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Black Holes

07/10/2005
Mark Hancock

Black Holes and Networked Lives

One of the questions that faces those of us who wish to frame and seek answers to the question of what is Net.Art, (or at least, what it could be) is the consideration of what part of the project is Net dependant? Has the artist used the internet merely as the carrier for the art work, and therefore used it as a free and worldwide form of art gallery, or is the work intrinsically borne on the web and unable to exist in any other form? Is the artwork using the networked environment in such a way that its content is in part formed by the medium?

Net Arts and Media Arts are still relatively new and fresh. Even though we may consider the “history” of the Internet and have historical reference points to compare and contrast with, we are still exploring how artists can explore this art form and still deciding what might be considered “good” Art or otherwise. As well as these questions, it might be important to ask: how does this work address the question of what it means to live in a networked world?

Black Holes is one such work that tries to encompass this question as part of its exploration of networked literacy. Written by Lewis LaCook from one location, across the Internet to his home computer, the texts that made up his on-line presence have been remoulded into a poetic landscape of content that slowly unravels itself as the reader moves the cursor into the text itself, allowing the words to grow and move about the screen.

The music that accompanies the poem is generated randomly as well. Created using sound files and as LaCook says in his artists’ statement “Sure, there are motifs used throughout.” But they are triggered by as random a trigger as is possible using the software. The soundtrack is at once amusing and thoughtful without trying to tie the listener/viewer down too much into following a prescribed narrative of sounds. Whilst the music reflects the format of seemingly random text well, it would exist nicely as an independent piece.

Of course, Black Holes is also a record of Lewis LaCook’s life at the time of writing stage. Names of his partner and friends appear through the text: “There is no smell like hers,” appears in one opening sequence. Such a soft and important statement about what it is like to be alive and in love, and one that fixes this piece within the life and emotive thoughts of the author. Where some of the text reads like a Brion Gysin and William Burroughs cut-up, breaking through original meaning to become something else, a statement like this slices through any reviewer rhetoric and asks us all to remember that digital art is also human art: as much about the human condition as it is about the technology.

And what of the images within the piece? Fed in from external sources, they suggest a fragility and delicacy that reinforces some textual references, not merely within the subject of the images but in the way they are fed in from external sources, to the readers’ web page. LaCook allows the work to depend a little on the randomness of the Internet. If a server that houses an image he references goes down, or the owner decides to remove the image, it is lost from Black Holes. What you see today might not be seen on a second viewing tomorrow. Or you might see the same image repeatedly, causing it to be burnt into the mind so that you come away with vague recollections of some but definite knowledge of others.

Some text is like this as well. Especially when the speed of it scrolling across the screen increases. Often, it isn’t so much what you read of Black Holes, as what it chooses you to read of it. But the Internet is like that sometimes. You read some things slowly or you flick through others without more than a glance. Modern life is like that and LaCook asks that we read Black Holes in that way too and to consider that our lives might be alike. Even given the vast sphere of Internet and real world space that the readers of black Holes might occupy.

If the title is in some way a reference to the idea of the web being a large vacuous space that everything disappears into, then LaCook alters our perception of that and points out that humanity is in there too.