Since September, the Western Front’s former box office and reading room has been transformed into a temporary exhibition space for TERMINAL, a series of four installations each addressing a single-user interface or device that artists have taken up in their material vocabularies. The first iteration looked at poetry written with and for the computer. The second installation is now on display and it positions the Commodore Amiga, one of the first home computers with graphic and sound capabilities, as instrumental in beginning to see the computer as a tool for creative output. 
Mark Pelligrino, G.I.R.L., 2012
A digital painting by Barry Doupé, animation by Mark Pellegrino, and Marisa Olson’s “gilded” Amiga from her Time Capsuleseries are shown in the small physical space. Olson’s “Midas touch” treatment of an actual Amiga 500 expresses both adulation for and the death of a once useful object. The Amiga was the turning point for attitudes around the “personal computer” and Pellegrino’s G.I.R.L. shows how personal a computer can become by portraying a BBS community whose sexual perversities thrived on the anonymity provided by this early instance of social media.
Videos by Amy Lockhart and Doupé are viewable online. All the animations in TERMINAL 2.0 transmit a quality of strangeness when you see what exactly can be done with such limited processing capacity. Lockhart’s Amiga Shorts are a succession of scatological and surreal vignettes. All of their rich bizarreness is gained from the quaint graphics. Doupé fifteen-second Vhery approaches the visual bounce of Oskar Fischinger, but is updated to suit the distracted gaze of a contemporary computer user.
Beyond an appeal to techno-nostalgia, this series provides a highly concentrated viewing experience of work made with humble technological means. However, users aren’t inclined to slow down our capacity to intake as much information as possible. Billed as a “multi-media” machine, Amiga may have been the first step towards generations of multitaskers and technocratic go-getters. By focusing on single-user interfaces and low-fi technologies, Terminal pushes softly against our feeble attention spans and overly ambitious “processing capabilities.”
Western Front: http://front.bc.ca/
TERMINAL 2.0: Graphical User Interface continues until January 7.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.
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TERMINAL 2.0 at Western Front
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