A cultural and historical commentator, Neidich, not surprisingly, soon turned his attention more directly to the mass media. In 1995 he created an extensive series of photographs about the physical and ideological apparatus of the media's saturation coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial-cum-spectacle, work which has lately been generating renewed interest through a number of international exhibitions. Far from an extended diatribe, the series' allusive title — "Beyond The Vanishing Point" — points to both the transformation of the media's mission from the presentation of news to the production of entertainment and to the physiological basis of seeing. (Neidich is a former ophthalmologist and neurological researcher.) Thirty of these handsome images will be exhibited February 22-April 28 at the Gandy Gallery in Prague. MediaChannel Media Arts editor Robert Atkins recently spoke with Neidich about media, culture and cognitive science.

Robert Atkins:  Has the mass media subsumed everything we think of as culture today?

Warren Neidich:  That's a big question. Let's begin by defining a few terms. First of all, there is a culture of the media. By this I mean that there is a set of sociological, economic, political and technological relations that interact to create the media itself. They constrain, maintain and derange the traditional notion of "news." Secondly everything is so porous now. The boundaries of disciplines — including art — have become more and more fuzzy in our postmodern world. Let's look at art. Whether we look at it in the modern way, as a developmental process in which the object moves through different forms related to its predecessors, or we take a more current view of development as a series of starts and stops, jumps forward and switchbacks into an indefinite open model isn't important.

RA:  Why not?

WN:  The fact that artists are affected by the history of art lays a groundwork for a separate culture. Consider the Surrealists. In the past what they were doing interested a small group of insiders — viewers, patrons and critics. The effect of Surrealism was powerful, but it took years to diffuse out into the general public. Today the situation is quite different. What is in the galleries one day is on MTV the next. Madonna is a perfect example of an artist who borrows from visual art, encodes it into a digestible form and disseminates it through culture. A recent Diesel clothing catalogue featured a model squirting water out of his mouth as Bruce Nauman did for his "Artist as Fountain," which had been inspired by Duchamp. Today I saw artist Sarah Lucas' "Cantaloupes" adorning bus shelters. The point is that what was once a long process has become simultaneous. This is one reason that art is considered so dangerous by right-wingers in the United States. Its effects are felt in the culture at large through its instantaneous dissemination.

RA:  Let's turn to your work. You had a recent show of photos at the Bayly Museum in Virginia called "Camp O.J.," which will soon be seen in Prague. What was that about?

WN:  "Camp O.J." is many things. I think you have to understand the accidental way I got there first. I was making a work entitled, "Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media and Myth in America." I'd decided to follow Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac's main character in "On the Road," on a journey across America. With the book as my guide I drove the same route to see how the postwar myth of the "on the road experience" had shifted. For instance, there really aren't any hitchhikers anymore, the two-lane highway has become the six-lane superhighway, the small towns have been replaced by shopping malls.

But if you get off the new highway and onto the older route, you're confronted by the eerie feeling of emptiness and abandonment on a road dotted with billboards in disrepair. Without getting nostalgic for something I never knew myself, the experience seemed almost virtual. That is, perhaps the superhighway of the online experience was replacing the material world with the immaterial.

At the end of my trip, I mistakenly came upon "Camp O.J." [the mini-city base camp of reporters covering the O.J. Simpson murder trial] while driving — lost — through downtown Los Angeles. I was awe-struck by the media encampment. As I got out of my car I swooned and experienced a kind of vertigo as I tried to take in the whole site. It was like I had come across a huge mountain range emerging out of a flat plane, and it took my breath away. As an artist I knew I had to make a piece here.

RA:  How did you proceed?

WN:  Like every project it went through changes. At first I was interested in the platforms, the lighting and all the apparatus that seemed borrowed from movie production and rock 'n' roll concerts. I felt that there had to be a link between the machines that determine the possibility of cinema and those that determine media. I was interested in the technological advances in the production of cinema and its early roots in 19^th-century Zootrope, phenakistascope and the like. I was also interested in all the things in a picture that we normally don't pay attention to — the "latent" images and forms and content, to borrow a term from Freud. Standing in front of the great media complex of Camp O.J. one could only imagine the Erector Set parapets as a kind of architecture of a media unconscious. A flimsy construct of relations ready to tumble down.

I was there for four months, and what eventually became the focus of the work grew out of my initial impressions. I became aware that the O.J. Simpson trial had another life beyond the culture of media as it was expressed in the physical site that was Camp O.J. The life of the story was growing and glowing on the millions of TV sets that were transmitting the story to the millions of onlookers. Part morality play and part docudrama, OJ was now competing with soap operas for America's attention. News had morphed into entertainment.

RA:  But was that really so new in 1995? In 2001, it certainly seems like a commonplace.

WN:  I think Camp O.J. was a pivotal moment in pushing the envelope of acceptance. It wasn't the first instance of this intensive media scrutiny. The Gulf War and the emergence of CNN's 24-7 operation and the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building were antecedents. But in those situations, the traditional definition of news was upheld. The media still acted on the post–VietnamWar myth of itself as the fourth branch of American government alongside the Supreme Court, the congress and the presidency — a delicate game of checks and balances. Somehow all this changed as the media became complicitous with the event itself, driving it forward in the ever consuming desire for ratings.

RA:  So you see the creation of the news-entertainment spectacle as a product of the mid-nineties?

WN:  Exactly. No longer ashamed of its ties to money, prestige, power and global capitalism, the media was transformed by entertainment conglomerates into a global influence machine that advertiser would pay big money to be part of. The ever evolving infotainment genre of "Entertainment Tonight," with its factious focus on stardom, competed with the straight news programs for the small bits of information emerging from the Jell-O–slow, O.J. trial. The straight news programs mutated as well, and soon Geraldo Rivera was acting like an anchor man.

And there's a personal side to this, of course. I was at a party the other night, and a young artist was discussing "generational" differences between herself and her ex-boyfriend, who was 15 years older. They had a whole different set of memories that had to do with television programs, teen shows, cartoons, even favorite advertisements. The construction of her subjectivity was completely different than his. I call this system of networked relations "inter-pop-ular" relations, as they bind members of the same generation together.

These generation-specific memories also affect the kind of art that this artist produces. For example, gestalt psychology is used by media and entertainment to create more provocative imagery to enlist the consumer's gaze. Artists, whether or not they even know anything about gestalt psychology, unconsciously learn these strategies from advertising or from other artists' work.

RA:  So the artist is another audience being targeted by the infotainment makers?

WN:  Well, at least they're being affected, like everybody else. The audience that is responsive to the kind of art we're talking about is also specific and responds to the strategies and symbols of this generational discourse. The aesthetic of Silverado Levis ads and Wired Magazine is aimed at one part of the e-audience. Targeted audiences are nothing new, but this is different in the sense that this phenomenon is not predicated on narrative and symbolic fetishes but actual stylistic formations — some would say ideologies — that are embodied in software like Photoshop, which constructs space in the limited field of the LCD screen and programs the viewer. Notice I said "programs the viewer." Never before has a tool like this been used so broadly in the aesthetic and commercial realms.

RA:  If you're not Madonna or Damien Hirst it takes a while to get work exhibited or re-exhibited. What have you been doing since "O.J."?

WN:  I did the "Camp O.J." series about six years ago, and since then I have been interested in what I call "The Cultured Brain." This work came out of my desire to embrace my background as a research fellow in neurobiology and as a medical doctor who specialized in ophthalmology. Prior to 1997 I had always focused my work on cultural criticism and cultural history. After "O.J.," I decided that by bringing these two interests together I might be able to make something very special.

At my recent exhibit, "Beyond the Vanishing Point: Media and Myth in America," I tried to do this. I painted the gallery space at the Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville with three-inch-wide black and white stripes. This created an optical illusion in which the viewer the stripes move and undulate. Neurobiologists, using gradients not unlike these stripes as tests, have come to believe that this is caused by the way the visual cortex, that part of the brain used for seeing, processes this kind of information.

At the same time, the stripes also have art historical references. On one hand they relate to the optical paintings of Bridget Riley and on the other to the Situationist strategies of Daniel Buren, who painted abstract stripes on walls to debunk ideas about art's secular nature. When you walked into the Bayly space you had to look at the photographs because the wall was visually swimming and disorienting. This forced attention is a metaphor for the way that media constructs what we look at and makes us look at it.

And the exhibition space itself is ideological, or at least value-laden, if you consider its history and function as a repository and display for artworks and artifacts. So the stripes of the neurobiology laboratory become part of the history of aesthetic devices, like perspective, which illuminate and determine how we see.

RA:  So it's not just the odd coupling of media and art but a ménage with cognitive neuroscience, as well.

WN:  Exactly.

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