LA
[00:14:19.357]um, it has a worship of cars
[00:14:23.925]in a way, and it's also a trap.
[00:14:27.826]Anyway, so the piece is edited in
[00:14:32.901]such a way that, it sort of like
[00:14:35.529]jump cuts, like anytime there's
[00:14:37.861]was going to be a down moment
[00:14:39.821]it pushes forward, and the
[00:14:41.941]track is infinite, it goes
[00:14:43.459]from one to the other
[00:14:44.531]but since it's always on a track
[00:14:46.100]you're continuously moving
[00:14:48.226]boom, boom, boom, boom, boom
[00:14:49.798]It is hypnotic, it's sort
[00:14:52.838]of endless, people would usually stay
[00:14:54.824]for 30-45 minutes, unknowingly
[00:14:57.542]they didn't know that it had ended
[00:14:59.249]so I got them comfortable, and then I
[00:15:02.011]edited the work to conceal the end
[00:15:07.984]and so people stay.
[00:15:09.619]And they're - yea.
[00:15:11.442][Host] But this is really interesting
[00:15:13.239]to me because your description of it
[00:15:15.457]also refers to it as, like, a birth canal,
[00:15:18.928]so if it never ends, it's like
[00:15:20.836]you never get born, you're there,
[00:15:22.762]is that intentional? I don't know,
[00:15:25.126]how do you relate those things?
[00:15:27.165][Guest] Yeah, well, let's see
[00:15:29.020]My um, we had our first kid
[00:15:32.306]during the show, so it was
[00:15:36.073]definitely an influencer.
[00:15:38.443][Host] It was on your brain.
[00:15:39.946][Guest] It has its light and its shadow,
[00:15:42.249]that work. Kind of the pointer to
[00:15:45.042]the shadow is "Hey we can get stuck
[00:15:47.001]in the stimulation". That is when
[00:15:50.241]you never get born.
[00:15:52.190]And the birth, is when you
[00:15:55.219]transcend through a high level of, uh
[00:16:00.535]concentration, sensory clarity
[00:16:03.723]immersion, so it was sort of like
[00:16:06.953]playing with this line of duality
[00:16:09.959]I guess it goes back to what
[00:16:12.588]we were saying earlier, you know, this
[00:16:13.887]capacity for always being in this body
[00:16:18.109]and trying to get comfortable and figure
[00:16:20.490]things out. And, that can
[00:16:23.480]get us into all kinds of trouble.
[00:16:25.531][Host] So is the viewer of this piece
[00:16:28.202]supposed to find a way out of that?
[00:16:31.005][Guest] I think this is the good
[00:16:32.543]side of art, which doesn't try to push
[00:16:36.353]one's experience.
[00:16:39.230]That is the paranoia of efficacy, maybe.
[00:16:44.612]Like, that's where maybe it comes from
[00:16:46.950]is saying, like, not forcing an outcome,
[00:16:51.466]rather encrypting multiplicity,
[00:16:57.885]multiple passages, multiple insights,
[00:17:01.306]multiple translations, different levels
[00:17:04.909]of meaning. Inevitably everyone
[00:17:07.484]leaves the show. And what they
[00:17:12.116]take of their experience varies.
[00:17:14.610]But usually people participate with it
[00:17:18.217]for more than its single loop
[00:17:20.915]which I think is one of the big achievements.
[00:17:25.753][Host] I asked Jesse to tell me about what
[00:17:27.497]he's working on now.
[00:17:28.953]Which led to a fascinating short
[00:17:30.942]discussion that encompassed
[00:17:32.520]particle physics and stadium crowds.
[00:17:35.895][Guest] Well, I have a show up
[00:17:39.097]in Los Angeles, a solo show at a gallery
[00:17:42.257]I've been showing with called
[00:17:44.360]Five Car Garage
[00:17:46.311]and, um, that has a bunch of cyanotype prints
[00:17:52.585]that I made here and a
[00:17:55.342]particle simulation, um, that I made
[00:18:00.677]with the lab, um, it's another example
[00:18:05.881]of sort of, self/other dichotomy
[00:18:08.817]using large-scale prints that are
[00:18:13.328]start as small collages using, um,
[00:18:17.107]large social gatherings, like often
[00:18:21.111]concerts or football games,
[00:18:23.010]there's I think some Husker collages
[00:18:25.925]that take out the center
[00:18:29.306]so the game is removed
[00:18:31.932]or the musician is removed
[00:18:34.598]and it just layers back the audience
[00:18:36.979]over the whole thing.
[00:18:38.774]It's a very strange thing to look at.
[00:18:40.640]It's sometimes a little freaky.
[00:18:42.289]But it also turns the lens
[00:18:44.714]backwards a little bit
[00:18:46.033]on the spectacle of the event
[00:18:48.668]and I sort of ask what we're
[00:18:50.325]actually there for,
[00:18:51.878]besides the thing, is the collectivity.
[00:18:55.540]We modelled this simulation loosely on
[00:18:59.866]the physics of stadium waves, which
[00:19:04.110]only takes about 15 to 30 people
[00:19:06.561]to incite, but then can transer to
[00:19:10.600]you know, a hundred thousand.
[00:19:13.000]Um, and at that level, humans
[00:19:17.992]are behaving very much like particles.
[00:19:20.785]So it has this sort of like, meta quality
[00:19:23.713]to it.
[00:19:24.891][Host] And that ties back to your
[00:19:26.795]particle project, right, and you're
[00:19:28.519]working with a physicist to do
[00:19:29.791]some visualization of -
[00:19:31.605]I don't know exactly what, but
[00:19:33.826]some sort of particle physics concept.
[00:19:36.186][Guest] That's right, so that's another
[00:19:38.411]project we're working on is a
[00:19:39.478]through a UNL Arts & Humanities grant
[00:19:42.662]teamed up with Kees Uiterwaal
[00:19:47.064]in, um, the department of physics,
[00:19:49.985]working on an augmented reality
[00:19:52.447]project using, uh, subatomic
[00:19:56.794]particle animation, and so
[00:19:59.319]we're plugging in all this math
[00:20:00.648]and getting these kind of cool results
[00:20:02.848]and we hope to sort of
[00:20:05.017]use this as an excuse to portray
[00:20:08.667]an unseen world well beyond our
[00:20:10.713]level of resolution.
[00:20:14.893][Host] Is that similarity intentional, then,
[00:20:18.872]I mean you're talking about particles
[00:20:20.079]bringing the unseen world into
[00:20:22.023]the seeable world but also
[00:20:23.612]taking a human-scale world
[00:20:25.503]and equating it back to particles,
[00:20:27.295]do you -
[00:20:28.131][Guest] Yeah.
[00:20:29.423][Host] You work with scale, I guess.
[00:20:31.312][Guest] Yeah, I guess, I think it's all
[00:20:32.624]you know, it's all sort of the same-ish
[00:20:36.385]intertwined, different, uh
[00:20:38.665]I guess it's just I feel like it's
[00:20:41.447]you know I think there's just
[00:20:42.954]something that
[00:20:45.378]is driving me around that
[00:20:49.007]type of work, I don't know
[00:20:52.678]I can speculate where it came from
[00:20:54.599]but maybe it's like you know
[00:20:57.052]bacterial fauna in your gut
[00:20:58.619]helping you decide things,
[00:21:01.471]I don't know.
[00:21:02.468][Host] Just accept it and do it.
[00:21:03.613][Guest] Yeah, but completely related.
[00:21:06.892][Host] Good, good.
[00:21:08.822]For more information about Jesse
[00:21:10.963]Fleming's work, visit his
[00:21:12.645]website at jessefleming.com
[00:21:15.091]and check out our show notes for links.
[00:21:18.291]You've been listening to ArtsCast Nebraska
[00:21:22.156]a podcast production of the
[00:21:23.927]Hixson-Lied College of
[00:21:25.238]Fine and Performing Arts
[00:21:26.582]at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:21:28.710]This episode was recorded and edited
[00:21:30.929]by me, Chris Marks, with technical
[00:21:33.154]assistance from Jeff O'Brien at the
[00:21:34.919]Johnny Carson Center for
[00:21:36.395]Emerging Media Arts.
[00:21:37.950]Special thanks to Kathe Andersen
[00:21:40.043]and Ella Durham.
[00:21:41.540]For more information about the college,
[00:21:43.624]please visit arts.unl.edu.
[00:21:47.207]Thank you for listening, and
[00:21:48.450]remember to support the arts.

Jesse Fleming | Episode 5

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Jesse Fleming | Episode 5

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