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Traceroute – A Personal Journey Into the Uncharted Depths of Nerd Culture

Featured Image: Johannes lands in San Francisco.

Traceroute – A Personal Journey Into the Uncharted Depths of Nerd Culture, A Realm Full of Dangers, Creatures, and More or Less Precarious Working Conditions. (Or Fear and Loathing in Nerdcore).

“In the end, we’ll all become stories” Margaret Atwood.

Before Vaporwave, Post-Internet, Facebook, and your latest Kickstarter campaign, there was the cybercultural counterculture. I encountered it through publications like Collapse, Mondo 2000, ReSearch, Fringeware Review, and bOING bOING (when it was still in print), and on BBS boards like The Thing and The WELL. This was the land of cyberpunk, Dead Media, Tactical Media, The Church of the SubGenius, online dungeons and wetware hacking. This is the native culture of Johannes Grenzfurthner, born of the dark forests of Austria, famous for music and mass murder (by his own admission), and a crèche for nerddom.

Traceroute (…) is a reflection on his own roots of nerddom, and an On the Road style romp across the United States as he visits icons of the counterculture, the outré, and the generally questionable.

He begins Traceroute with a fitting genesis story of his growing up in Central Europe, dressing like Captain Kirk, making treehouses and accidentally killing the family chicken with a failed science experiment, reading comic books, making short films, and being obsessed with Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor. He saw that the neighbor’s patio tile always looked like LCD displays, and he started noodling around with his neighbor’s computer, logging into the FIDONet, learning about his nerddom, discovering ASCII porn, and Woschi Woschi Wau Wau, the Dog that Never Pooped. If you’re following me up till now, then you’ll get the general tone of the movie.

As Johannes expands on his arc from a gawky Austrian kid to founding the cybermedia group Monochrom in a quirky Germanic stream of consciousness, he decides to take his friends Jenny and Eddie on a trip across the US for a tour de farce into the depths of cyber-counterculture.

He begins his trip, of course, in San Francisco – home of the counterculture and the Californian Ideology, which he calls, “a fantastic realm of infinite opportunity and homelessness” There, he begins his intellectual trek across the USA with V. Vale – author and publisher of the ReSearch series of documentary books. Vale began his publishing career with a volume called Search and Destroy while working at the City Lights bookstore – a Mecca of beat culture. He cements the foundations for the film in saying that nerds made the counterculture; there is a sort of reflection that only comes from isolation or obsessiveness, and “There is no creativity in the absence of revolt.” says Vale.

Suddenly, I realize that I’m about a half thousand words into this review, and only about a quarter way through the movie, and barely out of San Francisco. That is the nature of Traceroute, a relentless stream of factoids and side trips that talks about many things, like the whiteness of cyberculture, the uncomfortable relationship between counterculture and neoliberalism, shipping containers, Area 51, as well as sci-fi props and makeup at Stan Winston Studios. This is the nature of the nerd; to be infinitely interested in infinite numbers of things, the more obscure the better. Actually, giving a feel for the film without describing it in total is probably the best thing to do, as it leaves many of the places Johannes goes to the imagination.

Traceroute has both memorable moments and stops that simply must be done if one is to visit cyber-counterculture. One of the mandatory stops is to SxSW Interactive in Austin, Texas and a chat with Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling. Jon is one of the founders of the legendary 90’s zine Fringeware Review and icon of Austin counterculture, as well as omniglot. Bruce Sterling, is of course, Bruce Sterling – cyberpunk author, WIRED Magazine blogger, and cyber-tastemaker. Listening to Lebkowski’s surprise at the traction of the cyberpunk movement in the 90’s in contrast to Sterling’s waxing of hanging with the tragically hip Milanese cyber-squatters of the time reminded me of the romanticism that also accompanies the underground.

A fantastic moment was when the Traceroute crew actually winds up at the gate to Area 51 in the middle of the night and decide to talk to tactical artist Trevor Paglen to get more information about the site. Paglen, almost more than anyone, has done work that reveals “black” projects being pursued by the US government, such as stealth technology, spy satellites, the location of Internet ocean cables, and so on. During their conversation, Paglen brings up a mission patch for the US Air Force for a stealth project that has two things. First, there is an alien head, as it is Area 51 after all, and a caption that reads, “Gustatus Similus Pullus”, (or, Tastes Like Chicken). Frat humor in the skunkworks – hmmm…

Trevor Paglen discussing Blackops insignia
Trevor Paglen discussing Blackops insignia.

Grenzfurthner also muses that we are two things – sexual beings and tool users. This makes sense as his group Monochrom hosts the annual Arse Electronika festival (a sexual play on the Ars Electronica in Linz). This reveals itself  in a number of segments with Miss Maggie Mayhem (San Francisco), Kit Stubbs (Boston), Christina Anapakis (Los Angeles, who does art from body cultures), and Bad Dragon, a company that does science fiction/fantasy dildos. From Maggie’s playfully powerful illustrations of the links between sex work and Silicon Valley to Christina’s experiments with Johannes’ culture to make a failed cheese, I am happy to see that Monochrom’s sex and body-positive message that nerds are filled with a curiosity about all of the world around them is present in Traceroute.

My only complaint about the movie is that I wanted more of it, or perhaps more of the eastern US, as it is nearly three-fourths of the way through the film before we leave Austin. Perhaps the newest part of the country, the West, might be the weirdest, but I’ll leave that to Johannes. And there are tons of other alternative cultural sites to go, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Craig Baldwin’s Artist’s Television Access in California, and Rich Pell’s Center for Postnatural History, the Mystery Spot, but he had a week, and only two hours of video. But on the other hand, I’m giving inordinate attention to the first half of the film, so not only am I self-referentially riffing on Grenzfurthner’s narrative style here, but mimicking the structure of the movie.

Lastly, anyone dealing with outré culture that mixes nerddom and capitalist critique has to go to Monroeville, Pennsylvania – site of George Romero’s marvelous political zombie flick, Dawn of the Dead. They go to Monroeville Mall, the site of the movie itself, with leftist critic and game designer Paolo Pedercini. There is a certain poesis about Paolo ranting about consumer culture, nerddom, the nexus of the mall and the surveillance state while waiting for the security guards at the mall to show up. These remarkably self-referential shots are what makes Traceroute magical.

Paolo Pedercini gives an undead rant on capitalism in Pittsburgh.
Paolo Pedercini gives an undead rant on capitalism in Pittsburgh.

After watching Traceroute, I was left with a real exhilaration and a deeply reflective feeling at once, but I think this would be similar to Grenzfurthner’s experience on his ur-nerdtrek across the USA. I mean, except for being a decade older, we have a lot in common. Our upbringings were similarly nerdy, but mine in Ohio, and his in Austria, he started Monochrom while I was with RTMark, we have many friends in common in the film, and we’ve glancingly communicated for decades. And he just made the documentary of our shared subculture. Of course, I’m going to like this film.

However, I wondered – what about the relevance of cyberculture and the counterculture in the age of Facebook and postinternet slickness? I mean, what role does Traceroute’s subject matter have in the light of neoliberal, hyperprofessionalized cultural production evident in the mid-2010’s? But then, the words of Sandy Stone, an eternal voice of reason, rang out in my mind. She said that William Gibson (and I’d add, Sterling and the rest of the cyberpunks as well) wrote this future, and a lot of it came true. And it sort of went to shit, and we’re still doing it, and it’s all good. And I’d like to expand in saying that not just cyberculture, but counterculture just keeps going, and the fact that it’s from the 80’s or 90’s (or the 60’s, for that matter) makes any difference. What Johannes terms as nerd culture is merely many aspects of Western counterculture, and it’s a tradition that has given rise to everything from the Summer of Love to the personal computer (and that’s just San Francisco…). What Traceroute reveals is the tradition of alterity just beneath the surface of Western culture, and that it has a powerful effect on our mass consciousness, whether it is in plain sight or not. Traceroute  is debuting at the NYC Independent Film Festival, April 27-May 1, 2016.

The Rubix Cube is is not the only twisty puzzle. Learn about Pyraminx, the 2×2 and 4×4 cubes, the Megaminx on Ruwix.

Choose Your Muse Interview: Lynn Hershman Leeson

Featured image: External Transformations: Roberta’s Construction Chart, No. 1,from the series Roberta Breitmore, 1974–78

Introduction.

Choose Your Muse is a new series of interviews where Marc Garrett asks emerging and established artists, curators, techies, hacktivists, activists and theorists; practising across the fields of art, technology and social change, how and what has inspired them, personally, artistically and culturally.

Lynn Hershman Leeson artist and filmmaker, who over the last three decades, has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Her work was featured in “A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance” at the Tate Modern London in 2012 and a retrospective and catalogue are being planned for 2015 at the Zentrum fur Kunst Und Medientechnologie, Germany. Modern Art Oxford is hosting a major solo exhibition of her work Origins of a Species, Part 2, and it’s open until 9 August 2015.

Lynn Hershman Leeson released the ground-breaking documentary !Women Art Revolution in 2011. It has been screened at major museums internationally and named by the Museum of Modern Art as one of the three best documentaries of the year.

The image above is from !Women Art Revolution, which introduces the Guerilla Girls who draw attention to injustice and under-representation across artistic platforms and institutions. Several members discuss their origin story and modus operandi, including “the penis countdown. !Women Art Revolution won the first prize in 2012 at the festival in Montreal on Films on Art.

She also wrote, directed, produced and edited the feature films Strange Culture, Conceiving Ada, and Teknolust. All featured Tilda Swinton and were showcased at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival before being distributed internationally. After her retrospective, at CIVIC RADAR in December 2014, a bumper catalogue consiosting of 450 pages will be published in Oct 2015. Featuring writing by Peter Weibel, Laura Poitras, Tilda Swinton, Kristine Stiles, B Ruby Rich, Hou Hanru, Andreas Beitin, Peggy Phelan, Pamela Lee, Jeffrey Schnapp, kyle Stephan and Ingeborg Reichle. Civic Radar is now at Diechterhallen Falkenberg till November 19, 2015.

Start of Interview.

Marc Garrett: Could you tell us who has inspired you the most in your work and why?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: What has inspired me are people who work with courage to do original work that has a political and authentic ethic. These include, to name a few only, it seems a bit strange because naming them isolates these artists from the context of their contributions. But I have been inspired by Lee Miller, Mayakovsky, Tinguely, early Automata and so many more like Thomas Edison, Jules Etienne Marrey, even Cezanne. Early on I educated myself by copying works to get a sense of how particular artists formulated their language – the way Rembrandt used light, Leonardo’s draftsmanship and parallels he found between technology and science, Gauguin’s color reversals, Brecht, Breton and Duchamp’s ironic and iconic archetypal identities, Tadeauz Kantor, and Grotowsky’s extension of the frame.

Also younger artists (nearly everyone is) like Rafael Lezano Hemmer, particularly the work he is doing now in using facial recognition to locate kidnapped victims, Amy Siegal’s Providence, Janet Biggs, Annika Yi, Nonny de la Pena, Tania Bruguera, Ricardo Dominguez, and many many more.

Lee Miller photographed women in fire masks in wartime London in 1944. [Source: Telegraph/Lee Miller Archives]
Lee Miller photographed women in fire masks in wartime London in 1944. [Source: Telegraph/Lee Miller Archives]
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, "Sandbox, Relational Architecture 17", 2010. Glow Festival, Santa Monica, USA. Photo by: Antimodular Research.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Sandbox, Relational Architecture 17”, 2010. Glow Festival, Santa Monica, USA. Photo by: Antimodular Research.

MG: How have they influenced your own practice and could you share with us some examples?

LHL: I think these examples added to my conceptual dimensional and historical overview which has been reflected in my practice. There are direct links also, like how the breathing machines and suicide machines relate to Tinguely, or how Roberta relates to Duchamp and Breton. But these are obvious and on the surface. The deeper perspectives embed themselves into the structure and architecture of the work. Political references like Civil Rights and The Feminist Movement are part of the core of the time I lived through and the resulting collage that is my work.

Breathing Machine. 1965. Lynn Hershman
Breathing Machine. 1965. Lynn Hershman

MG: How different is your work from your influences and what do you think the reasons for this are?

LHL: I think we all work in the time frame we are born into, and if we are lucky use the materials or invent the technologies to give presence and voice to the political gestures of that era. We cannot produce work from another era other than what we inhabit and really have to be in tune with the global framing of the tools and language invented during our life time.

MG: Is there something you’d like to change in the art world, or in fields of art, technology and social change; if so, what would it be? How would that happen?

LHL: Of course I would open up the process and systemic repressions, which would hopefully result in eradicating censorship, and the making more transparent the capitalistic underpinnings that are polluting access, value and visibility. In the 70’s, I did the first prison art project in San Quentin, and many early public art works geared toward social change, and it just required fortitude and clarity that resulted in breaking down systems of perceived values.

MG: Describe a real-life situation that inspired you and then describe a current idea or art work that has inspired you?

LHL: Well, hearing about Steve Kurtz’s predicament and the unfairness of it caused me to make the film Strange Culture.  I personally experienced exclusion and rejection – as did many women, and that inspired !Women Art Revolution. I think work comes out of awareness of the situations of one’s time.

Steve Kurtz’s nightmare began on May 11, 2004, when he awoke to find his wife Hope dead of a heart attack. Police responding to his distressed 911 call became suspicious of scientific paraphernalia in his house (materials for an art project on genetically modified food) and contacted the FBI. Soon his world was turned upside down. Only hours after his wife’s tragic death he was suddenly a murder suspect, an accused bioterrorist, and a pariah to all but his closest friends.

The film is told through a unique blend of interviews, documentary footage, and reconstructed scenes starring Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, and Peter Coyote, Hershman’s critically-acclaimed film is a sophisticated, look at how the traumatic events of 9/11 altered American society and undermined its long-held values. [1]

MG: What’s the best piece of advice you can give to anyone thinking of starting up in the fields of art, technology and social change?

LHL: Stay true to your vision, forge ahead no matter what the obstacles are and keep your sense of humor.

Three images from, Origins of the Species (Part 2). Lynn Hershman Leeson. Modern Art Oxford. 29 May — 9 August 2015.
Three images from, Origins of the Species (Part 2). Lynn Hershman Leeson. Modern Art Oxford. 29 May — 9 August 2015.

“Ms. Hershman Leeson continues to use art as an advance warning system in new work, developed with scientists, that focuses on, and participates in, the phenomenon of genetic manipulation. The show’s most recent piece is an installation of wallpaper made from images of hybrid animals, plants, and human limbs created through DNA manipulation, regenerative medicine and 3-D bio-printing. It looks great in the gallery, and like much of this artist’s work, it takes both ethics and aesthetics in ungraspable directions.”[2]

MG: Finally, could you recommend any reading materials or exhibitions past or present that you think would be great for the readers to view, and if so why?

LHL: The Art and Technology show in MdM at Salzburg, my exhibition and catalogue for The Burden of Guilt. The Electronic Super Highway and catalogue coming up at Whitechapel next year. Recommendations for catalogues: !War Graphic Novel, Marshal McLuhan, Rebecca Solnet’s River of Shadows, Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild, Kristine Stiles: States of Mind,  Peter Weibel: The Global Contemporary and the Rise of the New Art World,  and so many others. I also think for instance that James Watson’s Double Helix is beautifully written. So many possibilities for educating one’s self exist.

Drone: Camera, Weapon,Toy: The Aestheticization of Dark Technology

Introduction

Unmanned mobile devices, better known as drones, are one of the most significant ‘dark technologies’ of the 2010’s, and proceeds to reconfigure sociopolitical relations through the gesture of the remote gaze. Note that I say ‘mobile’, as opposed to ‘aerial’, as drones encompass unmanned land and water-based craft as well, but for our purposes, the flying eye has been the most visible technology in Baudrillard’s mediascape in terms of its use by the CIA in the Afghanistan/Pakistan and African theatres of operation.

To compound matters, the 2012 FAA Reauthorization Act has created a milieu in which estimates are that there could be 10,000 domestic drones in use by 2020 (Bennett & Rubin). Drones are going to be one of the US’s major technology growth markets, with the devices being used in geographic, aerospace, and environmental research as well as military and law enforcement uses.

From this, a strange series of cultural disconnects are emerging as drone images become Tumblr fodder as part of the ‘New Aesthetic’ art movement via James Bridle’s Dronestagram site (Bridle), and drones proliferate through sites like DIYDrones.com and even retailer Costco. What emerges is a complex cultural landscape where a burgeoning remote air force polices the globe in the name of American power, while the images generated by them elicit a perverse visual fascination amongst certain subcultures. Furthermore, only slightly domesticated versions of these technologies are now being flown by techno-enthusiasts and children. What is developing is a complex set of relations that is abstracting power, interaction, and representation.

Drone Outline, James Bridle.
Drone Outline, James Bridle.

The Aerial Camera and the Abstracted Gaze – The Drone Aesthetic

In March of 2012, a panel of five artists, writers, and designers presented a panel at the media festival South by Southwest entitled, “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” (Bridle, et al). In this panel, they stated that the aesthetics of digital vision and representation, created through algorithmically-driven imaging and devices, including generative art, Kinects, and drones, are creating a machine aesthetic signaling a distinct step in the creation of the digital image since its emergence in the 1960’s. The panel expounded upon the aesthetics of new re-presentation technologies like 3D printing as well. Keep in mind that this panel drew with a very broad brush, including everything from algorism to computer glitch media, but what has intersected with current events are robot eyes like those of drones and their cyborg sighting mechanisms that team pattern recognition with human remote operators. This panel may have faded into obscurity if it were not for Bruce Sterling’s endnote talk foregrounding the concept (Sterling).

Bridle’s creation of the Dronestagram Tumblr foregrounds the drone’s eye view or the ‘shadow’ of the drone on the landscape, as depicted by Bridle’s Drone Shadow 002 (Bridle), which was a 1:1 scale outline of a drone’s shadow in Istanbul for the 1st Istanbul Design Biennial. Other projects that highlight the gaze from and the gazing of military drones are Trevor Paglen’s Drone Vision and Omar Fast’s film, Five Thousand Feet is the Best, which tells a fictionalized encounter of a Nevada-based drone operator with an interaction between a Middle Eastern family and a group of men planting an IED. Fast makes an interesting observation in the narrative, “Seeing the world from above doesn’t just flatten things, it sharpens them. It makes relationships clearer.” (Fast) Conversely, Trevor Paglen remarks on the nature of drone vision:

“What is particularly interesting to me are the ways in which ‘seeing like a drone’ is and is not like seeing through a standard bombsight: the techno-optical regime through which conventional bombing has been conducted differs from the high-resolution full-motion video feeds that inform (and misinform) the networked bombing of late modern war. Those feeds significantly compress the imaginative distance between the air and the ground, but they do so in a highly selective fashion.” (Paglen, from Gregory)

 Omar Fast, 5000 Feet is the Best
Omar Fast, 5000 Feet is the Best

How I see the gaze of the drone is not through relief, technological regimes, or even traditional paradigms of Mulvey’s acquisitiveness of the male gaze (Mulvey), but of a Latourian network of objects (actors) in a network (Latour) that reconfigures the definition of the viewed object that the line of flight that the drone-gaze confers. In my model, the operator-node views the ‘sighted’ object through a framing of the drone camera, part of which is controlled by pattern-acquisition algorithms. What results is an augmented ‘cyborg’ sight in which the mise en scene is given the illusion of being sharpened by the technological regime of the drone’s technological systems. It is a line of flight that travels along of three nodes in a network of gaze; the operations site, the programmatic framing node of the drone-object which then redirects the gaze to the objective, transforming it from a house, person, or loved one to a target or objective. This is the problem of the cyborg gaze of the drone.

Another read of the drone gaze can be found in James Cameron’s movie, Avatar(ibid.) In it, disabled soldier Jake Sully operates a bioengineered clone of one of the native species, the Na’vi, to infiltrate their culture. While many have likened Avatar to a criticism of the Iraq and Afghanistan engagements, I posit that Jake’s avatar, is in fact a drone in biomorphic form. The difference here is not merely the optic (and haptic) immediacy of the avatar and its less destructive mission, but the avatar’s mission to win the “hearts and minds” of the native population, similar to that of the Afghanistan conflict. The drone-dream of Avatar is experience and agency without presence, although Jake does end up ‘going native’ when his human body is killed and his soul transfers into his Na’vi body. This echoes many films in which the colonizing body becomes part of the colonized demographic after spending time with them, like Dances with Wolves. It’s safe to say that a drone pilot might not want to ‘go native’ until such a biomorphic agent is invented, but Avatar problematizes the notion of remote engagement in terms of Fast’s affective gaze of the drone and its context to human relationships in addition to Cameron’s romanticization of the avatar-drone.

Jake Sully and his biomorphic drone
Jake Sully and his biomorphic drone

The second aspect of remote engagement that Avatar brings into focus is the lack of distinction between the technologically enabled person of disability versus the able-bodied person placed into a state of paralysis by being tied to the workstation or network-connected device. In The Third Interval, (Virilio) Paul Virilio posits this liminal (dis)abled state as an effect of the technological collapse of space through networked technology, but as Raunig states, a Deleuzian line of flight and invention appropriated by the state apparatus as a tool for the institution of war. Jake becomes freed by his cyborg existence, only to be trapped by the war machine of the corporate state until he is freed by the elimination of his techno-duality. It appears that true freedom can only come from the severance from remote control and cognitive integration with the drone itself. To experience the ontology of a drone, you must become one, not merely control it. (Bogost)

TechnoFetishism and the Horror of Infantilization: The Household Drone

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.” – Paul Virilio

Setting aside the idea of becoming drones, I want to share a cognitive dissonance that I experienced at the end of 2012. While reading descriptions of the dark spectacle of “The Light of God” (what the laser homing beam used for the Hellfire missile has been called) in the Middle East, over Christmas 2013 I was horrified to see stacks of drones for sale at the local Costco (a regional US wholesale big-box chain) in a picture posted on Facebook by scholar Richard Grusin. I had been working with devices like the ARDrone for a couple years, but to see stacks of them for holiday sale was a grim fantasy made real. It is not that, as Paul Virilio said, there are just more eyes in the panoptic First World (in addition to police cameras, phones, ATM machines and the like), but these particular eyes that are being used as extensions of state power are being sold as infantilized versions at holiday retailers. The ARDrone was the early techno-adopter’s fetish of the 2012 shopping season, military technology commodified as completely as any iPad (which it uses as a controller, by the way). As Laurie Anderson said in the film, McLuhan’s Wake, “if you want to get the job done, you‘re gonna want the latest thing…”(McLaughlin, et al), and in this case, the thing is the ARDrone. Or it could be any of the products promoted by Chris Anderson’s new project, DIYDrones.com, a start-up he left WIRED Magazine in part to create.

The connecting conversation between the military Predator and our “pet” predator (i.e. the videodrone; and there is an irony that many of our pets are predators, such as dogs, cats, and ferrets) is that I was communicating with artist Art Jones in Karachi, Pakistan who was doing an art project with the US State Department. He called it The Pakistani Playlist(), where US artists would send media and links to him in Karachi as a form of intercultural dialogue. I sent links to devices like the ARDrone and videos of children playing with these infantilized versions of military technologies that were zipping around the outer tribal lands. My aim, and Jones understood this, was that technoculture and the military-industrial complex sells a dark dichotomy between remote hunter-killers abroad and sexy flying eyes at home that one woman even asked me to use to see if her landlord had successfully removed the bird nest from her rafters. How can something so fun and useful, because it’s little more than a radio-controlled plane with a camera, be that dangerous? What’s the worst that could happen, except for perhaps having your teenage son spying on the sunbathing girl next door? As a point of note, that scenario was one illustrated briefly in a PBS documentary called The Rise of the Drones.

Jansen's Orvillecopter.
Jansen’s Orvillecopter.

The cultural effect of the domesticated drone is that of banalization and aestheticization of military technology and its products that elide the stark reality that the ARDrone at the Costco is not a General Atomics Predator. The swarms of synchronized quadricopters being developed at Penn State in videos on YouTube are not seen in the context of their potential applications for the violation of personal privacy. In addition, Parrot (the maker of the ARDrone) offers tools to dynamically upload your flight videos to YouTube without vetting, and another app allows you to create snazzy dance numbers by creating aerial ballets for your drone on your iPad. Those who have always dreamt of flight, like me, can now share our dreams of flight through the social nets. Given this, drone flight logs have the potential of having the banality of funny cat videos and hipster Tumblr sites, while eliding the social issues these devices raise. What is the meaning of a domestic commons when Foucault’s panoptic vision is merely intensified by the number of Virilio’s public eyes? Is the fact that public eyes are now nearly universal, justifying the installation of more of them? And who are the operators, and what is the intent of the gaze of the domestic drone? And what of the configuration of the drone as fetishized object itself, such as Antoine Catala’s objectified drone exhibition (Kirsch) or Burt Jensen’s Orvillecopter(Netburn), the merger of taxidermied cat and quadridrone?
The emergence of the drone in all its configurations, fixed-wing, quadricopter, or rover, how they represent the detached gaze and how they are depicted in the media, call into the question the ethics of remote warfare, new forms of objectification, commodification, and aestheticization of intrusive technologies and their mediated production. The use of drone strikes by the CIA around the world, the intersection of these practices through critical artmaking sectors of The New Aesthetic and its obsession with the machine eye, as well as the proliferation of domestic drones (at least in North America) show the complexities of the cultural impact of this ‘dark’ technology. Furthermore, where technology is in one place a weapon, in another a toy, and yet in another a fetishized object brings us to a complex discursive locus where the extension of military power, McLuhanist body augmentation, and cultural production are all brought into question. Where the military-industrial complex has given technological apparatuses with multivalent uses such as the Internet, drones complicate the concept of the remote eye in ways that are in no way even close to resolution.

Shu Lea Cheang and Mark Amerika

Opening Event: Seeds Underground Party – Sat 31 August, 2-5pm

Contact: info@furtherfield.org
Visiting Information

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
ABOUT THE ARTWORKS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
EVENT: SEEDS UNDERGROUND PARTY
TALK: SHU LEA CHEANG – ART, QUEER TECHNOLOGIES AND SOCIAL INTERFERENCE
LOCATION 

DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
WATCH VIDEO OF THE OPENING

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION


This exhibition by Mark Amerika (US) and Shu Lea Cheang (US/FR) at Furtherfield Gallery marks a significant moment for contemporary art. Amerika and Cheang are both ‘net native’ artists. They share many of the obsessions of the growing multitude of artists who have grown up with the net since the early 1990s.

They are also big “names” – internationally established artists who regularly show their work, to critical acclaim, at contemporary art galleries around the world. They have crossed over into the mainstream art world whilst maintaining a critical edge.

Amerika is a media artist, novelist, and theorist of Internet and remix culture, named a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator” in their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st Century.

Cheang is a multimedia artist who works with net-based installation, social interface and film production. She has been a member of the Paper Tiger Television collective since 1981 and BRANDON, a project exploring issues of gender fusion and techno-body, was an early web-based artwork commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum (NY) in 1998.

Both artists continue to shape and be shaped by contemporary networked media art cultures of remix, glitch, social and environmental encounters.

Shu Lea Cheang and Mark Amerika at Furtherfield Gallery provides a physical interface in a local setting in the heart of a North London park to the thriving, international, networked art scene.

ABOUT THE ARTWORKS


The exhibition features Cheang’s UKI viral love installation and Composting the Net. These are shown alongside pieces from The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), Amerika’s latest work in his collaborative series of transmedia narratives.

UKI viral love (2009 – ongoing) – Shu Lea Cheang

The exhibition features large stills from two performance installations. UKI viral love is the sequel to Cheang’s acclaimed cyberpunk movie I.K.U. (premiered at Sundance Film Festival, 2000) conceived in two parts – a viral performance and a viral game. The story is about coders dispatched by the Internet porn enterprise, GENOM Corp, to collect human orgasm data for mobile phone plug-ins and consumption. In a post-net crash era they become data deprived and these coders are suddenly dumped into an e-trashscape environment where coders, twitters, networkers are forced to scavenge from techno-waste.

UKI – Trash Mistress [Radíe Manssour] (2009) by Shu Lea Cheang – Photo by Rocio Campana
UKI – Trash Mistress [Radíe Manssour] (2009) by Shu Lea Cheang – Photo by Rocio Campana

In 2009, Cheang moved into the art studio at Barcelona’s Hangar medialab with 4 tons of E-trash, collected in Barcelona’s city recycling plant in one day. Amidst the rubble of wires, cables, boards, keyboards and computers, along with the coders and the hackers, UKI the defunct replicants are part of the e-trashscape seeking parts and codes to resurrect themselves.

UKI viral love is developed with collaborations and residencies at HangarBCN [artistas residentes] (Barcelona, Spain), Medialab Prado [Playlab] & [Desvisulizar] (Madrid, Spain) and, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial [Plataforma Cero] (Gijón, Spain). The work presented at Furtherfield Gallery is the first physical installation of UKI in a gallery setting.

Composting The Net (2012) – Shu Lea Cheang

Composting the Net sources Internet net cultures’ accumulated data. It appropriates open (un)moderated mailing list communities, used for collaboration, sharing information and dialogue, and reprocesses the information into a virtual compost. For this exhibition Cheang composts the Spectre mailing list, a channel for practical information and exchange for media art and culture in “Deep Europe”, initiated in August 2001. The abundant info-data is reused and given extra life – an artistic legacy beyond its original purpose. It is also a celebration of the independent spirit of net culture that exists outside of corporate dominated Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook.

Composting The Net  (2012) Web art by Shu Lea Cheang
Composting The Net (2012) Web art by Shu Lea Cheang

The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics – MOGA (2012)Mark Amerika

Amerika’s The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA) features the work of The Artist 2.0, an online persona whose personal mythology and body of digital artworks are rapidly being canonized into the annals of art history. The narrative traces the life of the artist and his ongoing commitment to a practice of ‘glitch aesthetics’. MOGA features a wide array of artworks intentionally corrupted by technological processes, including net art, digital video art, digitally manipulated still images, game design, stand-up comedy, sound art, and electronic literature.

Lake Como Remix, MOGA (2012) by Mark Amerika
Lake Como Remix, MOGA (2012) by Mark Amerika

Featured in the Furtherfield Gallery exhibition are three works from the MOGA series: Lake Como Remix, The Comedy of Errors and 8-Bit Heaven.

Museum of Glitch Aesthetics was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices for the 2012 AND Festival.

8-Bit Heaven (London-Soho 3) by Mark Amerika
8-Bit Heaven (London-Soho 3) by Mark Amerika

EVENT: Seeds Underground Party

In conjunction with Shu Lea Cheang and Mark Amerika exhibition opening, Furtherfield is pleased to host Shu Lea Cheang’s Seeds Underground Party on Saturday 31 August, 2-5pm. Join us for a seed exchange party where packets of seeds change hands and go underground in the fields around Finsbury Park.

+ More information about the Seeds Underground Party.

TALK: SHU LEA CHEANG – ART, QUEER TECHNOLOGIES AND SOCIAL INTERFERENCE

To coincide with the exhibition, on Monday 02 September The White Building hosts a special talk by Shu Lea Cheang who will be in conversation with curator and writer Omar Kholeif.


+ More information about the Event.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and his collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007). Amerika is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at La Trobe University.

Shu Lea Cheang

As an artist, conceptualist, filmmaker, networker, Shu Lea Cheang (USA/France) constructs networked installation and multi-player performance in participatory impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interface and open network that permits public participation. Engaged in media activism with transgressive plots for two decades (the 80s and 90s) in New York City, Cheang concluded her NYC period with the first Guggenheim Museum web art commission/collection BRANDON (1998-1999).  Cheang has expanded her cross-genre-gender borderhack performative works since relocating in Eurozone in 2000. Currently situated in post-net BioNet zone, Cheang is composting the city, the net while mutating virus and hosting seeds underground parties.

LOCATION


Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park
London N4 2NQ
T: +44 (0)20 8802 2827
E: info@furtherfield.org

Visiting information

Furtherfield Gallery is supported by Haringey Council and Arts Council England.

This exhibition is sponsored by Rowans Tenpin Bowl, Carroll/Fletcher and Arts Catalyst.

VIDEO

Shu Lea Cheang and Mark Amerika from Furtherfield on Vimeo.

New Aesthetics: Cyber-Aesthetics and Degrees of Autonomy

Featured image: Five Thousand Feet is the Best by Omer Fast.

In perusing Honor Harger’s recent missive on drone aesthetics and James Bridle’s ongoing posts of drone images at Dronestagram, taken in context with the Glitch un-conference in Chicago, some new questions have come to mind. These questions have to do with conceptions of New Aesthetics in its various forms in terms of interaction with the program/device and its level of autonomy from the user. In my mind, there seems to be a NA continuum from generative programs that operate under the strict criteria of the programmer to the often-autonomous actions of drones and planetary rovers.  As you can see, I am still chewing on the idea that The New Aesthetic as it seems to be defined, as encompassing all semi-autonomous aspects of ‘computer vision’. This includes Glitch, Algorism, Drone imagery, satellite photography and face recognition, and it’s sometimes a tough nugget to swallow that resonates with me on a number of levels.

First, image-creating technological agents are far from new, as Darko Fritz recently stated in a talk that algorithms have been creating images, in my opinion, within criteria of NA since the 60’s, and pioneers like Frieder Nake, A. Michael Noll, and Roman Verostko have been exploring algorithmic agency for decades.  If we take these computer art pioneers into account, one can argue that NA has existed since the 60’s if one lumps in genres like Verostko’s ‘style’ of Algorism or the use of algorithms as aesthetic choice. A notch along the continuum toward the ‘fire and forget’ imaging (e.g. drones) is the Glitch contingent, which is less deterministic about their methodologies of data corruption aesthetics by either running a program that corrupts the media or they perform digital vivisection and watch what little monster they’ve created.  Glitchers exhibit less control over their processes, and are much more akin to John Cage, Dada or Fluxus artists in their allowance of whimsical or chance elements in their media.

However, as we slide along the spectrum of control/autonomy from the lockstep control of code to the less deterministic aesthetics of face recognition, drone imaging, robotic cameras, Google Street View cams, Mars Rovers and satellite imaging, things get murkier.  Autonomic aesthetics remind me of the ruby-hued Terminator T500 vision generated by intelligent agents running the ‘housekeeping’ on the machine platform. I consider this continuum from Algorism to Glitch to autonomous robotic agents under an NA continuum of aesthetics is important insofar as it defines a balance of agency between the operator and the ‘tool’. For me this is the difference between the high degree of control of the Algorist, the ‘twiddle and tweak’ sensibility of the Glitcher, and the gleaning from the database of pseudo-autonomous images created by Big Imaging created by drones and automatic imaging.  Notice I use the term ‘pseudo’ in that there are operators flying the platforms or driving the car, while the on-board agents take care of issues like pattern/face recognition and target acquisition. We also see this in Facebook, as recent technological changes as of 2012 have introduced face recognition in the tagging of images. From this, a key issue for me in this discussion of what began as a nebulous set of terms (the criteria of NA as defined by the global conversation) is that of agency and autonomy, and how much control the New Aestheticist gets in the execution of their process.  Another important point is that I am not calling the ‘New Aestheticist’ an artist or curator, but something in between, but I’ll get to that later as this is also an issue of control of intent.

Back to this idea of autonomy between the subject, the ‘curator’ and the viewer, what interests me is the degree of control or not that the person creating, tweaking, or gleaning the image has over the creation or contextualization of that image. In the case of the Algorist, this is the Control end of the spectrum, where the artist takes nearly full control of the process of creation of the image, unless there is a randomization function involved in the process, and that it itself is a form of control – very Cybernetic in nature. Agency is at a maximum here, as the artist and machine are in partnership.  Roman Verostko is a prime example of this, as he explores intricate recursive images created by ink pen plotters using paints in the pens. What he, and the AI-driven AARON, by Harold Cohen, for that matter, are machine painting.

The next step down the autonomy spectrum would involve the use of ‘glitch’ tools and processes that distort, disturb, and warp digital media. The process involves executing a given intervention upon the medium, such as saving it improperly, hex editing its code to corrupt it, or as Caleb Kelly writes, ‘crack’ the media. There are differing degrees of disturbance of the media to inject chance processes into it, from a more ‘algoristic’/programmatic application of programs upon the media to directly changing the internal data structure through manipulating the information through hex code and text editors. The resultant process is an iterative ‘tweak and test’ methodology that still involves the user in the process to varying degrees. Of course, the direct manipulation of the data with a hex editor is the most intimate of the processes, but there is still one factor to account for. The factor in question is that there is the set of causes and effects that are set in motion when the artist/operator opens the media and the codec (Compressor/DECompressor) mis/interprets the media, as is intended by the artist.

If we are to look at the glitch process, we can say that there is a point of intervention/disturbance upon the media, which is entirely a function of control on the part of the user. Afterwards, it is set loose into the system to allow the corruptions within the media to trigger chance/autonomous operations in its interpretation in the browser, etc. This is where the glitcher straddles the line between control and autonomy, as they manually insert noise into their media (control), then the codecs struggle with the ‘cracked’ media (autonomy). The glitcher, then, has the option to try a new iteration, thereby making the process cybernetic in nature. In Glitch, there is a conversation between the operator, the media and the codec. With the aesthetics created by drones, algorithmic recognition software, and satellite reconstructions, the process is far more autonomous/disjoint, and the New Aestheticist has to deal with this in the construction of their practice.

In the genre that I will call ‘mobEYEle’ imaging, the robot, satellite, or parabolic street eye abstracts from the ‘artist’, aptly turning them into an ‘aestheticist’, as their level of control is defined as that of a gleaner/pattern recognizer from the image bank of Big Data. Rhetorically speaking, we could say that a connection between the aestheticist and the generator of the image would be less abstract if, say, a New Aestheticist were to be in the room with a drone pilot, conversing about points of interest. It is likely that a military remote pilot and a graphic designer would have sharply differing views as to what constitutes a ‘target of interest’. Like that’s going to happen…

Therefore, let us just say that the collaboration of a New Aestheticist and a drone pilot is nightly unlikely, and that the New Aestheticist is therefore abstracted from the decisions of command and control involved in acquiring the image that eventually gets in their hands. This, however, presents us with two levels of autonomous agency, one human and one algotrithmic. But before I expand on this, I would like to discuss my decision to call the practitioner an ‘aestheticist’ as opposed to an artist or curator.

This decision rests on what I feel is the function of the aestheticist, that is, to glean value from an image and ‘ascribe’ an aesthetic to it. This position puts them in a murky locus between artist and curator, as they have elements of neither and both. For example, does the drone-image NA practitioner create the image; are they the artist per se, of the image? No. Although they are more closely aligned to curatorial practice as they collect, filter (to paraphrase Anne-Marie Schleiner), and post on tumblrs and Pinterests? From my perspective, the role of a curator is the suggestion of taste through and informed subjectivity through ecologies of trust and legitimacy, but the social image aggregator, although they might want to perform the same function, has no guarantee of accomplishing this unless they develop a following. Therefore, under my definition, they are neither creators nor taste-makers in the traditional sense, so what makes sense is to call them ‘aggregators’ of aesthetic material and thus my term ‘Aestheticist’.

Returning to our conversation, the drone aestheticist, then, is subject to one of two degrees of completely abstracted autonomy of the creation of the image; that of the operator or that of the algorithms operating the drone. The abstraction surrounding the human operator is easiest to resolve, as the images of interest are either the preference of the drone operator or those created by the operator under the parameters of the mission, and not the results of a New Aestheticist’s joyride on a Global Hawk. It is merely someone else’s volition selecting the image, and a confluence of personal interest deciding as to whether the image deserves to be on the New Aestheticist’s social imaging organ. However, it is the drone’s algorithmic image acquisition system that creates a more alien perspective in regards to aesthetics and autonomy of the image.

Compared to the Algorist or the Glitcher, all loosely placed under the banner of New Aesthetics, the Drone/Big Data Aestheticist is most problematic, as they are a fetishizer of sheer command and control operations that are potentially utterly abstracted from the pilot/driver’s volition. This creates a double abstraction through first the pilot, and then the algorithmic recognition system. There is no cybernetic loop here at all, as the gleaning of the item of interest from the beach of Big Data is twice removed from any feedback potential. Secondly, as I have written before, the Drone Aestheticist is exactly that, a gleaner of interesting images for use on their social image site, which in itself is a bit of an abject exercise.

Or is it? For example, if one is to say that the Aestheticist gleaning the images does so without intent or politics, and is merely operating on fetish/interest value, then this is perhaps one of the least interesting practices in New Aesthetic practice. But on the other hand, if one looks at the work of practitioners like Jordan Crandall, Trevor Paglen, or Ricardo Dominguez, who examine the acquired image as instrument of aggression, control, and oppression, this puts a new lease on the life of the Drone Aesthetic.  In a way, though inquiry, there is an indirect feedback loop established in questioning the gaze of the device, its presence, and its function in its theater of operations. The politics of the New Aesthetic emerges here, in asking what mechanisms of command and control guide the machine eye and determine its targets of interest. This is of utmost importance, as the abstracted eye is guided without subjectivity or ethics and is determined solely by the parameters of its algorithms and the stated goals of its functions.

Is the aesthetic of the machine image merely a function of examining its processes, fetishizing its errors, or something else? The criteria of the New Aesthetic attempts to talk about a spectrum of digital imaging that stretches back into time far longer than 2010, and has a problematically broad sense of definition. Once these problems are set aside as a given, one of the key criteria for the evaluation of NA practice and the function of its images depends upon the degree of control and autonomy inherent in the process within the creation of the image. This is formed in a continuum of control and abstraction from Algorism and Generative Art to autonomous eyes like drones and satellites. Algorism is one of the oldest NA practices, and exhibits the closest relationship between artist, machine and determinacy of digital process. A greater degree of indeterminacy is evident in the Glitch, but the iterative process of tweaking the media and then setting it forth into the process of interpretation by the codec, foregrounds the issue of digital autonomy.

The eye of the unmanned platform abstracts creation from the human organism at least once if a human does not operate it remotely, and twice if it is. There is the Terminator-like fear of the autonomous robot, but at this time, perhaps the more salient questions regarding what I have qualified as drone/autonomous aestheticism under NA of what the function of the image is, and is it really that interesting? Are the practices of NA blurring artistic and curatorial practice into a conceptual aestheticism, creating a cool detachment from the image despite its source or method of creation? Is the bottom line to the genres of NA the degree of control that the artist or aestheticist has over the image’s creation or its modality/intent? It seems that NA is an ongoing reflection upon the continuum of control over the generation of the image, our beliefs regarding its aesthetics, and what the intentions or politics are behind the creation of the New Aesthetic image. Or, as I have written before, are we just pinning images from Big Data and saying, “Isn’t that kinda cool?”

Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle of intention and cool.

Heath Bunting, The Status Project & The Netopticon

Featured image: Ein Identity-Workshop mit dem britischen Künstler Heath Bunting. Vertiefung Mediale Künste, Sihlquai 131, 8005 Zürich. Dienstag,

Introduction.

Whether Bunting is climbing trees, skateboarding, canoeing or working with technology he approaches it all with the same critical attention. He hacks around systems, physical or digital. Right from when he built his first computer at the age of 14, his life has been an experimental research project. His practice consists of a dry sense of humour and an edgy, minimal-raw aesthetic, mixed with a hyper-awareness of his own artistic persona and agency in the world, whilst engaging with complex political systems, institutions and social contexts.

Even though the subjects he explores are likely to be the most topical or important issues of the day, it always includes playfulness and an element of the prankster in his work. His work regularly highlights issues around infringements on privacy or restriction of individual freedom, as well as contexts concerning the mutation of identity, our values and corporate ownership of our cultural/national ‘ID’s’, as well as our DNA and investigations into Bio-technologies. In an age where we are submersed in frameworks and protocols designed by a neo-liberal elite for a  generic consumer class, Bunting’s work is well placed as observation and practical research into the ‘depths’ of legal and illegal territories in our contemporary, networked cultures.

Heath Bunting 14 years. North Herts Gazette Series Thursday, November 13, 1980.


The Status Project.

“our identity is constructed as human beings that can possess one or more natural persons and control one or more artificial persons. The higher up in the class system the better the access to status variety.”(Bunting)

The Status Project, is a study of the construction of our ‘official identities’ and creates what Bunting describes as “…an expert system for identity mutation”. His research explores how information the public supplies in their interaction with organisations and institutions is logged. The project draws on his direct encounters with specific database collection processes and the information he was obliged to supply as a public citizen to access specific services; this includes data collected from the Internet and information found on governmental databases. This data is then used to map and illustrate how we behave, relate, choose things, travel and move around in social spaces. The project surveys individuals locally, nationally and internationally, producing maps of “influence and personal portraits for both comprehension and social mobility”.

The use of data in contemporary life has made individuals an accessible resource for commercial and political interests. We are a rich source of data-mining material. Data mining is a process that potentially commodifies our interactions. Its historical roots lie with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and 20th Century statistical analysis. These two methods of formulating data have grown ever closer together, backed by corporations and government-initiated military funding. Social networks such as platforms like Facebook and Internet networked institutions such as Google and the US military are all obsessed with our behaviours online. A good example is the NSA’s recent rebirth in turning most of its surveillance apparatus to spy on the US and its citizens. They have built a supercomputer tracing through billions of people’s emails, phone calls, and online activities in other countries outside of the US. The UK government is currently going through the political process of trying to implement similar spying protocols and systems to watch what UK citizens are up to.[2]

“Google suffers from data obesity and is indifferent to calls for careful preservation. It would be naive to demand cultural awareness. The prime objective of this cynical enterprise is to monitor user behaviour in order to sell traffic data and profiles to interested third parties.” [3] (Lovink)

Bunting is a Hacktivist Artist, acting (playing) out the role of a spy collecting and observing data content. Hacktivist Artists work with technology to explore how to develop their critical and imaginative practice in ways beyond the frameworks of the art establishment and its traditions. The established art arena is gradually catching up with this kind of artwork. However, one could be forgiven for thinking that many art critics and galleries are still caught in the 20th Century.

Two other artists also working on people’s data are Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. They have collaborated on exploring alternative identities as the mysterious group, Men in Grey.[4] They detect online users’ vulnerabilities by tapping into and intervening in wireless network traffic – observing, tracing and copying user online activities. It is then redisplayed online on their website for others to view or transferred onto a visual screen on the side of a briefcase as an intervention in cybercafes for all to view. Although, no one knows other than themselves if the data is hacked and then redisplayed on these briefcases, as proposed in their video featuring one of their interventions. One thing is for sure – they have touched upon issues concerning our fears about personal data being seen by other people who we’d prefer were not viewing it.

The Status Project also taps into questions concerning technology, hierarchy and power. We are entwined in a complex game where the sacrifice of our information is part of connecting with others across digital networks. This raises the issue of our ‘human’ status being aligned ‘to and as’ objects of measurement. Through travel ports, our vehicles, passports, ID cards, library cards, mobile phones, alongside information about our health. We have mutated into networked (information-carrying) beings. Bunting’s own position on this matter is that “Technology is becoming more advanced and the administration of this technology is becoming more sophisticated, and soon, every car in the street will be considered and treated as persons, with human rights. This is not a conspiracy to enslave human beings, and it is a result of having to develop usable administration systems for complex relationships. Slaves were not liberated because their owners felt sorry for them; slaves were given more rights as a way to manage them more productively in a more technologically advanced society.”[5]

identity_orienteering_competition_piccadilly_circus_heath_bunting02.jpg
Identity orienteering competition, Piccadilly Circus, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, United Kingdom (UK), 2008.

In the UK, in 2006 a research document called ‘A Report on the Surveillance Society For the Information Commissioner’ was published. Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network. This report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners’ Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner’s Office. The publication begins by saying “Conventionally, to speak of surveillance society is to invoke something sinister, smacking of dictators and totalitarianism […] the surveillance society is better thought of as the outcome of modern organizational practices, businesses, government and the military than as a covert conspiracy. Surveillance may be viewed as progress towards efficient administration, in Max Weber’s view, a benefit for the development of Western capitalism and the modern nation-state.”[6]

We are not only under surveillance by entities we do not trust, we are also tracing each other online. Recently, in a show called ‘Being Social'[7] at Furtherfield’s new gallery, artist Liz Sterry showed her installation piece, ‘Kay’s Blog’. Sterry had “collated not only one form of online social engagements but all she could find about a Canadian blogger called Kay. Using everything from photographs to things Kay has mentioned in videos, blogs and posts on social networks, Sterry has recreated Kay’s bedroom in the gallery.”[8] (Scott)

Installation shots. Kay's Blog. Liz Sterry. Being Social exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park - 25 February - 28 April 2012. Images by Pau Ros.
Installation shots. Kay’s Blog. Liz Sterry. Being Social exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery, Finsbury Park – 25 February – 28 April 2012. Images by Pau Ros.

“”There were times when I felt quite creepy,” says Liz, 28, as she shows me lists of Kay’s Facebook friends and a Google Streetview of her apartment block while a playlist of her favourite songs plays in the background.”[9]

Yet, as this ever-creeping surveillance culture grows and attaches its all seeing eyes onto us all. Whether we are referring to domestic interactions, organizational or deliberate, this is not the main issue. Neo-liberalism has developed so much now, we are all part of the Netopticon. English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late Eighteenth Century designed the Panopticon. It allowed officers in institutions, particularly in prisons, to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates without them knowing whether or not they are being watched. In the end it was not built, but the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his publication Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,[10] in 1975 said that we are not only monitored in prisons, but in all hierarchical structures like the army, schools, hospitals and factories. This process has evolved through history to resemble Bentham’s Panopticon. The up-dated version of Panopticon, can now be thought of as the Netopticon – where individuals are complicit in feeding their own forms of collective co-surveillance, as well as being traced by corporations, governments and spammers.

“What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.” [11] (Critical Art Ensemble)

So far, for the project he has created a functioning, sketch database of the UK system with over 10,000 entries – made over 50 maps of sub-sections of the system to aid sense of place and potential for social mobility. Bunting says he is also researching how to convert his identity generating software into a bot recognised under UK law as a person “covered by the human rights act i.e. right to life and liberty; freedom of expression; peaceful enjoyment of property. I am very close to achieving this.”

This bring us to another part of the project what I call ‘Identity Kits’, and Bunting calls ‘Synthetic off-the-shelf (OTS) British natural person’.[12] These kits consist of various items, personal business cards, library cards, a national railcard, t-mobile top-up card, national lottery card and much more. They take a few months to compile each of them because they are actual items that everybody uses in their everyday lives, involving evidence of identity. There is also a charge for the package of 500.00 GBP, which is cheap for a new identity.

Bunting stresses that these UK identities are lawful and that there is no need for any official consulting or permission from an authority to use or make them. Through this he intends to illustrate a precise codification of class in the UK system. Currently, he defines three classes of identitiy: human being, person and corporate. What class of individual you are places you into categories of evaluation, this process allows others to judge your status, worth and value, within a hierarchy, which is clearly represented in the status maps.

This work touches on issues around our everyday status as a critique, but also as an investigative hack, and plays around with the quagmire of inequality currently in the UK. Inequality is built, constructed into the fabric our societies as an accepted default, through tradition, social or mechanistic, holding in place societal divisions. If there was a status project made in other countries reflecting their own status, worth and value of citizens there would be clear links defining where the connections and divisions lie, between each culture. In fact, another project worth mentioning here is ‘The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better’. [13] The authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have done their own ‘extensive’, detailed research in highlighting through many different graphs, mapping out inequality around ther globe.

“We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why.” [14] (Hanley)

Bunting’s work expresses a discipline conscious of agency, autonomy and enactments for self and collective empowerment. Hacking different routes around what at first is seen as too big to deal with, lessens its power and awe. Like Burbank in the ‘The Truman Show’, what we have been told is not real. Bunting knows this instinctively, and is on a quest to upturn each stone to see what lies beneath. But at the same time these facilities created to crack the social, and data orientated codes, are shared. He then leaves the paths he has discovered wide open for others pass through, as we all struggle to survive the ever creeping strangle-hold, of the Netopticon.

———————————————————————-

This article was written for and will be published as part of Heath Bunting’s presentation in Athens ‘Workshop How to Build a New Legal Identity’, May 5th 2012.

During the workshop, Heath Bunting will introduce us to techniques and strategies on how to form new identities. The distribution of the workshop How to Build a New Legal Identity across Europe aims at exploring the characteristics of identity in each country.

Artist’s Talk: May 4, 2012 @ 19.00

Workshop How to Build a New Legal Identity: May 5, 2012 @ 12.00

Frown Tails, 6 Paramythias str, Keramikos, Athens
Organised by: Katerina Gkoutziouli and Frown Tails

http://www.frowntails.com/heathbunting.html

Is Seeing Believing? Taina Bucher interviews curator Gaia Tedone.

Taina Bucher interviews curator Gaia Tedone about her latest online curatorial project called ‘Is Seeing Believing?’ as part of the TRUTH programme at or-bits.com, an online platform for the display of contemporary arts and production of new works. Born in Italy, in 1982 Gaia Tedone holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, and has for the past year been one of the curatorial fellows at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. She has been involved in a number of art projects and worked with institutions such as Whitechapel Gallery, James Taylor Gallery, The David Roberts Art Foundation and Tate Modern.

Taina Bucher: Tell me a bit about your background for doing curatorial work. How did it get started and what are some of the thematic interests that have been important to your work?

Gaia Tedone: I started doing curatorial projects in London, where I was living and working for the past five years. The time spent at Goldsmiths was extremely formative from a practical and intellectual point of view. I was involved in a number of projects – some of them in collaboration with institutions in London, such as the series of talks Curating Fictions organised at Whitechapel Gallery, others were developed within the academic context, as for instance IM magazine and the publication A Fine Red Line (A Curatorial Miscellany) which I edited with fellow curators Isobel Harbison, Ilaria Gianni, Nazli Gürlek, Rosa Lleo and Yannis Arvanitis. The latter experience led us to establish the curatorial collective IM projects – a platform for editorial projects for which I contributed for the following two years.  

The MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths and the Whitney Independent Study Program have both helped me to locate my interest in the history of art production within today’s global context and to look at the ways in which specific economic and political contexts shape the production and circulation of art. These two complementary programmes of study informed my research interests, which are located at the intersection between the fields of new media and cultural studies.

This year, within the context of the Whitney Program, I was exposed to a number of seminal authors and texts that since the 70s have contributed to the development of the field of cultural studies, and I was deeply inspired by the recent work of David Harvey and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe.  This intense year of research has informed the conception and realization of the exhibition Foreclosed. Between Crisis and Possibility that I co-curated with ISP fellows Jennifer Burris, Sofía Olascoaga, and Sadia Shirazi at The Kitchen in New York.

The exhibition, which included works by Kamal Aljafari, Yto Barrada, Tania Bruguera, Claude Closky, Harun Farocki, Allan Sekula and David Shrigley, took the current housing crisis in the U.S. as the departing point to explore other meanings of the word foreclosure, which also evokes processes of exclusion and a shutting down of recognition.

Yto Barrada, still from The Smuggler Tangier, 2006. Video, color, silent; 11 min. Courtesy Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut, and Galerie Polaris, Paris.
Yto Barrada, still from The Smuggler Tangier, 2006. Video, color, silent; 11 min. Courtesy Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut, and Galerie Polaris, Paris.
Photograph of public program City as Stage, in conjunction with the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, The Kitchen, NYC, 11 June 2011 | © Maria Rapicavoli.
Photograph of public program City as Stage, in conjunction with the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, The Kitchen, NYC, 11 June 2011 | © Maria Rapicavoli.

Taina Bucher: How did you get into doing online curatorial work?

Gaia Tedone: I was invited few months ago by Marialaura Ghidini to collaborate with her and Christine Takengny on the autumn issue of or-bits.com. Marialaura had some preliminary thoughts on how she wanted to develop the programme, and after few Skype meetings we established a common ground upon which we built three parallels projects. The programme curated by Marialaura was launched in early October with works by Angus Braithwaite/David Raymond Conroy/Adelita Husni-Bey/Iocose/ M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia)/Richard Sides and my response followed shortly after that. Is Seeing Believing? is my first curatorial work online.

Taina Bucher: How do you feel about exhibiting art online, what are the challenges and benefits? In what ways does the conceptual work with developing a project online differ from curating exhibitions in a more offline institutionalized setting?

Gaia Tedone: or-bits.com provided me with technical support in terms of coding and web-design, while I was left totally free to develop my own curatorial strategy. My original idea was to build up a True or False web-based questionnaire, mainly text-based. However, the project developed in a slightly different direction and I was happy to adapt its format to the eclectic contributions I was receiving. Once I gathered all the content, I chose to mimic the format of an online newspaper, as this seemed the best visual strategy to actually play with the ideas being put forth while maintaining an inner coherence for each artist’s contribution.

I found the context of the web extremely challenging from a curatorial perspective, as it required the ability to work simultaneously on different elements, from the editing of content to the formalization of a coherent visual output, employing an approach both flexible and rigorous. It felt like a condensed version of a ‘traditional’ show, yet faster in pace and with a different degree of curatorial control. It came together fairly organically. The Web I think poses a number of important questions, especially in relation to the short attention span we generally dedicate to what we read or look at when surfing the net. Would the type of art being produced have to play or interject whit this? How would it change the public’s experience or engagement? These are all open questions for me.

Taina Bucher: What is the idea behind your current exhibition on or-bits?

Gaia Tedone: The theme TRUTH developed out of several conversations inspired from Žižek’s text Good Manners in the age of Wikileaks and a shared interest in somehow questioning the democratic claim of the web as a space of freedom, in light of the recent developments of Wikileaks and of the role that social media played during the Arab Spring. In a world in which everyone can be the author of his/her own news, how do we assess what is true or false? And how is this shifting power’s relationships and individual agency?

Within this larger framework, the project Is Seeing Believing? specifically focuses on the relationship between image and belief and develops from the engagement with two particular images: first, the image of Caravaggio’s iconic painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-1603), depicting Apostle Saint Thomas’ unwillingness to believe without direct, physical and personal evidence in Jesus Christ’s Resurrection. Second, the image published in the news showing President Obama, Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, watching Bin Laden’s death live.

The latter image, which quickly became one of the most publicly viewed in occasion of Bin Laden’s death, claims to present a less crude version of the story, but in fact it does not. On the contrary, it carries the absence of the image we are actually looking for – the one of Osama Bin Laden’s death body – affecting the viewer on multiple levels. On the one hand, by making the relationship between political power and media control even more visible; on the other, by acknowledging the necessity to see an image in order to believe in a fact. Then again, to what extent does it really matter if what we are looking at is the actual event or other people witnessing it? Has seeing become believing? These are some of the questions and preoccupations that have animated the conception and realization of this online project.

Taina Bucher: ‘Is Seeing Believing?’ is an exhibition displayed in the format of a newspaper. Who are the contributing artists?

Gaia Tedone: I began by approaching a number of artists, designers and activists whose work I admire and who, in my opinion, share a highly critical approach towards the production and reception of images and often employ a strategic use of the media in their practices. Some of the contributors, like for instance Jon Rafman, Nate Harrison, Alterazioni Video, The International Errorist and Foundand, have used the web extensively as the source and context of their works, others as for instance Azin Feizabadi and Oliver Ressler & Martin Krenn brought to the project their experiences of artists working within specific public spaces. A couple of interventions, such as the ones of MDR, Sadia Shirazi and Alessandro Sambini were specially conceptualised and produced for or-bits.com.

The idea of assembling them within the format of an online newspaper came at a later point, once all the material was gathered. It also pays homage to The New York Times Special Edition produced by The Yes Men and Steve Lambert and distributed for free in the streets of New York City in 2008. The paper announced the end of the Iraq’s war and changes in the US government’s policies on global warming, embracing for one day the philosophy of ‘All the News We Hope to Print’, at the beginning of President Obama’s administration.

The choice to play out specifically with Al Jazeera’s website was driven by the visual intelligibility of its design and by the desire to locate the project’s investigation within the context of this year political events and the role that social media played within the Arab Spring. As Sadia Shirazi interestingly points out in her contribution about Wikileaks as a socially engaged practice, if information is the terrain of war, what better context than a newspaper to put forth such urgent questions?

Taina Bucher: It is interesting that you say your or-bits contribution seeks to challenge the debate on image and truth by embracing the visual volatility of the web. Yet your newspaper is surprisingly static to be a webpage. Was this a conscious choice?

Gaia Tedone: This is a pointed observation. The webpage attempts to create a visual cohesiveness to the project, but it also asks the viewer to be actively engaged with the navigation.

I would see it as an attempt to fix in time the volatility of the web, maintaining in its content the associative and eclectic character of a browsing session, yet proposing a specific vantage point. In a sense it is like an exhibition, in which the works are in dialogue with each other, but have their own space and are framed by the specificity of the context.

Taina Bucher: Your project seems to suggest that we have no choice but to believe the image. Why is that? Haven’t we by now learned to be critical of the image, of its truthfulness and representability? Just think of Judith Butler’s book Frames of War where she addresses the dramaturgy of the Abu Ghraib photos. Susan Sontag already argued in 1977 that visual representation had become a cliché, that we are constantly bombarded with sensationalist images that numb our sense of believing. In what ways do you think, then, that the explosion of images online has somehow led to a diminished capacity to be critical?

Gaia Tedone: What interests me is the relationship between the access to images and the mechanisms of power that regulate this access and how this relationship is becoming more sophisticated and problematic within the context of the web and the role that social media play in the diffusion of images and information.

I think that a critical approach towards the reception of images is a condition that needs to shift and constantly adapt itself to the development of the image’s status itself. It cannot be separated from the historical and technological context in which images are produced and cannot be considered resolved as such, as the social and political configuration of the world is shifting also through the news and the images accompanying them.

Through the question Is Seeing Believing? I wanted to direct attention to the individual agency and the possibility for artists to filter, edit and rearrange the information and images they are exposed to, in this way challenging the notion of truth. To quote Siegfried Kracauer, who is also mentioned in the project, and his famous collection of essays ‘The Mass Ornament’ published in 1963: Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense. Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding.

These words still resonate powerfully with me, as they crucially point out to the ambiguous relationship between photography and information. Although there is a risk involved in believing in the image – risk that we must be aware of ­– what happens when the access to the image is negated to us? When this process of identification, compassion and repulsion that images often instigate is no longer accessible? Do we stop believing in reality or do we start to understand it?

President Obama’s decision not to diffuse the image of Osama Bin Laden’s body marks, in my opinion, a very important moment in the history of the images of the last decade.
It counterbalances with its absence 9/11, one of the most photographically reproduced events of this century – the day in which history and fiction met in the brutal instant of a photographic frame. I see this absent image as an occasion to stop, look back and critically reflect on what happened

The Secret War Between Uploading And Downloading

Peter Lunenfeld’s book “The Secret War Between Downloading & Uploading: Tales Of The Computer As Culture Machine” (MIT Press 2011) presents a new way of looking at the cultural struggle for control of the Internet. Although the conflict between uploading and downloading may not seem secret since the Napster case a decade ago, and is indeed a common feature of net political debate, Lunenfeld is using the concepts of downloading and uploading to discuss not the copyfight but how human beings relate to each other culturally and socially through technology.

Lunenfeld immediately establishes both technical and poetic meanings for each term. Downloading is fetching data from a central server, or an animal eating. Uploading is sending data to a server and to other devices. It is also animal excretion and nesting, and the human creation of “superfluous” material goods such as paintings and experiences such as philosophy. Downloading for Lunenfeld is consumption, and in its current state dominated by broadcast media it is overconsumption leading to “cultural diabetes” in which mass culture plays the role of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

This is vivid, but the very definition of uploading that Lunenfeld starts with (sending data to other devices) also involves downloading (…to other devices). The “slow food” movement that he contrasts with super-sized, HFCS-laden American diets is a product of broadcast culture like any other hipster franchise. And outside the US, HFCS has never replaced sugar and state and independent television has provided an alternative to the HFCS of the brain that he describes network television as. If I am critical of this, and a (very) few of Lunenfeld’s other arguments, it is only because of the clarity with which the rest of them are presented and with which they are all developed. This is a serious, ambitious and forward-looking book about human use of networked computing machinery in an age when cybercultural lullabies and recanting cyberprophets have turned the field into an inward- and backward-looking one. It deserves serious critique.

As the subtitle of the book, “Tales Of The Computer As Culture Machine”, claims the computer, and particularly the networked computer, is indeed a culture machine. Computing machinery can imitate any other machine, and so any mechanically reproducible media (that is to say, all mass media) can be created, distributed and reproduced by computers. That the wide availability of computers and network access changes the balance of power in the media is a common claim, and one that it is easy to view cynically in the face of an Internet of lolcats and conspiracy theory blogs. But Lunenfeld takes us beyond this.

Lunenfeld builds up concepts and weaves them together into a coherent and thought-provoking worldview. Affordances, mindfulness, information triage, sticky vs. teflon objects, tweaking, toggling, continual partial production, unfinish, WYMIWYM, MaSAI. Some of these are standard in cyberculture and its critiques. Others are Lunenfeld’s own coinage. They build up to form a new vocabulary and a conceptual framework for new critical take on network culture. And, crucially, new possibilities for action on the basis of that critique. Like all the best Theory, Lunenfeld’s concepts identify something important in the real world and afford new ways of thinking about it and acting on it.

Having exhorted us to download mindfully through info-triage and to upload meaningfully, to make unimodernist media sticky and unfinished and to move beyond the revolutionary rhetoric of Web 2.0 to an evolutionary Web n.0, Lunenfeld describes a world of bespoke futures (“Creatively misusing scenario planning as a means toward crafting visions of the future”) and plutopian meliorism (the pluralistic pursuit of happiness within an open society).

The ultimate destination that emerges in the final pages of this new take on network culture is surprisingly high stakes. It is nothing less than an appeal to use the means of the aesthetics of the culture machine to pursue the ends of plutopian meliorism in the face of the closures of would-be theocrats and other totalitarians. That is, to use the net to reaffirm the enlightenment in all its ambition and seriousness leavened with and strengthened by the pluralism of postmodernism’s critique of modernity.

Is the framework that Lunenfeld has built up in the course of the book up to this task? Can it be used to address left and right-wing criticism from within and without mainstream Western society that Western culture is just, well, entertainment? Lunenfeld’s achievement is to build his framework from many small measures that can easily be applied practically and evaluated against vivid concepts. By the end of the book you can see how to act on this and to evaluate whether your actions succeed. And the effects of those actions, although not revolutionary (and Lunenfeld rightly points out that the rhetoric of revolution has been appropriated by theocratic and corporate reaction), will be in the direction of considered lives in a society that is more than simply entertainment as a result.

Lunenfeld finishes the main argument of the book by proclaiming that he will write utilities rather than manifestos. But he has written a fine example of both here: a call to action with a conceptual and practical toolkit to support it. With cyberculture at its most nostalgic and despondent at precisely the moment where network culture is showing its potential for both progressive and reactionary political change, the modesty of Lunenfeld’s means and the ambition of his ends are a much needed and easily embraced positive step forwards.

Link to Publication:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12452

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Pac-Man

The legend says it was when the Japanese game developer Toru Iwatani took a slice of his pizza that the yellow game character Pac-Man appeared before him. In Pac-Man, we find a restless character hunting around in life’s mazes constantly seeking for pills to satisfy his insatiable desire. Meanwhile the ghosts of anxiety are tracking him down. What many players don’t realize are that the game also contains an unanswered philosophical-existential question. Where is actually Pac-Man for the short period of time when he escapes into the left or right end of the maze and after a short time pop up on the other side of the maze?

Pac Man

In Martina Kellner’s work “Pac-Man Time Out”, which was showed at the exhibition A MAZE in Berlin 2009, Kellner had created short video clips that investigated what Pac-Man actually did in the short time he was away from the monitor. In one clip, we find him at the airport queue with Ms. Pac-Man ready to board. Perhaps they are planning to take a holiday away from the busy videogame environment? One thing is for sure, Pac-Man does no appear in contemporary art as much as his colleagues from other classic games as Space Invader, Pong and Super Mario.

Street Pac Man

Like many 8-bit characters Pac-Man is well represented in street art and design. For example the American street artist Katie Sokoler staged a real Pac-Man game in her quarters. But it is quite unusual with installations, machinima or Art Games in which Pac-Man has the lead role. This is a bit odd considering how famous Pac-Man is among the general public. The French artist François Escuillie has even created a paleontological reconstruction of Pac-Man’s skull and the Swedish artist Johan Lofgren has in his new colour series “Confessions of a Color-Eater” taken with the colour “Ms. Pac -Man-yellow “, but despite this there are few interactive artworks based on Pac-Man.

Pac-Mondrian

Two exceptions are in any case worth highlighting: the “Pac-Mondrian” and “Eggregore”. “Pac-Mondrian” was created in its first version in 2002 by the Canadian artist group, Price Budgets Boys and is described as a mix of Piet Mondrian, Pac-Man and Boggie Woggie music. The board consists of Piet Mondrian’s painting “Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1942-43), which in its turn is inspired by Manhattan’s street grid and boogie woogie music. The videogame works with the same principle as a normal Pac-Man game except that the maze is a painting by Piet Mondrian. Price Budget Boys have also created three sequels: “Detroit Techno” (2005), “Tokyo Techno” (2006) and “Toronto Techno” (2006). The labyrinths in the new versions are created by stylized street grid from each city, executed in the style of Piet Mondrian. And in the name of equality, you play as Ms.Pac-Man in these versions. For those who have followed previous articles in this series, will recognize that there is a similarity between “Pac-Mondrian” and the Danish artist Andre Vistis works “PONGdrian v1.0”, in which Vistis combined the videogame PONG with Mondrian’s paintings.

social video game in which eight players, each with its own control will try to collaborate and steer Pac-Man through the maze

Antonin Fourneau & Manuel Braun’s work “Eggregore” is a social video game in which eight players, each with its own control will try to collaborate and steer Pac-Man through the maze. It may sound like an old teamwork workshop with a twist. Eight wills and strategies must collaborate to succeed with the mission. “Eggregore” is a Greek word which is associated with occultism and means a collective mind. The question that Fourneau and Braun is asking is: Can multiple individual game strategies together create a stronger and better collective player or will it just be chaos when the different games strategies are pulling in different directions? In the video game world, there are many examples of online worlds like World of Warcraft, where player successfully work together in clans or guilds in order to achieve higher goals in the game. It has even become an asset in your CV to show that you have played World of Warcraft and that you can lead and work together with other players to achieve different goals. Pac-Man, however, seems to be a rather greedy individualist who only thinks of himself in the video game world. And perhaps it is this self-absorption with himself taht prevents the game from breaking through as a major theme in contemporary Game Art?

Links:

Pac-Mondrian:

http://www.pbfb.ca/pac-mondrian/

Eggregore:

http://liftconference.com/eggregor8

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Pong. Part 1 by Mathias Jansson.

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Tetris. Part 2 by Mathias Jansson.

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Space Invaders. Part 3 by Mathias Jansson

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Pong

Classic video games such as Pong, Tetris, Space Invaders, Pac Man and Super Mario have in the past decade inspired many artists in their work. The common link between all of these games is that they are very easy to learn and play. There is no need for manuals, just a few simple instructions on the screen. The graphics are simple, the colours few, the characters and style are pixelated. These games have influenced a whole generation and have over time become a part of our cultural heritage. Even today, these games still amuse and fascinate players and have also inspired various artists to use them in their art. In a series of articles, we will look at some classic games and give examples of how they have been used in art and what impact they have made on the art scene. First out is PONG.

It was the American physicist William Higinbotham who in 1958 created what many consider to be the first computer game. The game was called “Tennis for Two” and was played on an oscilloscope with help of a simple analogue control.

Tennis for Two computer game by William Higinbotham 1958. The oscilloscope is in the middle with the two controllers facing it. Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory, New-Upton, York, USA.
Tennis for Two computer game by William Higinbotham 1958. The oscilloscope is in the middle with the two controllers facing it. Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory, New-Upton, York, USA.
Pong - Youtube video

Click here to view video on Youtube…

It took, however, until 1972, when the Atari Company, founded by Allan Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell, picked up the idea and created a commercial version and called it PONG, before the game became one of the first real big sellers for the computer games industry. PONG is a simple, minimalistic game that consists of two rectangles and a square, which symbolize two tennis racquets and a ball. You can either play against another opponent or against the computer. In this simplified version of tennis, the goal is to hit the ball so the opponent misses it.

the Atari company picked up the idea and created a commercial version and called it PONG

PONG is probably the videogame that has inspired most artists over the past decade. When the Computer Games Museum in Berlin in 2007 organized a major exhibition entitled “pong.mythos” over 30 artists attended with works of art inspired by PONG. The catalogue explains why PONG fascinated so many artists: “No other video game has been the origin of artistic production quite as often as the simple black-and-white tennis game. In addition to its popularity, it seems to be this minimalism that especially appeals to artists, since the playing pattern is a virtual prototype of the essence of each and every communication situation: the ball as the smallest possible unit of information, oscillating between sender and receiver” (from the catalogue “pong.mythos” 2006).

The artist group /////////fur//// showed their “Pain Station” (2001) in which the player who missed the ball were punished with physical pain, a blow on the hand, heat or an electric shock. “Pain Station” connects the physical world with the virtual and the virtual player’s mistakes turn actual real pain.

Painstation by /////////fur//// at pong.mythos in the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt/Main from November 16, 2006 - January 21, 2007
Painstation by /////////fur//// at pong.mythos in the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt/Main from November 16, 2006 – January 21, 2007

The artist group Blinkenlights working in the urban environment was represented with a project that transformed a large office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz to a digital screen where passersby could play PONG on the facade with the help of their mobile phones. In the artists S. Hanig and G. Savicic’s work “BioPong” (2005) the ball was replaced with a living cockroach where the players would try to push the insect over to the other side. And in the group Time’s Up version “Sonic Body Pong” (2006) the ball in the game was only a sound which the players could hear in their headphones and with help of large green rectangles on their heads they would try to hit the sound from the ball.

S. Hanig and G. Savicic's work "BioPong" (2005)
S. Hanig and G. Savicic’s work “BioPong” (2005)

There are also many other examples that were not included in the exhibition “pong.mythos”. As early as 1999, the artist Natalie Bookchin made “The Intruder”, a work where PONG was one of 10 different videogames that she used to create an interactive artwork by Jorge Louis Borges short story “The Intruder”. The Danish artist Anders Visti mixed the game PONG with the art of Piet Mondrian in “PONGdrian v1.0” from 2007. The playing field in Vistis artwork reminiscent a painting by Mondrian but when the ball hits the fields it disturbs the lines and colour fields, and creating new opportunities and challenges for the player. Finally, I can mention the Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, who has made a series of performances called “Game Over”. In a theatre auditorium, he creates animated sequences by using real people in colourful T-shirts, where each individual represents a square on a screen. By moving the people in the auditorium, he can create short video sequences, for example of PONG playing in the lounge.

PONGdrian v1.0. Anders Visti from 2007
PONGdrian v1.0. Anders Visti from 2007
PONGdrian v1.0. Anders Visti from 2007
PONGdrian v1.0. Anders Visti from 2007

The reason that PONG is so popular among artists is that it is one of the very first video games, and therefore there is a large identification factor and a strong relationships between the game, the player and the artwork. PONG is also one of the easiest games in terms of both appearance and to learn to play, which paradoxically makes it so easy to transform and use in different contexts. The phrase “less is more” seems in this case a good explanation why PONG has inspired so many artists in recent years.

Links:

Pong Mythos – http://pong-mythos.net/index.php?lg=en
Natahalie Bookchin – The Intruder http://bookchin.net/intruder/
Guillaume Reymond – Game Over http://www.notsonoisy.com/gameover/
Anders Visti – PONGdrian v1.0 http://www.andersvisti.com/arkiv_grafik/pongdrian.html

All Raise This Barn by MTAA

All Raise This Barn – a group-assembled public building and/or sculpture.

“Artists MTAA are conducting an old-fashioned barn-raising using high-tech techniques. The general public group-decides design, architectural, structural and aesthetic choices using a commercially-available barn-making kit as the starting point.” -MTAA

Eric Dymond: Could you give me a brief history of MTAA?

T.Whid: Mike Sarff (M.River of MTAA) and I met in college at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, OH. We both separately moved to NYC in 1992 and started collaborating as MTAA in 1996 first on paintings and then moving on to public happenings and web/net art. We’ve been collaborating since, showing our work via our websites at mteww.com and mtaa.net. We’ve earned grants and commissions from Creative Capital, Rhizome.org and SFMOMA and shown at the New Museum, 01SJ Biennial, the Whitney Museum and Postmasters Gallery.

ED: The All Raise This Barn project uses one community to design and another to construct. Barn raising is itself a communal activity, drawing out the best in people and providing a place of sustenance for the Barn owner. How did you come to use a Barn Raising as the central performance subject?

M.River: From the start, Tim and I have been interested in how groups and individuals communicate. How do we speak to each other? What rules do we use? How does communication fail or how can it be disrupted? What is the desire that engines (TW: controls?) all of this – and so on. This interest in exchange is what attracted us to the Internet as a site for art in the beginning.

Along with communication as text, speech or image, we like to use group-building as a method for working with non-verbal communication. We’ve built robot costumes, car models, aliens and snowmen with large and small groups. It’s a type of building that is intuitive and open to creative improvisation. This kind of intuitive building is heightened by placing a time constraint on the performance. In the end it’s not about the end object, which we always seem to like, but more about the group activity.

So, at some point we began to think how large can we do this? A barn-raising seemed like the next level. It’s bigger than human scale and contains a history of group-building. Barns also have a history of being social spaces. Your home is your world but the barn is your dance hall.

ED: Did you envision it as a community event from the beginning?

MR: Yes. An online community, a physical community and a community that overlaps the two.

ED: It’s a hybrid work that draws upon some important conceptual precedents. The instructional aspect takes Lewitt and turns the strict instructions he uses upside down by allowing online decisions to drive the design. Did you find the responses to the online polling surprising?

MR: Yes and no. Like the other vote works we have produced, Tim and I set up how the polls are worded and run. So, even though we try to keep the process as open as possible, the nature of how people interact is somewhat fenced in. Even with a fence, people will find a way to move in strange directions or break the fence. It’s not that we think of the surprising answers as the goal of the work, but it is an important part of the process.

ED: There is also the performance aspect which I find exciting. The performance from both events are well documented. Were there any concerns regarding the transfer of the polls instructions to physical space?

MR: We had the good fortune of doing the work in two sections. When Steve Dietz commissioned ARTBarn (West) for the 01SJ Out of the Garage exhibition, we spoke about the sculpture as a working prototype for how a large pile of lumber could be group-assembled in a day with direction from Internet polling. From this prototype we then had a model for how to go about ARTBarn (East) for EMPAC.

All Raise This Barn (West). Sept 11, 2010 - San Jose, CA.
All Raise This Barn (West). Sept 11, 2010 – San Jose, CA.
All Raise This Barn (East). Oct 1, 2010 - Troy, NY.
All Raise This Barn (East). Oct 1, 2010 – Troy, NY.

Tim and I had a few loose ground rules on how to approach the translation. One was that we would leave some things open to the interpretation of the crew. Another was that both Tim and I had our favorite poll questions that we tended to focus on. It was impossible to do everything as some polls conflicted with other but some details liked ghosts, dripped paint and open walls seemed to call out to us.

Kathleen Forde, who commissioned ARTBarn (East) for EMPAC, spoke about these details as where the work became more than the sculpture. The small details held the whole process – material, design polls, and performance together.

ED: I think this comment on the details is right. On first glance there is a fun, open appeal to the work. But when you look at the overall project and how the different phases are tied together it becomes really complicated in the mind of the spectator. There are also different definitions of spectator in this work. The spectator who answers the poll, the spectator on the net who is grazing through the documentation, the ones who engage in the physical construction and those who witness the completed barn. It’s not a simple piece when we perform a detailed overview. Did you think about the various types of spectator that would spin off the project? Were the possible roles for the spectator considered after the fact or were they part of the planned concept?

MR: The “ideal spectator” thought first came up for us in a project called Endnode (aka Printer Tree) in 2002. For this work, we built a large plywood Franken-tree with a set of printers in the branches and a computer in the trunk. We then built a list-serve for the tree as well as subscribed it to a few list-serves. When people communicated with the tree, the text was printed out in the exhibition space. At first we talked about the ideal viewer as one who communicated with it online and then saw that communication in the physical space or vice versa.

Detail, filling the paper of Endnode (aka Printer Tree). November 23, 2002. Eyebeam Atelier.
Detail, filling the paper of Endnode (aka Printer Tree). November 23, 2002. Eyebeam Atelier.
Front view of Endnode (aka Printer Tree). November 23, 2002 during the Beta Launch exhibition. Eyebeam Atelier.
Front view of Endnode (aka Printer Tree). November 23, 2002 during the Beta Launch exhibition. Eyebeam Atelier.

Now I feel that the ideal spectator hierarchy is not as important and possibly limiting. Each experience should be whole as well as point to the larger aspects of the work. People can come in and out of the work on different levels. You voted. You followed the performance documentation. Are you missing an experience if you did not build with us or see the results? Yes, an activity is missed. Can you experience that activity thorough documentation. Somewhat. Are you going to have a better understanding of the work. Probably not. Even for me, some aspect of the work will not be experienced. In Troy, they are programing it as a meeting place now that is it is built.. When they are done with it, they will dismantle it and rebuild it elsewhere as a work space.

I say all this even though it is interesting to me that a work can move in and out of levels of viewer experience. I’m not sure as to the draw of it yet but I do not feel it is about an cumulative effect.

TW: Since Endnode I’ve always liked the idea of an art work that exists in multiple (but overlapping) spaces with multiple (but overlapping) audiences. With our pieces Endnode, ARTBarn and Automatic For The People: () there are 3 distinct (but overlapping) audiences: the online audience, the audience in the physical space and the (select few member) audience that experiences the entire thing.

Poster for, Automatic for the People: ( ), conducted from November 8, 2008 to February 7, 2009
Poster for, Automatic for the People: ( ), conducted from November 8, 2008 to February 7, 2009

ED: It’s that opening of possibilities that makes this ultimately a networked piece on many different levels. I find the idea of two barns, a few thousand miles apart yet linked by common purpose really intriguing. I’m talking about the whole set of experiences, not just the physical space of the barn. There’s a collapse of Geographic distance for the community and a richer experience because of that. Was the project conceived as two distinct locations or was that a fortunate turn of events?

MR: Fortune. Kathleen Forde, commissioned ARTBarn (East) for EMPAC then Steve Dietz commissioned the beta version for the 01SJ “Out of the Garage ” exhibition. Everyone liked the idea of the work arching across time and location. We all also liked the idea that the materials would be reclaimed after it stopped being a sculpture. For me, the reclaimation of the materials to use for a functional structure is the final step of the work.

ED: As the final step, the reclamation removes the common space where the community currently shares the sculpture. Does this mean you are going to use the online documentation as the artifact, coming full circle to where the piece began? Is it important to you that the communal memory will share this role?

TW: Yes, the documentation is the artifact. The barn structure or sculpture itself had been conceived as being physically temporary from the beginning.

ED: Thanks to both of you for your time and for this work.

Interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom, Part 2

In 2002, when Monochrom was invited to act as the representative of Austria at the Sao Paulo Biennial, instead of going as yourselves, you sent Georg Paul Thomann, one of the country’s most prominent avant guard artists, and also a complete fabrication.

Yes, we were asked to represent the Republic of Austria at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2002. However, the political climate in Austria (at that time, the center-right People’s Party had recently formed a coalition with Jorg Haider’s radical-right Austrian Freedom Party) gave us concerns about acting as wholehearted representatives of our bloody nation. We dealt with the conundrum by creating the persona of Georg P. Thomann, an irascible, controversial (and completely fictitious) artist of longstanding fame and renown. Through the implementation of this ironic mechanism – even the catalogue included the biography of the non-existent artist – we tried to solve with pure fiction the philosophical and bureaucratic dilemma attached to the system of representation.

It gave me something of a hearty guffaw to hear about how you and your fellows, manning the Austria country booth as the artist’s technical support staff – the lowliest of low in the art world hierarchy – went about revealing the fictitious nature of the artist.

Yes, we turned the tables. When members of the administration, journalists, or curators asked about the whereabouts of Thomann, our irritated answer was that he hadn’t cared to show up so far, and that he hadn’t helped with anything, because he was supposedly watching porn in his hotel room all day, while we – the members of his technical crew – didn’t care about that bullshit at all. But we informed other technical support teams about the basic idea of the project. They were also given detailed information about Thomann’s non-existence but we did not give them any hierarchic directives about what to do with their knowledge but left it up to them if they wanted to reveal the fake or keep spinning the story. Most people enjoyed doing the latter and they also kept telling different versions of the heard information until finally a bubbling geyser kept erupting in various ways and constantly led to new outbreaks of tittle-tattle.

Georg P Thomann exhibit, Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil 2002.
Georg P Thomann exhibit, Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil 2002.

What happened next, as I heard you describe it, was that “bubbles and bubbles of rumors” began to form around the expansive floor of the biennial. I found this moment in the arc of the project to be particularly interesting and was hoping you could perhaps share some of your thoughts and recollections.

Let’s give you a brief summary of the background. The basic principles of an art-super-structure like a Biennial is simple: lots of little white boxes in which art was set up – and little artists, spreading business cards like prayers. There is a nice German term: “die Warenformigkeit des Kunstlers” (“the commodity value of the artist”). We hardly had any contact with other artists… and that was bad. They came from more than 80 different countries, but they were hiding in their white boxes. Everyone was busy building his or her own little world. Then, during the final setup phase we found out about an incident, which took place in our neighborhood through a copied note.

One year before the Biennial, Chien-Chi Chang had been invited to be the official representative of Taiwan at the Biennial. But then, three days before the opening, his caption – adhesive letters – had been removed from his cube virtually over night. ‘Taiwan’ was replaced with ‘Museum of Fine Arts Taipeh.’ But to Chien-Chi Chang the status as an official representative of Taiwan was very important, because his photography artwork dealt directly with the inhumane psychiatric system in Taiwan.

Georg P Thomann exhibit, Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil 2002.
Georg P Thomann exhibit, Sao Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil 2002.

Chien-Chi was trying to get in contact with the Biennial administration and the chief curator (the German Alfons Hug), but didn’t succeed. Communication was refused. After that he decided to write an open letter, but the creative inhabitants of all the little white art-combs didn’t seem too interested in the artist’s chagrin, who by now wanted to leave the Biennial out of protest.

We were interested in the situation and did some research. We found out that the Chinese delegation had threatened to withdraw their contribution and to cause massive diplomatic problems. To them, Taiwan was clearly not an independent country (c/f ‘One China Policy’) and they put pressure on the Biennial management to get that message out. The management did not make this international scandal public and it was quite obvious why.

monochrom decided to show solidarity with Chien-Chi. We wanted to set an example and show that artists do not necessarily have to internalize the fragmentation and isolation that is being imposed upon them by the structure of the art market, the exhibition business, as well as the economy containing them. For us, though, this is not about taking a stand for either the westernized-economical imperialism represented by Taiwan or for China’s old-school Stalinist imperialism. This is about integrity and solidarity, values that we chose to express through a collaborative act. Together with other artists from various countries we launched a solidarity campaign: we took off some adhesive letters of each collaborating country’s signature and donated them to Chien-Chi Chang. monochrom sponsored the ‘t’ of Austria, while the Canadians donated one of their three as. The other participating artists were from Croatia, Singapore, Puerto Rico and Panama. A lot of artists and curators from other countries refused to support the campaign for fear of – as they would call it – “negative consequences.” WTF? But at least some of the artists were pulled out of their self-referential and insular national representation cubes which, in themselves, so rigorously symbolized the artists’ work and his or her persona as commodities.

the monochrom team
The monochrom team

After some time we managed to attach a trashy, yet legible ‘Taiwan’ to the outside wall of Chien-Chi Chan’s cube. Numerous journalists took notice of the campaign and Chien-Chi opened his exhibition in front of a cheering audience. Some days later, we found out that Chinese and Taiwanese newspapers massively covered the campaign. One Taiwanese paper used the headline “Austrian artist Georg Paul Thomann saves ‘Taiwan’.” In other words, a non-existing artist saved a country pressed into non-visibility. Who said that postmodernism can’t be radical?

What was it like – even from a kind of phenomenological sense – to be in the midst of this bubbling, to experience the formation of a scandal from its very embryonic moments? Is there something in the interiority of situations like this that you see as essential to the creation of new kinds of solidarity?

First we would have to define what “new kinds of solidarity” mean. What would be the ‘new’ part of it? Does it go beyond old and traditional forms of solidarity? And why should it? I think that classic forms of solidarity were carried out by political groups or other collective entities. They tried to express their (let’s label it as) “old-school solidarity” by pointing their collective fingers at someone who they thought were mistreated: “Look, look this human being is being oppressed!” And they always did it “in the name of something”. Old-school solidarity was one more frickin’ medium that people used to get a message across. Thus it was always part of the realm of representation. Your act of solidarity represents the one you show solidarity with, but your act is also advertisement for yourself, your cause and the (political) identity you wish to construct. Politics is always drama. Best example for this would be the “supporters of Palestine”. There are tons of ethnic groups on this rusty little planet who have to suffer under worse conditions. But nobody seems to be interested in showing solidarity with them. Where are Henning Mankell and Noam Chomsky when you really need them? Involved in some stupid fast-food anti-imperialism. We have to understand that the “object of solidarity” is something you pick for a reason… and most of the time it’s to feel good as a group and to impress your peers. But that has nothing to do with factual, non-reductionist political analysis. Collective entities define themselves through acts of representation and this representation is comparable to the construction of national pride or patriarchal family structures and values. Solidarity can be read as an act of defining identities. And that can be very dangerous, because old school solidarity always wants to be “right”. You are always “the good one” supporting the poor bastards. Smash dichotomies!

What we experienced at the Biennial of Sao Paulo back in the spring of 2002 was a very non-collective act. We were no real group, no leaflets, we had no common agenda, we were a psycho-geographic swarm. There was no basis for acting or speaking as a collective and there was no need to bundle our powers or form an identity. Yes, we tried to recruit other artists to join in our little act of solidarity. But it was no protest, we didn’t protest a certain political agenda because we didn’t want to end up in the old black and white world that, for example, all the apeshit Pro-Tibet supporters live in. Bah! Their ugly flags! Their patriarchal projections! Richard Gere! Yuck! So it was a kind of “free flowing solidarity”, not to be abused to form a political movement or statement. The only form of identity that was formed was the simple idea that even bourgeois artists can decide whether they want to be part of the Biennial and its stupid rules or whether they want to be part of action and fun.

To make it short: we are interested in micro-political solidarity, temporary solidarity that can’t fossilize. Solidarity is important if it can evolve and vanish within a short span of time and all that’s left is rumors and vague commemorations. Let’s call it a process of counteracting – that might be well-known in the field of the urban guerrilla but that so rarely pops up at art shows.

Read Part 1 of the Interview
http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1 

Read Part 3 of the Interview
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-3 

Publishing and the Digital Revolution

Co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange.

Vooks and cultural decadence

Last October I received an e-mail headed “Introducing Vook”:

The Vook Team is pleased to announce the launch of our first vooks, all published in partnership with Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. These four titles… elegantly realize Vook’s mission: to blend a book with videos into one complete, instructive and entertaining story.

The e-mail also included a link to an article about Vooks in the New York Times:

Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading…

article about Vooks in the New York Times

Note the rather loaded use of the words “lure”, “crave”, “fiddling” and “degrades”. The phraseology seems to suggest that modern readers are decadent and listless thrill-seekers who can scarcely summon the energy to glance at a line of text, let alone plough their way through an entire book. If an artistic medium doesn’t offer them some form of instant gratification – glamour, violence, excitement, pounding beats, lurid colours, instant melodrama – then it simply won’t get their attention. But publishers have a moral duty not to pander to their readers’ base appetites: the New York Times article ends by quoting a sceptical “traditional” author called Walter Mosley –

“Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow,” Mr. Mosley said. “And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we’re watching television or doing stuff on computers.”

In other words, reading from the printed page is better for your mental health than watching moving pictures on a screen: an argument which has been resurfacing in one form or another at least since television-watching started to dominate everyday life in the USA and Europe back in the 1950s. To some extent this is the self-defence of a book-loving and academically-inclined intelligensia against the indifference or hostility of popular culture – but in the context of a discussion of Vooks, it can also be interpreted as a cry of irritation from a publishing industry which is increasingly finding the ground being scooped from under its feet by younger, sexier, more attention-grabbing forms of entertainment.

The fact that the Vook publicity-email links to an article which is generally rather sniffy and unfavourable about the idea of combining video with print no doubt reflects a belief that all publicity is good publicity – but it is also indicative of the publishing industry’s mixed attitudes towards the digital revolution. On the whole, up until recently, they have tended to simply wish it would just go away; but they have also wished, sporadically, that they could grab themselves a piece of the action. But those publishers who have attempted to ride the digital surf rather than defy the tide have generally put their efforts and resources into re-packaging literature instead of re-thinking it: and the evidence of this is that the recent history of the publishing industry is littered with ebooks and e-readers, whereas attempts to exploit the digital environment by combining text with other media in new ways have generally been ignored by the publishing mainstream, and have therefore remained confined to the academic and experimental fringes.

Ebooks and e-readers

The publishing industry’s determination to make the digital revolution go away by ignoring it has been even more evident in the UK than in the US. The 1997 edition of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, for example, contains no references to ebooks or digital publishing whatsoever, although it does contain items about word-processing and dot-matrix printers. On the other hand, Wired magazine was already publishing an in-depth article about ebooks in 1998 (“Ex Libris” by Steve Silberman, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.07/es_ebooks.html) which describes the genesis of the SoftBook, the RocketBook and the EveryBook, as well as alluding to their predecessor, the Sony BookMan (launched in 1991). Even in the USA, however, enthusiasm for ebooks took a tremendous knock from the dot-com crash of 2000. Stephen Cole, writing about ebooks in the 2010 edition of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, summarises their history as follows:

Ebook devices first appeared as reading gadgets in science fiction novels and television series… But it was not until the late 1990s that dedicated ebook devices were marketed commercially in the USA… A stock market correction in 2000, combined with the generally poor adoption of downloadable books, sapped all available investment capital away from internet technology companies, leaving a wasteland of broken dreams in its wake. Over the next two years, over a billion dollars was written off the value of ebook companies, large and small.

After 2000, there was a widely-held view (which I shared) that the ebook experiment had been tried and failed: paper books were a superb piece of technology, and perhaps a digital replacement for them was simply never going to happen. There were numerous problems with ebooks: too many different and incompatible formats, too difficult to bookmark, screens hard to read in direct sunlight, couldn’t be taken into the bath, etc. But ebooks have always had a couple of big points in their favour – you can store hundreds on a computer, whereas the same books in paper form demand both physical space and shelving, you can find them quickly once you’ve got them, and they’re cheap to produce and deliver. Despite the dot-com crash and general indifference of the reading public, publishers continued to bring out electronic editions of books, and a small but growing number of people continued to download them.

Things really started to change with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle First Generation in 2007. It sold out in five and a half hours. With the Kindle, the e-reader went wireless. Instead of having to buy books on CDs or cartridges and slot them into hand-helds, or download them onto computers and then transfer them, readers using the Kindle could go right online using a dedicated network called the Whispernet, and get themselves content from the Kindle store.

Despite this big step forward, the Kindle was still an old-school e-reader in some respects: it had a black and white display, and very limited multimedia capabilities. The Apple iPad changed the rules again when it was launched in April 2010. The iPad isn’t just an e-reader – it’s “a tablet computer… particularly marketed for consumption of media such as books and periodicals, movies, music, and games, and for general web and e-mail access” (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-pad). Its display screen is in colour, and it can play MP3s and videos or browse the Web as well as displaying text. For another thing, it goes a long way towards scrapping the rule that each e-reader can only display books in its own proprietary format. The iPad has its own bookstore – iBooks – but it also runs a Kindle app, meaning that iPad owners can buy and display Kindle content if they wish.

It seems we may finally be reaching the point where ebooks are going to pose a genuine challenge to print-and-paper. Amazon have just announced that Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has become the first ebook to sell more than a million copies; and also that they are now selling more copies of ebooks than books in hardcover.

It is certainly also significant that the past couple of years have seen a sudden upsurge of interest in the question of who owns the rights over digitised book content, and whether ordinary copyright laws apply to online text – a debate which has been brought to the boil by a court case brought against Google in 2005 by the Authors Guild of America.

Google and digital book rights

Google Logo

In 2002, under the title of “The Google Books Library Project”, Google began to digitise the collections of a number of university libraries in the USA (with the libraries’ agreement). Google describes this project as being “like a card catalogue” – in other words, primarily displaying bibliographic information about books rather than their actual contents. “The Library Project’s aim is simple”, says Google: “make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically, books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print – while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights.” They do concede, however, that the project includes more than bibliographic information in some instances: “If the book is out of copyright, you’ll be able to view and download the entire book.” (http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html)

In 2004 Google launched Book Search, which is described as “a book marketing program”, but structured in a very similar way to the Library Project: displaying “basic bibliographic information about the book plus a few snippets”; or a “limited preview” if the copyright holder has given permission, or full texts for books which are out of copyright – in all cases with links to places online where the books can be bought. Interestingly, my own book Outcasts from Eden is viewable online in its entirety, although it is neither out of copyright nor out of print, which casts a certain amount of doubt on Google’s claim to be “carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights”.

In 2005 the Authors Guild of America, closely followed by the Association of American Publishers, took Google to court on the basis that books in copyright were being digitised – and short extracts shown – without the agreement of the rightsholders. Google suspended its digitisation programme but responded that displaying “snippets” of copyright text was “fair use” under American copyright law. In October 2008 Google agreed to pay $125 million to settle the lawsuit – $45.5 million in legal fees, $45 million to “rightsholders” whose rights had already been infringed, and “$34.5 million to create a Book Rights Registry, a form of copyright collective to collect revenues from Google and dispense them to the rightsholders. In exchange, the agreement released Google and its library partners from liability for its book digitization.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_Agreement). The settlement was queried by the Department of Justice, and a revised version was published in November 2009, which is still awaiting approval at the time of writing.

The settlement is a complex one, but its most important provision as regards the future of publishing seems to be that “Google is authorised to sell online access to books (but only to users in the USA). For example, it can sell subscriptions to its database of digitised books to institutions and can sell online access to individual books.” 63% of the revenue thus generated must be passed on to “rightsholders” via the new Registry. “The settlement does not allow Google or its licensees to print copies of books in copyright.” (“The Google Settlement” by Mark Le Fanu, The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2010, pp. 631-635).

Google, it will be noted, are now legally within their rights to continue their digitisation programme. This means they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission before they digitise work. If authors or publishers would prefer not to be listed by Google it is up to them to lodge an objection online. Google would argue that in launching their Library Project and Books Search they have merely been seeking to make their search facilities more complete, and thus to “make it easier for people to find relevant books” – but whether or not they have been deliberately plotting their course with wider strategic issues in mind, the end result has been to make them the biggest single player – almost the monopoly-holder – where digital book rights are concerned. As a reflection of this, an organisation called the Open Book Alliance has been set up to oppose the settlement, supported by the likes of Amazon and Yahoo: “In short,” their website claims, “Google’s book digitization strategy in the U.S. has focused on creating an impenetrable content monopoly that violates copyright laws and builds an unfair and legally insurmountable lead over competitors.” (http://www.openbookalliance.org/)

Signs of change

Whatever the pros and cons of the Google Settlement, it has undoubtedly helped to focus the minds of writers and publishers alike on the question of digital rights. Copyright laws and publishers’ contracts were designed to deal with print and paper, and until very recently there has been almost no reference at all to electronic publication. Writers who have agreed terms with a publisher for reproduction of their work in print have theoretically been at liberty to re-publish the same work on their own websites, or perhaps even to collect another fee for it from a digital publisher; and conversely, publishers who have signed a contract to bring out an author’s work in print have sometimes felt free to reproduce it electronically as well, without asking the writer’s permission or paying any extra money.

But things are beginning to change. A June 2010 article in The Bookseller notes that Andrew Wylie, one of the most prestigious of UK literary agents, “is threatening to bypass publishers and license his authors’ ebook rights directly to Google, Amazon or Apple because he is unhappy with publishers’ terms.” This is partly because he believes electronic rights are being sold too cheaply to the likes of Apple: “The music industry did itself in by taking its profitability and allocating it to device holders… Why should someone who makes a machine – the iPod, which is the contemporary equivalent of a jukebox – take all the profit?” Clearly, electronic rights are going to be taken much more seriously from now on.

Further indications that authors, publishers and agents are beginning to wake up and smell the digital coffee can be found in the latest editions of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook and The Writers’ Handbook. For those who are unfamiliar with them, these annual publications are the UK’s two main guides to the writing industry. The 2010 edition of The Writer’s Handbook opens with a keynote article from the editor, Barry Turner, entitled “And Then There was Google”. As the title indicates, its main subject is the Google settlement and its implications – but its broader theme is that the book trade has been ignoring the digital revolution for too long, and can afford to do so no longer:

In the States… sales of e-books are increasing by 50 per cent per year while conventional book sales are static. An indication of what is in store was provided at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair where a survey of book-buying professionals found that 40 per cent believe that digital sales, regardless of format, will surpass ink on paper within a decade.

Ebook

The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook is more conservative in tone, but if anything its coverage is more in-depth. It has an entire section titled “Writers and Artists Online”, which leads with an article about the Google settlement. In addition there are articles on “Marketing Yourself Online”, “E-publishing” and “Ebooks”. Even in the more general sections of the Yearbook there is a widespread awareness of how digital developments are affecting the book trade. For example, there is a review (by Tom Tivnan) of the previous twelve months in the publishing industry, which acknowledges the importance not just of ebooks but print-on-demand:

Amazon’s increasing power underscores how crucial the digital arena is for publishing… Ebooks remain a miniscule part of the market,… yet publishers and booksellers say they are pleasantly surprised at the amount of sales… And it is not all ebooks. The rise of print-on-demand (POD) technology (basically keeping digital files of books to be printed only when a customer orders it) means that the so-called “long tail” has lengthened, with books rarely going out of print… POD may soon be coming to your local bookshop. In April 2009, academic chain Blackwell had the UK launch of the snazzy in-store Espresso POD machine, which can print a book in about four minutes…

There is also an article about “Books Published from Blogs” (by Scott Pack):

Agents are proving quite proactive when it comes to bloggers. Some of the more savvy ones are identifying blogs with a buzz behind them and approaching the authors with the lure of a possible book deal… Many bestsellers in the years to come will have started out online.

Digital technology and writing style

Most of the emphasis in these articles falls on the impact which digital developments are having on the marketing of books rather than the practice of writing itself. But now and again there are signs of a creeping awareness that digitisation may actually change the ways in which our literature is created and consumed. In The Writer’s Handbook, Barry Turner attempts to predict how the digital environment may affect the practice of writing in the coming years:

Those of us who make any sort of livng from writing will have to get used to a whole new way of reaching out to readers. Start with the novel. Most fiction comes in king-sized packages… Publishers demand a product that looks value for money… But all will be different when we get into e-books. There will be no obvious advantage in stretching out a novel because size will not be immediately apparent… Expect the short story to make a comeback… The two categories of books in the forefront of change are reference and travel. Their survival… is tied to a combination of online and print. Any reference or travel book without a website is in trouble, maybe not now, but soon.

Scott Pack’s article on “Books Published from Blogs” tends to focus on those aspects of a blog which may need remoulding to suit publication in book form; but an article by Isabella Pereira entitled “Writing a blog” is more enthusiastic about the blog as a form in its own right:

The glory of blogging lies not just in its immediacy but in its lack of rules… The best bloggers can open a window into private worlds and passions, or provide a blast of fresh air in an era when corporate giants control most of our media… Use lots of links – links uniquely enrich writing for the web and readers expect them… What about pictures? You can get away without them but it would be a shame not to use photos to make the most of the web’s all-singing, all-dancing capacities.

Even here, however, the advice stops short of videos, sound-effects or animations. Another article in The Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook (“Setting up a Website”, by Jane Dorner) specifically forbids the use of animations:

Bullet points or graphic elements help pick out key words but animations should be avoided. Studies show that the message is lost when television images fail to reinforce spoken words. The same is true of the web.

It’s a little difficult to fathom exactly what point Dorner is trying to make here, but it seems to be something along the lines that using more than one medium may have a distracting rather than enhancing effect. If the spoken words on your television are telling you one thing, but the pictures are telling you another, then “the message is lost”. Perhaps a more interesting point, however, is where Dorner draws her dividing-line between acceptable and unacceptable practice. “Bullet points or graphic elements” are all right, because they “help pick out key words”, but “animations should be avoided”. In other words visual aids are all very well as long as they remain to subservient to text. They minute they threaten to replace it as the focus of attention, they become undesireable.

Clearly this point of view continues to enjoy a lot of support, particularly from traditionalists in the writing and publishing industries. All the same, combinations of text with other media may be about to enjoy some kind of vogue; and the development of the Vook brand since its launch last October is an instructive case-history in this regard.

Vooks again

When Vooks were first launched it seems fair to say that they were broadly greeted with a mixture of indifference and scorn. Reviews which appeared in the first couple of months after the launch were usually either lukewarm of downright unfavourable. Here, for example, is one from Janet Cloninger, writing in The Gadgeteer, November 2009:

So how were the video clips? Have you ever seen any of those old 60s TV shows where they were trying to show a bad acid trip? You know the crazy camera work, the weird color changes, the really bad acting?… I don’t think they added anything to the story at all… I found they were very distracting while trying to read.

Here is another from the Institute for the Future of the Book:

Vooks in The Gadgeteer, 2009

In terms of form the result is ho-hum in the extreme, particularly as there doesn’t seem to be much attempt to integrate the text and the banal video, which seems to exist simply to pretty-up the pages.

Following on from this generally unenthusiastic reception for the first Vooks, news about the brand over the next few months seemed to suggest that it was struggling to establish itself. In January 2010 Vook announced that they were publishing a range of “classic” titles, mostly for children – since “classic” normally means “out of copyright”, this seemed to imply that they were trying to boost their titles-list on the cheap. In February there was an announcement that Vook had raised an extra $2.5 million in “seed-financing” from a number of Silicon Valley and New York investors, suggesting that perhaps initial sales had been disappointing, Simon & Schuster had been reluctant to put up more money, and new sources of finance had therefore been sought.

With the launch of the iPad, however, it became obvious that Vook was making another throw of the dice. In April they launched 19 titles specially adapted for the iPad: In a statement, Bradley Inman, Vook CEO and founder said, “We will remember the iPad launch as the day that the publishing industry officially made the leap to mixed-media digital formats and never looked back…” The Vook blog makes this pinning-of-hopes on the iPad even more apparent:

The release of the iPad this Saturday was not just a red letter moment for Silicon Valley, it marked a turning point for the publishing and film industries, and a great opportunity for those invested in the future of media. The team at Vook has been working hard for months to prepare apps for submission to Apple… In many ways, it seems like the iPad was literally made for us…

And it seems their hopes may not have been misplaced. In May they launched a title about Guns’n’Roses (Reckless Road, documenting the creation of the Appetite for Destruction album), and lo and behold it was favourably greeted:

…unprecedented photos and memorabilia from the early years of one of the great rock bands from the 1980s and 1990s… If you are a true hard rock fan, and Guns ‘N’ Roses was one of your favorite bands, this app is worth the try. (PadGadget)

Now that I’ve had some time to read through Reckless Road and watch many of the videos included in it I can see the value of the Vook approach. It lends itself well to a product like this… This is an app any Guns N’ Roses fan would greatly appreciate. (Joe Wickert)

In June, the Vook version of Brad Meltzer’s bestseller Heroes for my Son was also favourably received:

It is easy to see the tremendous possibilities in the Vook format, especially when tied to a tablet device like the iPad. I very much enjoyed my first experience with a Vook mainly because I rapidly dropped my attempt to think of it as a Book with video plug ins. A Vook is really a multimedia platform that centers around text, rather than a traditional book. (MobilitySite)

Both these books are non-fiction – a genre in which the relationship between video footage and text seems far less problematic. It is interesting to note, however, that in both cases the non-linear structure of the Vook is singled out as a positive feature, compared to the sequential organisation of a traditional book:

It is charmingly non-linear and can be approached from many different angles. More a chocolate box than a book, especially if you are like me and enjoy really digging down into a subject while reading. (MobilitySite)

Remember that old VH1 series, Behind the Music? Canter’s Vook app feels like a modern version of that approach, with the added benefit that you can hop around the story to your heart’s content… (Joe Wickert)

There are hints here of a realisation that digital media can sometimes offer kinds of reading which are unavailable to, or hampered by, traditional print-and-paper.

Further recognition that ebooks with multimedia in them might actually have market appeal came at the end of June from none other than Amazon, who announced that they were adding audio and video to the Kindle iPhone/iPad app. The irony of this move is, of course, that Kindle ebooks are now multimedia-capable on the iPhone and iPad but not on the Kindle itself – an irony which can hardly be allowed to continue, and which therefore doubtless presages the launch of a multimedia Kindle some time in the near future.

Publishers, new media, and the cultural divide

Of course, the story of multimedia innovation in literature goes back much further than Vooks and the iPad. The British writer Andy Campbell, for example, has been publishing his own new media fiction online for years – most recently on the Dreaming Methods website. Most of his work has been designed in Flash, which the iPad unfortunately does not support. He therefore finds himself in the one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back position where new media literature is finally starting to make some headway in the marketplace, but thanks to a whim of the Apple corporation his own work in the field, developed over more than a decade, been landed with a big disadvantage. Understandably, his feelings are mixed:

It does indeed seem like there is a shift going on with digital fiction, although there are still a large number of stumbling blocks from a development point of view… Whilst the potential of the iPhone and iPad is undoubtedly exciting, a lot of authors – including myself – do not work with Macs or have the programming experience required to produce Apple-happy content…. However that’s from the point of view of Apple dominating the market and forcing everyone to use their SDK, whilst in actual fact Android holds considerable promise… I wouldn’t say digital fiction is breaking through into the mainstream – although perhaps it depends what you mean by digital fiction… Whether anything has been produced that really takes reading as an experience to a new level, I’m not sure.

Since Flash has hitherto been one of the main tools used by new media writers and artists, many of them will now find themselves in the same predicament as Campbell – and many of them will doubtless be hoping, like him, that alternative platforms such as Android are going to make some headway in the coming months. But leaving the question of platforms on one side, another difficulty for existing new media writers seems to be that although publishers are suddenly discovering a new enthusiasm for the form, they have very little knowledge or understanding of the work which has already been done, and very few links with those who have been doing it. Nor is this entirely the publishers’ fault, because there seems to be a genuine cultural divide between those who work in the publishing industry and those who take an interest in new media literature. Emily Williams of Digital Book World alludes to this divide in her article about this year’s London Book Fair (“Old London vs. New Media”, April 2010):

In most [publishing] houses, the digital innovators are still operating on a parallel plane, touching on but not fully integrated into the publishers’ core business centers. This segregation is so complete that much of the digital crowd is liable to skip the traditional fairs altogether, gravitating instead to their own tech confabs (which are in turn often boycotted by, or unknown to, the bookish folk).

Michael Bhaskar, a publisher and one of the judges of the Poole Literary Festival’s New Media Writing Prize, makes a similar point in his blog:

There has been no real conversation between the two [publishers and new media writers]. Why? It seems like we should have hit the meeting point where there could and should be a productive alliance, when in fact the gulf seems as wide as ever… Publishers have to sell books – or something – to keep going… [whereas] much new media writing is not designed to be commercial, being associated with a more recondite and experimental mindset.

In other words, publishers and new media writers have failed to come together, not simply because publishers have been hoping for the digital revolution to go away, nor because new media writers have been go-it-alone experimentalists, but because culturally they have belonged to different worlds, moved in different circles and spoken different languages.

Even assuming that these difficulties can be overcome, it is open to doubt whether new media writers will necessarily want to throw themselves headlong into the commercial mainstream. Many of them, like Andy Campbell, have been going it alone for so long that the habit of independence may be difficult to shake. Undoubtedly a bit of money would be very welcome, but advice from marketing men about how to make their work more commercial might be less well-received. On the publishing side of the equasion, however, there are definite signs that things are starting to change. Experimentation was the buzzword of the 2010 London Book Fair:

The publishing industry must move at speed to adopt new business models and new ways of working if it is to seize the opportunities of the digital revolution, delegates were told at London Book Fair… Industry figures focused on the need to experiment and to get a real understanding of what consumers want from the new technologies in a fast-changing environment. (The Bookseller)

Digital technology and writing style, part 2

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery by Leanne Shapton

There are also signs that the influence of digital technology on writing now extends beyond the software-savvy fringe, and is starting to affect the ways in which less specialised writers create their work. One of the surprize best-sellers of last year was a book called Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery, by Leanne Shapton, which (as the title suggests) takes the form of an auction catalogue, selling off the belongings of a fictional couple. As befits an auction catalogue, the book consists of photographs of the articles for sale, accompanied by snippets of text –

Lot 1231: Two pairs of white shoes. Two pairs of white bucks. The label inside the men’s pair reads “Prada”, the women’s reads “Toast”. Sizes men’s 11, women’s 9. Well worn. $40-60.

The artefacts in the catalogue are arranged in chronological order, which makes it easier for them to tell the story of the couple’s love-affair; but despite this concession to linearity what is striking about the novel, to anyone who has had very much to do with new media literature, is how like a piece of new media literature it is. Experimental it may be as a novel in print, but as a piece of digital writing it would be fairly conventional, albeit unusually well-put-together. It was obviously composed as collection of objects and pictures as much as a a piece of written text; there is no conventional dialogue or storytelling; despite its chronological sequence there is a strong non-linear element to the book, a feeling that it is as much designed to be dipped and skimmed as to be read from one end to the other; it makes a knowing reference to Raymond Queneau, the Oulipo writer; and in many ways it would be more at home on the Web, where the pictures could be in full colour and zoomable at no extra expense.

Another example of the influence of digital technology on “ordinary” literature comes from the small-scale end of the publishing industry – Martha Deed’s poetry chapbook The Lost Shoe, which was published earlier this year by Dan Waber at Naissance Chapbooks (about whom, more in a moment). The first point to note about this collection is that in order to publicise it Martha made a video, also called “The Lost Shoe” (http://www.sporkworld.org/Deed/lostshoe.mov), which deserves to be thought of as a companion-piece rather than a “trailer”. The poems in the collection are based on Martha’s experiences as a psychologist specialising in family law – more specifically, they deal with cases in which family members have done violence to each other, and some of them are harrowingly raw:

Upstairs, he tried twice to change his clothes
his fingers slippery with your blood…
You were looking at him
the last person you saw before your death
It bothered him, that lifeless stare,
so he stepped over your mother
your dying baby sister
and tried to close your eyes…

28 poems based on 100s of hours of family violence court proceedings

The video has the same combination of near-documentary authenticity and artistic control. It starts with a 911 telephone call from a man who has harmed his own children. There is a terrible moment when he is asked what has happened and he breaks into hysterical tears and says “They got stabbed”, as if somebody else might have done it. It ends with Martha reading aloud from one of her own poems, “Practice Tips”, which is based on the Center for Criminal Justice Advocacy‘s “Criminal Pre-Trial and Trial Practice”:

Play the tape 10 times at trial.
The jury will become accustomed to the carnage…
Obfuscate. Whine. Grandstand.
Fumble with your papers.

The fact that Martha feels equally at home working with both the written word and the camera, and therefore feels able to shoot her own video as a means of publicising her collection of poems, is an indication of the way in which digital technology is beginning to influence literary practice at grass-roots level. But the influence goes further. As well as conventional verse, her collection contains a number of visual poems – you could almost call them diagram poems – combining text with graphic design. “Jury Pool”, for example, shows a number of black stick-figures in and around the jury pool, labelled with reasons why they have been disqualified from the jury, or factors which will influence their outlook on the case: “Have to go back to school”, “Ate lunch with defendant’s mother”, “Crime victim”, “Don’t understand English”, and so forth. Including a diagram-poem such as this in a collection of poetry would not have been impossible before digital technology came along, but the fact that software packages such as Microsoft Word and Open Office Writer can handle images as easily as text, and make it simple to customise page-design without incurring any extra cost, means that poets now have an enormous range of experimental possibilities constantly at their fingertips.

Furthermore a lot of writers haven’t just moved beyond the pen or the portable typewriter to computers and word processing software; they have moved on to such things as blogs and web-pages, which have built-in multimedia capabilities. Sound-files and videos are rapidly becoming a normal part of the amateur writer’s working environment, and as a result the combination of text with other media is becoming a grassroots staple rather than a specialists-only field.

The Lost Shoeis published by Naissance Chapbooks, run by Dan Waber. A glance through Waber’s catalogue is enough to confirm the effect which digital technology is starting to have on poetic style. Amongst more formally conventional poetry he publishes, for example, Psychosis by Steve Giasson, which is based on comments collected by a YouTube posting of the shower scene from Psycho:

kthevsd Lame movies ? Kid I like all movies, old films, new films, etc. How is this classic lame ? Have you even ever watched it ? What would some 16 year old teenybopper know about cinema ? You probably have never even heard of Kurosawa and I bet you have never even seen a Daniel Day Lewis or Meryl Streep movie in your life. No wonder everyone laughs at your generations taste…

Or there is a collection by Jenny Hill called Regular Expressions: the Facebook status update poems

Ron: I delivered a fucking BABY tonight! Yep, a fucking BABY!!!!!!!!! what did
u do today? Nursing school is AWESOME!!!!!!!
Someone asks if it was slimy, another wants
the placenta, most are stumped
at how to comment
on all your exclamation marks.

Then there is Watching the Windows Sleep by Tantra Bensko, which combines “fiction, poetry, and photographs”; or Open your I by endwar, which is “at times concrete, at times typoem, at times visual poem, at times conceptual poem, at times typewriter poem”. It is clear that the digital revolution has affected all of these collections in one way or another – either by making a wider range of experimental options available, or by providing them with their inspiration and subject-matter.

Of course, these are atypical exhibits, because Dan Waber, the publisher, is clearly interested in adventurous and experimental kinds of poetry. He also publishes a series called “This is Visual Poetry“, which now runs to about fifty full-colour booklets of visual poems, “answering the question [What is visual poetry?] one full-color chapbook at a time”, and answering it extremely variously. All the same, even allowing for Waber’s adventurous tastes, the fact that within a couple of years he has managed to put together fifty chapbooks of visual poetry, plus nineteen “conventional” poetry collections which often show clear signs of technological influence, is strongly suggestive of the directon in which things are moving.

Digital technology and small-scale publishing

Just as noteworthy is the business-model behind Waber’s publishing ventures. Basically, his operation relies on three key elements. The first is print-on-demand technology, which has almost completely done away with the printing expertise on which book production used to rely. These days, as long as writers can produce a competently-laid-out electronic original it can be turned into a book at the touch of a button. Colour reproduction is slightly more expensive than black-and-white, but not prohibitively so. Standards of reproduction are undoubtedly lower than they would be in the hands of a specialist printer, but most people never notice the difference. Self-publishing ventures such as Lulu (www.lulu.com) rely on this kind of print-on-demand process, and although Waber sends his electronic originals to the local print shop rather than using a completely automated online process, the technology is the same.

However, whereas the Lulu publishing process involves quite a bit of donkeywork (and usually a crash course in book-design and pagination) on the part of the author, the second key element of Waber’s publishing model is a drastically simplified and stringent set of layout criteria. Submissions to the visual poetry series must be “17 color images of visual poems of yours that are 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall”; and submissions to the Naissance chapbook series must be a maximum of 48 pages, in A4 portrait layout, with specified page-margins. Waber has designed a macro which takes Word files laid out according to these specifications and converts them instantaneously into print-ready book originals. This means that responsibility for the page layout is left squarely with the author – as Waber’s guidelines say, “all you need to do is make each page look how you want it to look… and we’ll convert it” – with the added effect that as long as authors stay within the guidelines, they are free to experiment as much as they like.

This combination of strict limitations and artistic freedom has undoubtedly helped to foster some of the adventurous design his chapbook series displays. At the same time, however, Waber has eliminated so much complexity from the publishing process that the third key element of the business model looks after itself: his costs (including time-costs) have come right down, to the point where he can show a modest profit on print-runs as low as ten units. All he has to do is decide whether he wants to publish something: if he does, he runs his macro, sends his print-ready file to the printer, and has ten copies of the chapbook in his hands within 24 hours. As he writes with understandable pride:

The beauty in all of this is no cash outlay. No huge print runs. No wondering if there’s grant money to support it, no worrying if it’ll actually sell enough to cover costs. It’s all profit after one copy sells… I am in a situation where because I make money off of every book I publish, all I need to do is find more books to publish. Because I de-complexified the process so completely.

Waber believes that his kind of venture represents the way forward for literary publishing in the era of digital technology, and he also believes that it is the kind of solution which can probably only come from outside the existing print industry, not from inside, because, as he puts it, “Big Publishing has a model that is blockbuster-based”. To explain this more fully, he cites an article by Clay Shirkey called “The Collapse of Complex Business Models“, which argues that big and complex businesses become unable to adapt to new circumstances, because their ideas about how they should operate become culturally embedded. If the new circumstances are sufficiently challenging then the only way forward will be for big organisations to collapse, and for new small ones, without the same culturally embedded assumptions, to take their place.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to… when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

This, argues Waber, is likely to be the ultimate effect of the digital revolution on the publishing industry; not simply dramatic changes in publishing formats and marketing methods, but a complete collapse of “Big Publishing”, and a multitude of small-scale, dynamic new ventures like his own, growing up out of the wreckage.

Clearly this is something that publishers themselves are worried about. As Michael Bhaskar writes in his blog for The Poole Literary Festival’s New Media Writing Prize,

On the writing side I often hear that people feel ignored by publishers.Essentially the world of commercial publishing is a closed shop unwilling to listen to the maverick, the outsider and the original, and will ultimately pay for this as audiences gravitate to newer and amorphous forms… This might be an argument for by-passing publishers or intermediaries altogether… [but] what I would like is mediation.

New models for publishing

Clay Shirkey quotes the example of the “Charley bit my finger” video on YouTube to illustrate how production values have changed:

The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger… made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera… Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.

Youtube Video: "Charley bit my finger"

The “not one dime changed hands anywhere” line is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification. Wikipedia notes that “According to The Times, web experts believe the Davies-Carr family could earn £100,000 from ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’, mostly from advertisements shown during the video.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Bit_My_Finger) But the Davies-Carrs didn’t make or post the video with the intention of becoming celebrities or making money. They posted it so that it could be viewed by the boys’ godfather. The success of the video, in other words, owes nothing to its production values or to any marketing strategy, and everything to the environment created by YouTube and its viewers.

An alternative to the Big Publishing model is already with us, and despite odd viral phenomena like “Charlie Bit My Finger”, it consists in the main of very large numbers of small-scale products reaching small audiences, rather than small numbers of very high-profile products reaching huge audiences. This alternative model is enabled by digital technology, and it replaces high production values and market-minded editorial controls with the principle that people’s desire to publish themselves and to look at each other’s efforts is itself a profit motor. No single book published by Lulu, for example, has to sell a lot of copies for Lulu itself to make a profit – it’s the volume which counts. The same is true of YouTube, and it’s also true, on a much smaller scale, of Dan Waber’s enterprise.

YouTube is now crawling with people hoping to become the next viral phenomenon – and there are also a number of talented individuals who have built up sizeable audiences on YouTube and who are making decent amounts of money out of those audiences – but the really big money is being made not by the people who contribute material, but by YouTube itself. The same is true of print-and-paper publishing via Lulu. The removal of editorial constraint has greatly freed up and democratised the creative side of the publishing process, but on the other hand, a system where most writers made relatively small amounts of money compared to publishers and agents is being increasingly shoved aside by a new system where most creators make no money at all, while the publishers do very nicely.

Add to this the fact that YouTube is now in the hands of Google – the same Google which has been “creating an impenetrable content monopoly” over digitised books through the Google Books programme – and the future of publishing starts to look less like an open field for small enterprises, created by the collapse of big corporations, and more like a battleground where a few monster Web 2 corporations – Amazon/Kindle, YouTube/Google and Apple – are carving up the territory as fast as they can, much as the major European countries carved up Africa during the nineteenth century.

What the future really holds for the publishing industry is probably a mixture of these two scenarios. It’s unlikely that conventional publishing is going to disappear any time soon, but in a shrinking market publishers are going to be more and more reluctant to publish untried material, more and more inclined to go with material which seems to tap into an already-established audience. The celebrity biography or autobiography; the book of the comedy series; the first novel by a TV personality; these are already familiar. The book version of a popular blog and the “global distribution” edition of something which has already sold very well via the Web are going to become increasingly familiar in the near future. Add to this books with associated websites, increasing emphasis on ebooks, and a cautious trial of ebooks with interactive elements, and you have a pretty good picture of how the conventional publishing industry is shaping up to deal with the digital revolution.

In the meantime, entrepreneurs like Dan Waber are taking fuller advantage of the new possiblities offered by digital technology, and perhaps planting the seeds for a whole new generation of publishing houses; while writers like Martha Deed and Leanne Shapton, under the influence of the digital revolution, are redefining literary genres.

But one consideration which should not be overlooked in all this is the importance of open standards. The digital revolution itself is predicated not only on technical advances – such as broadband, print-on-demand, digital video and multimedia handheld devices – but on the Web itself, and in particular on the fact that the Web is non-commercial and belongs to all its users. Material which appears on the Web doesn’t have to comply with a proprietary format laid down by any one corporation: it has to comply with standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is this open structure which has enabled the Web to develop so rapidly and to serve as a framework within which so many enterprises have been able to flourish. For the field of publishing to flourish in the same way, open standards need to prevail here as well – open standards for ebooks, for example, so that standards-complaint work will be viewable on a whole range of different devices. Only under those circumstances can small enterprises and individual artists stand some kind of chance against the big corporations.

Link to original article:

http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewdigitalpublishing.php

© Edward Picot, August 2010
© The Hyperliterature Exchange

Interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom Part 1.

Above image taken by Scott Beale, Laughing Squid.

Introduction:

Marc Da Costa interviews the ever dynamic Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of monochrom. This is the first of three interviews, where he talks about the project ‘Soviet Unterzoegersdorf’; the fake history of the “last existing appanage republic of the USSR”. Created to discuss topics such as the theoretical problems of historiography, the concept of the “socialist utopia” and the political struggles of postwar Europe. In March 2009 Monochrom presented ‘Soviet Unterzoegersdorf: Sector II’. The game features special guest appearances of Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Jello Biafra, Jason Scott, Bre Pettis and MC Frontalot.

Since 1993, the Monochrom members have devoted themselves to the grey zones where systems intersect: the art (market), politics, economics, pop, gaiety, vanity, good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair. The technique underlying Monochrom’s work is that of being and working in the fields of Pop/avant-garde, theory/reflection, interventionism/politics, gaiety/lust/tragedy, (self-)configuration/mystification. The project Monochrom pushes into and beyond these fields is, ‘networking’ events, people, possibilities, material, impetus and identities.” (Zdenka Badovinac, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana)

Grenzfurthner has collaborated with groups such as ubermorgen, Billboard Liberation Front, Esel and Mego (label). Grenzfurthner writes for various online/print magazines and radio stations (e.g. ORF, Telepolis, Boing Boing). Grenzfurthner has served on a number of art juries (e.g. Steirischer Herbst, Graz). He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria and is a lecturer at University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria.

Recurring topics in Johannes Grenzfurthner’s artistic and textual work are: contemporary art, activism, performance, humour, philosophy, sex, communism, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.

Interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner, Part 1.

The ‘Soviet Unterzoegersdorf’, a game created by monochrom, is described as being at once the “last existing appendage republic of the USSR” and located inside the Republic of Austria. Could you speak a bit about the project and its background?

From a conceptual background we have to state that we have been occupied with the construction, analysis and reflection of alternative worlds for quite a long time. A lot of our projects are treating this field partly as a discussion with concepts deriving from popular culture, science and philosophy, and partly as a direct reference to science fiction and fantasy fan culture. We first created the fake history of the “last existing appendage republic of the USSR” in 2001 — ten years after the ‘mighty Soviet Union’ went into this nation-state-splitting-up-process and new countries emerged like Firefox pop-ups that you can’t manage to click away.

We wanted to discuss topics such as the problems of historiography, the concept of “utopia” and “socialist utopia” and the political struggles of postwar Europe in a playful, grotesque way. You have to bear in mind that the real village of Unterzoegersdorf was part of the Post WWII Soviet zone from 1945 until the foundation of the ‘neutral’ Republic of Austria in 1955. Reactionary Austrians talk about 1955 as the ‘real liberation’… and I have to mention that that’s rather typical: cheering when Hitler arrives and being proud members of the Third Reich, afterwards proclaiming that Austria was the first victim of Nazi Germany and complaining about the allied occupation forces — especially the Soviet.

The adventure-game - Unterzoegersdorf Sector 2. Ready for Proletarian Download!
The adventure-game – Unterzoegersdorf Sector 2. Ready for Proletarian Download!
http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/sektor2/index_en.htm

We transformed the theoretical concept into an improvisational theatre/performance/live action role-playing game that lasted two days. That means we really organized bus tours to Unterzoegersdorf — a small village that really exists — and acted the setting; beginning with the harsh EU Schengen border control. Later, in 2004, we started to think about a possible sequel to the performance. We thought that the cultural format of the “adventure game” provided the perfect media platform to communicate and improve the idea.

We started to work in February 2004 and presented ‘Sector 1’ — the first part of the trilogy — in the form of an exhibition in Graz/Austria in August 2005. We released ‘Sector 2’ in 2009, featuring guest stars as Cory Doctorow, Jello Biafra or Bruce Sterling. As the game series uses a 3rd person perspective with photo backgrounds and pictures of real actors as sprites, it took us quite a while to digitize and image process all of the material. This technique was actually first used by Sierra On-Line during the early and mid-1990s — but we are quite proud that we managed to get the feeling of discovering an old computer game that never existed on your old 500 MB hard drive. One aspect of the game is playing with memories and the future of the past. The future is a kind of carrot, the sort tied just in front of the cartoon donkey’s nose so it goes to work, goes off to war, learns Javascript and knows which bits to laugh at in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. You can imagine.

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf @ ToorCamp 2009: A Triumphant Gala featuring Public Domain Clip Art Finally, friends of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.
There is a video version of Ambassador Nikita Perostek Chrusov's uplifting talk about youth culture, communism and overthrowing "the system" at ToorCamp 2009!
Images above – Soviet Unterzoegersdorf @ ToorCamp 2009: A Triumphant Gala featuring Public Domain Clip Art Finally, friends of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. There is a video version of Ambassador Nikita Perostek Chrusov’s uplifting talk about youth culture, communism and overthrowing “the system” at ToorCamp 2009! Embed! Embed! Embed!

At a HOPE conference a few years back I was interested to hear you talk about the framing of the project as somehow deeply connected with a certain understanding of historiography that you and the other members of monochrom share. Could you elaborate on this a bit?

Debates triggered by postmodern culture have directed our attention towards questions of representation and the relevance of “history” and stories — i.e. The challenging proclamation of a post-histoire, the realization of the impossibility of a meta-narrative of history; the clash between reality and sign systems, the difference between fact and fiction, the impossibility of neutral contemplation or witnessing as well as the positioning of subjective awareness within such representations, etc. All these forms of representation have been playing a central part in the development of national, ethnic and tribal identities since WWII. And (as a by-product of military technology) computer game development is hardly aware of these discourses.

We wanted to combine (retro)gaming and (retro)politics and (crypto)humor to delve into this ongoing discourse. We wanted to harvest the wonderful aesthetic and historic qualities of adventure gaming. It is a commemoration and resurrection, and one more reminder that contemporary gaming (in its radical business-driven state-of-the-artness) should not dare to forget the (un)dead media of the past — or they will haunt them.

If you compare the status of the adventure game in the context of the economic growth of the computer game industry you could state that it is gone. Less than 1% of all computer games written are adventure games. Adventure games are nearly extinct… but only nearly. If media and media applications make it past their Golden Vaporware stage, they usually expand like giant fungi and then shrink back to some protective niche. They just all jostle around seeking a more perfect app.

For many people in the Soviet Unterzoegersdorf team, adventure games are part of their media socialization. For the computer industry it is one of the most successful gaming formats of the past. And for the feminist movement it is proof that a woman — I’m talking about Sierra On-Line’s Roberta Williams — was able to shape the form of a whole industry totally dominated by men.

Computer games are embedded in the cultural framework of technological developments. In the study of technological development and creativity, focusing attention on the failure, the error, the breakdown, the malfunction means opening the black box of technology. Studies have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are “left over.” However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural–and last but not least–political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed. According to Langdon Winner, there is a sense in which all technical activity contains an inherent tendency toward forgetfulness. Quote: “Is it not the point of all invention, technique, apparatus, and organization to have something and have it over with? (…) Technology, then allows us to ignore our own works. It is license to forget.”

Could you also perhaps talk about the choice of selecting the genre of an adventure game as the incarnation of this downtrodden republic. At the risk of being literal minded, is there any sense in which the existence of ‘Soviet Unterzoegersdorf’ as a kind of place that comes alive through players’ interactions with a program downloaded from the internet has anything to say to how you imagine being able to engage/critique/disrupt the idea of the nation-state?

We are postmodern leftists. A little bit melancholic… but you can count on us. We love to play with layers of consciousness and layers of layers of consciousness. On first view our project could be interpreted as a mock-up of the Soviet Union and the communist state structures that really existed. But, why on Earth do we need so many references to 1980s and 1990s metal music? Or Marvin Minsky? Or Negri? Or Austrian post-WWII history? Or geek adumbrations? Mocking the Soviet State would be much easier. In fact it’s about the wonderful clash between reality and sign systems, the impossibility of neutral contemplation or witnessing as well as the positioning of subjective awareness within such representations. The traditional humanists tend to see the whole philosophic aesthetic postmodern line of thought — from Judith Butler to Lyotard and Derrida — from the wrong angle. Okay, you can’t explain Sun Ra to a Green Day fan now, when he’s laying in the corner, piss-drunk and crooning “Anarchy”. But we think that the (radical) nature of postmodernism is often simply not grasped because people just copy it down into the conservative pattern of thinking which has been indoctrinated into us since the Enlightenment. Of course, on the other hand, it functions as a virus, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Contemporary art — the field we are usually working in because there’s money — is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the ‘New Economy’. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That’s the real truth of the matter.

Read Part 2 of this Interview
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-2

Read Part 3 of this Interview
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-3 

The Status Project: Data-Mining Our Identities.

An Interview with Heath Bunting – Part 1

Introduction: The personal connection.

I first met Heath when I moved to Bristol (UK) in 1988. It felt important, even profound. Not in a ‘jump in a bed’ kind of way. Yet our meeting did seem life changing somehow, to the both us. We hit it off and we collided – as equals – our collisions resonated, it shook our imaginations. From then on our paths, our lives connected and clashed regardless. We regularly challenged each other through constant, critical duels of dialogue; about activism, art, technology and ideas surrounding different life approaches and philosophies. From 1988 – 1994 (just before the Internet had properly arrived), in Bristol and London we collaborated on various projects such as pirate radio, street art and the cybercafe BBS – Bulletin Board System. We then went our separate ways exploring our own concerns more deeply, but continued to meet every now and then. Us both meeting in Bristol changed both of our worlds, it built the grounding of where we are now.

About Heath Bunting.

Founder of the Irational.org collective

Heath founded the Irational.org collective in 1995, a loose grouping of six international net and media artists who came together around the server irational.org. The collective included Daniel Garcia Andujar / Technologies to the People (E), Rachel Baker (GB), Kayle Brandon (GB), Heath Bunting (GB), Minerva Cuevas / Mejor Vida Corporation (MEX) and Marcus Valentine (GB).

Heath Bunting’s work manifests a dry sense of humour, a minimal-raw aesthetic and a hyper-awareness of his own artistic persona and agency whilst engaging with complex political systems, institutions and contexts. Crediting himself as co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements, he is banned for life from entering the USA for his anti GM work, such as the SuperWeed Kit 1.0 – “a lowtech DIY kit capable of producing a genetically mutant superweed, designed to attack corporate monoculture”. Bunting’s work regularly highlights issues around infringements on privacy or restriction of individual freedom, as well as issues around the mutation of identity; our values and corporate ownership of our cultural/national ‘ID’s’, our DNA and Bio-technologies “He blurs the boundaries between art, everyday life, with an approach that is reminiscent of Allan Kaprow but privileging an activist agenda.”[1]

In this two part interview we will discuss his current work within two distinctive areas of digital culture and sport-art starting with The Status Project, which studies the construction of our ‘official identities’ and creates what Bunting describes as “…an expert system for identity mutation”. His research explores how information supplied by the public in their interaction with organisations and institutions is logged. The project draws on his direct encounters with specific database collection processes and the information he was obliged to supply in his life as a public citizen, in order to access specific services; also on data collected from the Internet and from information found on governmental databases. This data is then used to map and illustrate how we behave, relate, choose things, travel and move around in social spaces. The project surveys individuals on a local, national and international level producing maps of influence and personal portraits for both comprehension and social mobility.

The Status Project, Data-mining Our Identities.

Marc Garrett: For many years now, your work has explored the concept of identity, investigating the various issues challenging us in a networked age. The combination of your hacktivist, artistic approach and conceptual processes have brought about a project which I consider is one of the most comprehensive, contemporary art projects of our age. The Status Project, deals with issues around personal identity head-on.

Why did you decide to embark on such a complex project?

Heath Bunting:

Three reasons

1. the network hacker

the network hacker fantasises about unlimited access to all systems made available through possession of treasure maps, keys and navigation skills

2. the Buddhist

the Buddhist intends to destroy the self and become only the summation of environmental factors plus find enlightenment in even the most banal bureaucracy

3. the computer scientist

the computer scientist aims to find comfort and hidden meaning in complex data

I am all three and am attempting to combine the obsessions of each into one project.

So far I have

Created a sketch database of the UK system with over 8000 entries

Created over 50 maps of sub-sections of the system to aid sense of place and potential for social mobility

Created system portraits of existing persons

Created software to generate new identities lawfully (off the shelf persons) and sold these identities

I am currently adding more data to the database. Which is split between the human being (flesh), the natural person (strawman) and the artificial person (corporation). Remaking maps using upgraded spider software, researching how to convert my identity generating software into a bot recognised under UK law as a person; and hence covered by the human rights act i.e. right to life and liberty; freedom of expression; peaceful enjoyment of property. I am very close to achieving this.

Did you know that 75% of the human rights act applies to corporations as well as individuals? If you were afraid of corporations in the 90’s and noughties then be very afraid of the automated voices that speak to you on stations or programs that transact currency exchanges, as they will soon be your legal equals as with all Hollywood propaganda, the reverse is true. The human beings will be the clumsy, half wit robot like creatures serving the new immortal ethereal citizens. If you think I am mad or joking, check back in 10 years time.

MG: Way back in 1995, there were already various groups and individuals (including yourself) who were critiquing human relationships whilst exploiting networked technology. Creative people who were not only hacking technology but also hacking into and around everyday life, expanding their skills by changing the materiality, the physical and immaterial through their practice. It was Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) who in 1995 said “Each one of us has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person’s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is his or her data body – a state-and-corporate-controlled doppelganger. What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.”[2]

15 years later, we are dealing with an unstoppable flow of meta-networks, creeping into every area of our livng environments. We have mutated, become part of the larger data-sphere, it’s all around us. As you describe, it seems that we are mutating into fleshy ingredients, nourishing a technologically determined world.

HB: Data body is quite a good way to think about it. I consider each human being to possess one or more natural person(s) and each natural person to control or possess none, one or more artificial person(s) (i.e. corporation). The combined total of natural and artificial persons possessed or controlled by a human being can be thought of as their databody. As human beings, we have quite a lot of control over our persons (natural and artificial). The problem is that we either don’t realise this or it takes the time to manage them. It’s possible to obtain a corporation for less than the price of a train ticket between Bristol and London. Why do so many people live without one? Could anti corporate propaganda have something to do with this ?

“What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself.”(CAE).[2]

Only if you remain a passive user of it. The natural person is only linked to the human being through such fine devices as a signature, which we decide to give or withhold, most human being’s natural person is actually owned by the government and borrowed back by the human being. This does not have to be the case as we can create and use our own persons.

“The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.”(CAE).[2]

I would say laziness has triumphed over mindfulness. All information about the functioning of natural persons is easily available, all persons have the same rights unless they choose not to claim them. Instead, people choose to get lost in their own selves and dreams, indulged by those that seek to profit from their labour.

Technology is becoming more advanced and the administration of this technology is becoming more sophisticated and soon, every car in the street will be considered and treated as persons, with human rights. This is not a conspiracy to enslave human beings, it is a result of having to develop usable administration systems for complex relationships. Slaves were not liberated because their owners felt sorry for them, slaves were given more rights as a way to manage them more productively in a more technologically advanced society.

MG: Getting back to the part of your project which incorporates a complex process of compiling and creating ‘off the shelf persons’, as you put it. Are you using some of the collected data as a resource to form these new identities, or is it a set of ‘hybrid’ identities?

HB: Please expand this question further…

MG: Near the beginning of the interview, you mention that you “Created software to generate new identities lawfully (off the shelf persons) and sold these identities.” I am asking whether most of these ‘new identities’ that you have formed and sold are, a mixture of different bits of information. Like data-versions of body parts from a machine or vehicle, reused, recycled to recreate, make new hybrid identities?

HB: The identities I can create are all new and legal, they are a portfolio of new unique legal relationships created with existing artificial persons. For example, registering with Tesco Clubcard either creates or consolidates the new natural person http://status.irational.org/identity_for_sale – for a new natural person to be credible, it must be coherent and rational. This is achieved simply by following the rules of the system, the more interrelating links with other persons, the more real the new person becomes.

Off the shelf natural person.

Off the shelf natural person.
close up
close up.

Comes with supporting physical items:

Comes with supporting physical items

personal business cards, boots advantage card, marriott rewards card, cube cinema membership card, baa world points card, tesco clubcard, vbo membership card, WHSmith clubcard, silverscreen card, airmiles card, somerfield loyalty card, post office saving stamps collector card, virgin addict card, subway sub club card, dashi loyalty card, t-mobile top up card, european health insurance card, waterstone’s card, 20th century flicks card, bristol library card, co-operative membership card, nectar card, oyster card, bristol ferry boat company commuter card, love your body body shop card, co-operative dividend card, bristol credit union card, choices video library card, national rail photocard, bristol credit union account, bristol community sports card, star and garter public house membership card, first class stamp, nhs donor card, winning lottery ticket (2 GBP), t mobile pay as you go mobile and charger…

Upgradable to both corporate and governmental levels.

(500.00 GBP) – SOLD

MG: I can see on the web site, in the section The Status Project – Potentials that there are various ready-mades, ‘Off the shelf natural person – identity kits’. Am I right in presuming that there are individuals out there who have bought and used these kits?

HB: These are mostly existing persons, only one of them was synthetic. I will be setting up a small business soon though to manufacture and sell natural person.

MG: On exploring deeper into the Status Project data-base, there is link to a file called ‘In receipt of income based job seeker’s allowance’. This information is taken from ‘Jobcentre plus’, a UK government run organisation and on-line facility, inviting visitors to search for jobs, training, careers, childcare or voluntary work. How important was this source in compiling data for your database of individuals?

HB: This is only one record of over 8000 in the database, each record refers to one or more other record(s) in the database.

MG: What projects relate to/have influence on The Status Project in some way, and what makes them work?

HB: They Rule[3] – It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. A glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies.

It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies

“Go to www.theyrule.net. A white page appears with a deliberately shadowy image of a boardroom table and chairs. Sentences materialize: “They sit on the boards of the largest companies in America.” “Many sit on government committees.” “They make decisions that affect our lives.” Finally, “They rule.” The site allows visitors to trace the connections between individuals who serve on the boards of top corporations, universities, think thanks, foundations and other elite institutions. Created by the presumably pseudonymous Josh On, “They Rule” can be dismissed as classic conspiracy theory. Or it can be viewed, along with David Rothkopf’s Superclass, as a map of how the world really works.”[4]

Bureau d’etudes – distribution.
http://bureaudetudes.org/

The Paris-based conceptual group, Bureau d'etudes, works intensively in two dimensions. In 2003 for an exhibition called 'Planet of the Apes' they created integrated wall charts of the ownership ties between transnational organizations, a synoptic view of the world monetary game. Check the article 'Cartography of Excess (Bureau Bureau d'etudes, Multiplicity)' written on Mute by Brian Holmes in 2003.

The Paris-based conceptual group, Bureau d’etudes, works intensively in two dimensions. In 2003 for an exhibition called ‘Planet of the Apes’ they created integrated wall charts of the ownership ties between transnational organizations, a synoptic view of the world monetary game. Check the article ‘Cartography of Excess (Bureau Bureau d’etudes, Multiplicity)’ written on Mute by Brian Holmes in 2003.[5]

MG: The sources of data for the Status Project seem to vary in type. Where do you collect them from and how do you collect the different kinds of data?

HB: It ranges from material instruments such as application forms right through to constitutional law and then common sense .

MG: How do you propose the Status Project might be used as a system for ‘identity mutation’?

HB: I want to communicate the fact that people in the UK can create a new identity lawfully without consulting any authority. I intend to illustrate the precise codification of class in the UK system, and there are three clearly defined classes of identity in the UK: human being, person and corporate . I am looking at the borders between these classes and how they touch each other, this can be seen with my status maps. Also, I intend to create aged off-the-shelf persons for sale similar to off-the-shelf corporations.

Taken from the front page of the Status Project:

Lower class human beings possess one severly reduced natural person and no control of an artificial person.

Middle class human beings possess one natural person and perhaps control one artificial person.

Upper class human beings possess multiple natural persons and control numerous artificial persons with skillful separation and interplay.

End of Part 1.
————–

.re_potemkin

.re_potemkin is a crowdsourced re-make of the film “Battleship Potemkin”. It is a “.f.reeP_” project by .-_-., part of a series of projects that embrace the ideology and means of production of contemporary media and technoculture in order to make art.

From December 2006 to January 2007 .-_-. worked with 15 groups of students from Yildiz Technical University to reproduce Battleship Potemkin on a shot-by-shot basis. Not all shots were reproduced, there are empty black sections in the new film. The students and the setting of the university and its surrounds are very different from the locations and actors of Battleship Potemkin. The domesticity, institutional backdrops and modern street furniture would be very different from the 1920s Soviet backdrops of the original even if they weren’t in colour.

Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925) is a classic of early 20th century cinema, a piece of obvious propaganda that both fulfils and transcends its instrumental purpose with its exceptional aesthetics. Its most famous images have become cultural icons and cliches. If you haven’t seen it then ironically enough it’s on YouTube so you can watch it there and go “oh, that’s where that came from…” before we continue. Or you can watch it in the side-by-side comparison with .re_potmkin on the project’s homepage.

The Soviet dream became (or always was) a nightmare, an ideology that sacrificed many millions of lives in order to maintain its fictions. Our contemporary liberal democratic society regards itself as unquestionably morally superior to communism for this and many other reasons. The (self-)defining difference between Soviet communism and liberal free-market capitalism is economic ideology. Free markets benefit individuals by reducing inefficiencies.

Battleship Potemkin reproduction

As free market capitalism has triumphed its means of production have evolved. Corporations emerged as a leading way of organizing labour, leading to utopian social projects in the West in the same era as Eisenstein was working in the East and later to a burgeoning middle class in the post-war era. But since then corporations have become increasingly unapologetic exploitative economic projects.

In order to cut costs and become more economically efficient, corporations can become virtual. They shed jobs to reduce payroll and other costs associated with actually employing people. They then source cheaper labour and production from outside, paying other companies to make the branded goods that the corporation sells. This is known as outsourcing.

A logical next step in corporate cost reduction is to source labour from individuals without paying for it at all. This is known as crowdsourcing. Although individuals who donate their labour to a corporation through crowdsourcing might not be compensated monetarily, they can still be compensated in other ways.

With crowdsourced intangible goods the best way of rewarding people who donate their labour to produce those goods is simply to give the resulting product to them under a licence that allows them to use it freely. Non-profit projects such as GNU and Wikipedia do this very successfully, but corporations are always tempted to try and privilege their “ownership” of other people’s work. Where crowdsourced labour is exploited without fair compensation this called sharecropping.

Battleship Potemkin reproduction

.re_potemkin is a non-profit project rather than a corporation, and as such it has adopted a GNU or Wikipedia-style copyleft licence. Or at least it claims to have. In a creative solution to the fact that there is more than one copyleft licence suitable for cultural works, .re_potemkin’s licence is a kind of meta-copyleft. Checking the licence page reveals that .re_potemkin’s licence is more a licence offer than a licence.

This avoids the politics of imposing a choice between competing copyleft licences on the producers and consumers of the work. The only problem with this approach is that adaptations of the project, works that build upon it, may end up unable to be combined and built on further because they have been placed under incompatible licences. This is unlikely to happen, but it can be very frustrating when it does.

.re_potemkin is crowdsourced equitably, then. And even in its technical form, .re_potemkin is a free and open resource. it is distributed not in a patent-encumbered, proprietary format such as Flash or MP4 but in the Free Software Ogg Vorbis format. Too few artistic projects follow the logic of their principles in this way, instead sacrificing principle to the at best temporary convenience of the proprietary YouTube or QuickTime distribution channels.

The politics of the production of an artwork are only of aesthetic (rather than art historical) interest if they intrude into the finished artwork. A crowdsourced artwork such as the Sheep Exchange is about crowdsourcing as well as being made by it. The aesthetic of that work (many differently styled drawings of sheep) raises the question of how and why it was produced and this feeds back into the aesthetic experience.

Not all shots were reproduced, there are empty black sections in the new film.

.re_potemkin does not follow the classic crowdsourcing model of an open call for volunteer labour on the internet. It was produced by many groups, but in a closed community. It functions more as an allegory of crowdsourcing than as a literal example of it, but this adds to the project artistically, creating a layer of depiction. The means of production are aestheticized in a way that presents them for the viewer’s consideration in way that can be understood and contemplated more easily than an amorphous internet project.

The “commons based peer production” of free software and free culture is not, to use Jaron Lanier’s phrase, “Digital Maoism”. But the comparison is a useful one even if it is not correct. Utopianism was exploited by the Soviets as it is exploited by the vectorialist media barons of Web 2.0 . re_potemkin gives us side-by-side examples of communism and crowdsourcing to consider this comparison for ourselves.

Within the work the similarities and differences between the original film and its recreation vary from the comical to the poignant. Students in a play park acting out shots of soldiers on a warship, hands placing spoons on a table cloth, crowds gathering around notice boards. This isn’t a parody, it’s an interrogation of meaning. And it is a strong example of why political, critical and artistic freedom is at stake in the ability of individuals and groups other than the chosen few of the old mass media to organize in order to refer to and reproduce (or recreate) existing media.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

An Interview with Danja Vasiliev

Meat Space and the World Inside the Machine

Introduction:

Danja was an Artist in Residence at Furtherfield’s HTTP Gallery space between the 1st March – 9th April 2010. A Russian born computer artist currently living between Berlin and Rotterdam. Working with diverse methods, technologies and materials Danja ridicules the contemporary affection for digital life and questions the global tendency for cyborgination. Danja co-founded media-lab moddr_ in 2007 which is a joint project at Piet Zwart Institute alumni and WORM Foundation. Based in Rotterdam moddr_ is a place for artists and hackers, engaging with critical forms of media-art practice.

The email interview took place a few weeks after his residency. A recent collaborative project that many readers may already know of, by Danja Vasiliev, Gordan Savicic and Walter Langelaar, all part of moddr.net lab is, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, which lets you delete your social networking profiles and kill your virtual friends. Danja is certainly prolific, he is also collaborating with New Zealander artist, Julian Oliver who is now based in Berlin. This interview unearths some of the ideas and intentions behind Danja’s personal works, asking what motivates him to use computers, technology and networks, as well as understand more the social contexts and implications of his endeavors.

Start of Interview:

Marc Garrett: You’ve been on the residency at Furtherfield’s HTTP space http://www.http.uk.net/ for a few weeks now. Before we discuss Netless, the project you have been researching here and some of your other recent works, I think it would be interesting to know about some of your earlier works first. Before the turn of the century you made various net.art pieces. What I find interesting here is that whilst you were creating these works you were also parodying net.art at the same time, was there any particular reason for this kind of approach?

Danja Vasiliev: “HTTP” as an abbreviation was a very significant thing for me throughout the last decade, now having to stay at a place bearing the same title feels like a necessary experience indeed. Fifteen years ago WWW was something very new in Russia and besides the new dial-up aesthetics and world-wide means it brought a complete new layer of existence – “netosphere”, which made my youth. I was trying to understand the technology, though not being of a scientific kind I did it by monkeying around with artworks of others. Later I heard it was called “Open Source” approach. The Website “koala.ru” http://koala.ru.k0a1a.net became a collection of expressionist pages, each page had its own story and often a narrative. Back in the day my arsenal was naturally limited: HTML3, GIF89a (animated) and JavaScript1.2. It felt challenging to work with those tools, file-size was aesthetically just as important as letter-case, and I liked it… I haven’t changed any of the pages since 2002, iirc. The greatest source of my inspiration (image and code -wise) of that time was the baddest of all Superbad – I loved the wackiness yet elegance weaved into the piece. My attraction to /random redirect/ comes from there.

..had raw hot dog rubbed on his face so that the pups would lick him on cue. Web page-section of Superbad.
..had raw hot dog rubbed on his face so that the pups would lick him on cue. Web page-section of Superbad.

MG: What draws you into using computers in your art practice?

DV: It must be the conflict between the everyday technology and digital life. I’m exploring that edge between the meat space and the world inside the machine. Machine in this case is not just a PC – a single computer is only a part of the network. Acting on those parts adjusts the behavior and perception of the whole – I’m interested in that. Computer hacker attitude and methods are very influential, my works are often merely illustrations of those technological interventions. It makes much more sense to me to try to confront or challenge the technology (and the users) rather then to celebrate the achievements. ‘IT’ today is what politics were yesterday – it and its aesthetics owe to be questioned, broken into pieces, interrogated, sabotaged, reflected upon and ridiculed.

MG: On the NETTIME list on 1st July 2008, Eric Kluitenberg wrote an intriguing essay about your work titled “Turning the machines inside out”.[1] He also discusses something which is close to one of my own interests, about the world as a kind of Interface, metaphorically, virtually and materially “The world according to Rossler is defined by that what transfers between the observer and the “real” world at the interface. It is the interface to the world that defines what can be observed about the “real” world.” Kluitenberg.

Before we talk about Kluitenberg’s concepts regarding his thoughts around your work, I would like to know what your own considerations are in respect of the “World as Interface” and what this means to you?

DV: Well, it always surprises when I come across some theoretical implications confirming, destroying or otherwise connecting to my own work. Perhaps that is why I got to be a maker rather then a thinker – I could never describe the topic I was covering with m/e/m/e 2.0 in a such a profound way as Eric Kluitenberg did. However incapable of posing a verbal question, my intention was indeed to discuss and demonstrate that effect of alienation created by the very medium (or shall I say the interface) of the Web. A System that promotes itself to the users as a fair substitute for reality and provides services for talking, seeing, being and so on, yet fails to escape its own binary jail, i.e. fails to become indeterministic. This determined interface creates determined world – web applications are uploaded straight into our brains. In my perception what we are seeing now is rather reversed or multiplexed inclination of “World as Interface” idea, when devices used for participation in-World and auxiliary systems created around to assist the process, all of this _is_ the World for its users.

A System that promotes itself to the users as a fair substitute for reality and provides services for talking, seeing, being and so on, yet fails to escape its own binary jail, i.e. fails to become indeterministic.
m/e/m/e/2.0
m/e/m/e 2.0 in a crate, camera close-up
m/e/m/e 2.0 in a crate, camera close-up

MG: Kluitenberg in his essay, viewed your m/e/m/e/2.0 to be part of a tradition “(inadvertently or not) in the best company of a long tradition of “avant-garde” artists who created various sorts of absurd, ironic, impossible, sadistic, insane or ridiculous machines. His likes are the creators of ominous bachelor machines (Duchamp, Lautreamont, Picabia, Roussel, Kafka), self-destructing machines of the Tinguely type, right down to the magically autistic robotic anti-sculptures of Allan Rath.”

For me, what links m/e/m/e/2.0 to our contemporary world and its ever increasing networked existence “and what we know it to be now” is, its playful and direct link and reference to the Internet. It could not be what it is without the Internet, in which millions have been and are still being taught how to adapt and reconfigure relationships with others, and ourselves. We have become part of the networked driven interface via this socially engineered activity. Would it be presumptuous of me to consider m/e/m/e/2.0 to be a kind of portrait, or a physical re-representation of the human mind or perhaps “head”, metaphorically?

DV: m/e/m/e 2.0 is a manifestation of the absence of any human traits in an act of network communication. Of course it is impossible to demonstrate this without the involvement of the main suspect – the object, the sculpture – is only a half of the work, another half is the Internet. Whenever the piece is not online – it is not complete, and as such – kept in a wooden crate. What “m/e/m/e 2.0” ultimately represents is the physicality of the fellow Internet user on the other end of the wire. It is a device that converts digital instances (copies) of netizens into humanoids, adding flesh around immaterial skeletons. By the analogy to what’s known as “modem” (MOdulator-DEModulator, a device used for digital communication over analog, physical mediums), “m/e/m/e 2.0” is a “semi-modem” or just “mo” without “dem” – it materializes (modulates) without caring to convert back into binary format. It lets the users enjoy their own bodily presence while online; much like the famous FuFme device only with some corrections to the current state of things.

The machine of m/e/m/e 2.0 allows its visitor to sense not only the surfaces of the system but also to get into an strange relationship with the concurent users. The $USER begins to understand intimacy over a distance. The mechanical body can not be re-multiplied to a spontaneous number of requests, instead all of the users come to share one analogue broadcast medium. Whenever someone clicks to open a new link, the information is transmitted to all connected users, “meshing” and colliding their sessions. Seemingly a constraint becomes a feature – unbodied cyberspace gets filled with physical presence. The consequence is that it turns web browsing into a broadcast, collective group activity without any predefined rules. Each page is a part of info-system contained with-in m/e/m/e 2.0, all pages are hyper-linked into a mesh that has no beginning or end.

m/e/m/e 2.0, final release, v1.0
video – m/e/m/e 2.0, final release, v1.0 Download video.

MG: During your residency here in London, you worked on another project called Netless. Could you explain what the project does and why you have chosen to embark on such a venture?

DV: I’m researching a digital communication strategy or technique that would be free from the “panoptical” effect of the Internet. It is too easy to observe and trace users connected to the global network – partly because of the way it is structured, as well as its reliance on the corporate communication channels. It is something about “net neutrality”.

Netless is an attempt to create a new network, alternative to the Internet. More precisely – networks within existing city infrastructures, possibly interconnected into a larger network alike the Internet. Netless is not dependent on specialized data carriers such as cables or regulated radio channels. In fact, there is no permanent connection between all of its hosts (peers) at all – it is net-less. The network is based on the city transportation grid, where traffic of the vehicles are the data carriers. Borrowing the principals from the Sneakernet concept, the information storage devices are physically moved from point A to point B. Numerous nodes of the netless network are attached to city buses or trams. Whenever those vehicles pass by one another a short-range wireless communication session is established between the approaching nodes and the data they contain is synchronized. Spreading like a virus, from one node to another, the data is penetrating from the suburbs into the city and backwards, expanding all over the area in the meanwhile. That broadcast data can be picked-up by anyone.

London bus route, Berlin Metro, Public Transport Varna.
London bus route, Berlin Metro, Public Transport Varna.

…the similarities between city transportation maps and circuitry of modern networks are not accidental. their purposes are identical – to provide efficient transport flow between all the locations of the area they cover. routes are designed to match the necessary throughput without congesting at peak times. D.Vasiliev.

MG: What kind of information will be shared within a “Netless” system? Also, are these ad hoc mini-networks going to be attached onto vehicles as secret transmitters?

DV: Constrained by the bandwidth limits Netless networks will work most effectively when dealing with short messages. Technically speaking – “ascii” text, or short base64 encoded binaries/images. Textual data is playing well together with human brains – we often do not need to read a complete sentence to understand the meaning – this would be a great way of keeping the data traffic down. If an error occurs during the transmission of a text message, it can be easily “repaired” by the recipient’s brain – less work for hardware, more information can come thorough. The Netless network integrates into the citizens’ living infrastructures, its data-processing and error-correction routines are outsourced to the users. This is a “hybrid” (parasitic) system, it requires the “human” as resource in order to function.

This is a "hybrid" (parasitic) system, it requires the "human" as resource in order to function.


It would be very interesting to collaborate with some city transportation company, like the one that runs all the buses across London, Arriva. It blankets all areas pretty well as I discovered during my residency at HTTP and if every bus would carry a “Netless” node – the performance would be amazing. That said, it wouldn’t be smart to make “Netless” depend on any commercial entity. Instead I’d rather encourage people to follow up on the project development and start putting together their own “Netless” nodes and take those on everyday travels within the cities. The strength (and bandwidth) of any mesh-network grows proportionally to the amount of nodes involved into the network, thus – (random) network maintenance is the sole responsibility of its users..

Bus carrying Netless node


MG: This idea of independent nodes/activities of communication, asking us to consider the notion of what it would be like to be “off the grid”; is an important issue. It reflects wider concerns around individual freedoms and civil liberties, in an age where corporations are channelling our everyday digital behaviours towards, a more “official” form of mediation. Where top-down, imposed digital infrastructures are dominating the interface of who our digital, data-bodies are, whilst having control and access to our content, not on our terms. It also reminds me of the battle between pirate radio and institutionally implemented radio broadcasts, as in who owns the medium and what is perceived “correct” information when sharing with others?

DV: Definitely, reclaiming the medium (or the net-space for this matter) does not happen on paper or during some international conference on the topic of net-neutrality. Such changes in disposition of the forces – corporate state on one hand and personal interest/freedom on other is a tedious process; approached top-down it might take ages to complete. Revolution starts on the streets! Rather than having endless debates and explaining to the officials about how and why “Inter Net” is different from “Closed Circuit Tele-Vision”, we respond proactively, ahead of the regulations; creating our own communication strategies. I see my role here in exemplifying the conflict and its resolution.

MG: To the more traditional art practitioner out there who may not be so dedicated or as involved as yourself, in using computers and technology as part of the creative process; how do you manage to keep the balance, maintain the essence of what you do, as art?

DV: I’m for sure not “doing art”. I reflect on certain things, certain events, topics. Those often happen to have technological origins – nothing very surprising nowadays. My works are somewhat “improved” versions or “hacks” of our every-day technology and thus – our life. It is an essential thing for me to work with the same means as the means of the subject of my criticism – e.g. /misuse/ a piece of technology to demonstrate its other potentials; it is a more constructive approach.

MG: What other projects can we expect to see in the future other than what we have discussed so far?

DV: More technological interventions… and I was also thinking of building a railway model! People should check http://k0a1a.net more often.

MG: Will do, and thank you very much for the conversation…

DV: Thank you, nice chatting…


danja vasiliev
http://k0a1a.net

Other Information:

Danja was also interviewed by Marc on a Furtherfield, radio broadcast 6th April 2010 – Resonance FM. http://www.furtherfield.org/resonancefm.php

You Are Not A Gadget

Jaron Lanier
You Are Not A Gadget
2010
Allen Lane
ISBN 1846143411

Jaron Lanier’s book “You Are Not A Gadget” is a timely polemic, a cry of the soul in an increasingly soulless Web 2.0 world. I found reading it a frustrating and inspiring experience. For every time I wanted to throw the book at the wall in exasperation there was a time where Lanier spoke to a part of me that the cultural transition from 90s cyberpunk to 2010s cyberpreppy had optimised out.

Lanier is asking the right questions. What happens to our conception of what it means to be human when the way we represent our humanity is reduced to snippets of media on (micro-)blogs and social networking sites? How can we support a middle class of independent artists when the technology and economics of the Internet makes money directly only for the vectorialist media barons of Web 2.0? Will the technologically enabled troll class become a political threat akin to historical fascism?

These are questions that need asking, and Lanier asks them in an intelligent and open way. This is all the more impressive given his background as a champion of cyberculture. Lanier is not fearful or dismissive of the changes that the technology he championed has wrought. He is looking them in the eye and challenging their new proponents to explain the gap between their claims and their reality.

The problem is that Lanier’s answers crash and burn from a lack of detailed knowledge of non-cyber culture. He contrasts the managerialism and capitalism that he mis-identifies as materialism with a naive and easily exploited mystificatory spirituality. He accepts unquestioningly the music recording industry’s claim that the Internet has destroyed the economic and cultural value of music. And his characterisation of commons-based peer production as digital Maoism is wide of the mark.

To address just one of his examples; the cultural smog of the contemporary Internet follows the exhaustion of mass culture, it has not produced it. Napster is not to blame for the X Factor. The Beatles, generally regarded as a cultural highpoint of mass culture, were a reactionary throwback to earlier rock and roll tropes and were identified as such by Cliff Richard at the time. The well of mid-20th century black American music was returned to in the 1960s, 1970s 1980s and 1990s and was dry by the era of the parochial third-order nostalgia of Britpop. Crucially, Britpop pre-dates Napster and mass adoption of the MP3 file format. Lanier’s adopted narrative doesn’t add up.

But I come to praise Lanier, not to bury him in data. His is an ambitious critique, an important challenge to deeply ingrained cybercultural beliefs. We should all be so brave as to face the consequences of what we believe in so directly. And his final conclusions, not those of a disappointed cyber-hippy who should have been careful what he wished for but of someone who has kept faith in the potential of technology for us to realise ourselves, are as inspirational as they are accusatory.

You can google any number of blow-by-blow disagreements with Lanier’s thesis. And his own FAQ on the book is in many ways more convincing than the book itself. But if you have any interest in contemporary culture as it is mediated by technology you owe it to yourself to find your own points of difference and agreement with Lanier and to look beyond that to the spirit of what he is saying.

Which is that we should not be reifying and reducing our selves and our experiences into packets of data that the social robber barons of Web 2.0 can sell to marketing companies and government agencies. We should be using virtual reality and the other affordances of information technology to expand our consciousness and to grow as socialised individuals.

Web 2.0 can be oppressively straight and conformist. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t dismiss Lanier’s ambition to create a virtual reality system that could let him experience being an octopus. Wonder what it would be like to try it yourself, and how you would explain it to your friends.

Not the entries on your Facebook Friends list, your actual friends…

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Entropic elasticity: Critical Glitch Artware & the demoscene.

Article by Rosa Menkman

Based on an interview with the Critical Glitch Artware Category organizers and contenders of Blockparty and Notacon 2010: jonCates, James Connolly, Eric Oja Pellegrino, Jon.Satrom, Nick Briz, Jake Elliott, Mark Beasley, Tamas kemenczy and Melissa Barron.

From April 15-18th, the Critical Glitch Artware Category (CGAC) celebrated its fourth edition within the Blockparty demoparty and this time also as part of the art and technology conference Notacon.

The program of the CGAC consisted of a screening curated by Nick Briz, performances by Jon Satrom, James Connolly & Eric Pellegrino, and DJ sets by the BAD NEW FUTURE CREW. There were also a couple of artist presentations and the official presentation of a selection of the (115!) winners within the Blockparty official prize ceremony.

The CGA-crew
‪The CGA-crew‬

A Critical Glitch Artware Category at Blockparty and Notacon 2010?

The fact that CGAC was coupled with a demoscene event is somewhat extraordinary. It is true that both the demoscene and CGAC or ‘glitchscene(s)’ focus on pushing boundaries of hardware and software, but that said, I (as an occasional contender within both scenes) could not think about two more parallel, yet conflicting worlds. The demoscene could be described as a ‘polymere’ culture (solid, low entropic and unmixable), whereas CGAC is more like an highly entropic gas-culture, moving fast and chaotically changing from form to form. When the two come together, it is like a cultural representation of a chemical emulsion; due to their different configuration-entropy, they just won’t (easily) mix.

But all substances are affected (oxidized) by the hands of time; there is always (a minimal) consequence at the margin. And this was not the first time these two cultures were exposed to each other either; Criticalartware had been present at Blockparty since 2007. Moreover, a culture can of course not be as strictly delineated as a chemical compound; it was thus clear that this year the two were reacting to each other.

While over the last couple of years the demoscene has been described in books, articles and thesis’, this particular kind of ‘fringe provocation’ is not what these researchers seem to focus on; they (exceptions apart) concentrate on the exclusivity of the scene and its basic or specific characteristics. The ‘assembly’ of these two cultures during Blockparty could therefore not only serve as a very special testing moment, but also widen and (re)contextualize the scope of the normally independent researches of these cultures. So what happened when the compounds of the chemicals were ‘mixed’ and what new insights do we get from this challenging alliance (if there is such a thing)?

A very brief introduction to the demoscene.

The demoscene is often described as a bounded, delimitated and relatively conservative culture. Its artifacts are dispersed within well-defined, rarely challenged categories (for the contenders, there is the ‘wild card’ category). Moreover, the scene is a meritocracy – while the contenders (that refer to themselves with handles or pseudonyms) within the scene have roles and work in groups, the elite is ‘chosen’ by its aptitude.

The demoscene also serves a very specific aesthetics, as enumerated by Antti Silvast and Markku Reunanen this week on Rhizome (synced music and visuals, scrolling texts, 3d objects reflections, shiny materials, effects that move towards the viewer – tunnels and zooming – overlays of images and text, photo realistic drawing and adoption of popular culture are the norm). In the same article Silvast and Reunanen declare that: ‘Interestingly, even though we’re talking about technologically proficient young people, the demosceners are not among the first adopters of new platforms, as illustrated by numerous heated diskmag and online discussions. At first there is usually strong opposition against new platforms. One of the most popular arguments is that better computers make it too easy for anybody to create audiovisually impressive productions. Despite the first reactions, the demoscene eventually follows the mainstream of computing and adopts its ways after a transitional period of years.'[1]

More about this can be read at Rhizome’s week long coverage of the demoscene. Silvast and Reunanen’s statement might be most interesting when we move along to see what happened during the meeting of the two scenes.

A pre-history of the Critical Glitch Artware Category: Criticalartware.

Co-founded by jonCates, Blithe Riley, Jon Satrom, Ben Syverson and Christian Ryan in 2002, Criticalartware is a radically inclusive group that started as a media art history research and development lab. Since 2002 the group has shifted and transitioned. Criticalartware’s formation was deeply influenced by the Radical Software platform (publications and projects). Since then it has been an open platform for critical thinking about the use of technology in various cultures. Criticalartware applies media art histories to current technologies via Dirty New Media or digitalPunk approaches. Through tactics of interleaving and hyper threading it permeates into cultural categories of Software Studies, Glitch Art, Noise and New Media Art.

During the first phase of Criticalartware (from 2002 – 2007), the group was a collaborative of artist-programmers/hackers. It also functioned as a media art histories research and development lab. In this form, Criticalartware had become an internationally recognized and reviewed project and platform.

When this phase ended in 2007, jonCates, Tamas Kemenczy and Jake Elliott were the remaining active members of Criticalartware. During this time, Elliott and Kemenczy wanted to take the project in a new direction; into the demoscene. This direction has ultimately defined the second phase of Criticalartware; an artware demo crew, making work for and appearing annually at the Blockparty event and Notacon conference in Cleveland.

2010 marked the next important transition for the Criticalartware crew, when it started using the phrase ‘Critical Glitch Artware’- Category. Criticalartware now not only organizes itself around the demoscene but also around the concept of the glitch. While a glitch (not to be confused with glitch art) appears as an accident or the result of misencoding between different actors, CA’s Glitch-art category exploits this possibility in an metaphorical way. Criticalartware is now foregrounding these glitch art works (with an emphasis on the procedural/software works) that have been on a ‘pivotal axis’ of the crew for a long time.

Melissa Baron from CGAC presenting her work Hacking 73H 0r3g0n 7r41L for the Apple
Melissa Baron from CGAC presenting her work Hacking 73H 0r3g0n 7r41L for the Apple

Critical Glitch Artware.

CGA, just like the demoscene, can be described as an open (plat)form for artistic activity/culture/way of life/counter culture/multimedia hacker culture and (unfortunately a bit of ) a gendered community. CA are about pointing out ideas or concepts within popular culture and incorporating (standardizing) these as machines or programs in a reflexive and critical self-aware manner.

CA can also be described as an investigating of standard structures and systems. They are often amongst early adopters of technology, in which they (politically) challenge and subvert categories, genres, interfaces and expectations. But the CGA – artists do not feel stuck in a particular technology, which makes it aesthetically, at least at first sight hard to pinpoint a common denominator.

There is not a real organization within this scene. The artists and theorists are scattered over the world, connected in fluid/loosely tied networks dispersed over many different platforms (Flickr, Vimeo, Yahoo groups, Youtube, NING, Blogger and Delicious).

Criticalartware and Demoscene.

Because of its bounded, intricate conservative qualities, the demoscene has been an easy target for outsiders to play ‘popular’ ironic pranks on, to misunderstand or misrepresent. A growing interest for the demoscene by outsiders has compelled jonCates and the Criticalartware crew to articulate their position towards the demoscene more extensively. In an interview with me, jonCates articulates Criticalartware’s points and contrasts these with problematic representations of the demoscene within two works by the BEIGE Collective (that in 2002 existed along side the Criticalartware crew in Chicago).

When the BEIGE collective went to the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) Conference in 2002 they made a project called: TEMP IS #173083.844NUTS ON YOUR NECK or Hacker Fashion: A Photo Essay by Paul B.Davis + Cory Arcangel.

jonCates writes to me that ‘this problematic project characterizes or epitomizes a kind of artists as interlopers positionality that i + Criticalartware as a crew has always attempted to complicate. we do not want or understand ourselves as seeking out an ironic or sarcastically oppositional position in relation to the contexts that we choose to work in. we have not set out to ridicule the demoscene or otherwise make ridiculous our relations to the demoscene. in contrast, we set out to operate within a specific demoscene through multi-valiant forms of criticality, playfullness, enthusiasm, respect, interest, admiration, etc… this has also been in efforts to connect this specific demoscene to our experimental Noise & New Media Art scenes or what you Rosa referred to earlier as glitchscene…’

Another point of contention for jonCates is the Low Level All-Stars project by BEIGE (in this case, Cory Arcangel) + Radical Software Group (Alexander R. Galloway). this work is described as ‘Video Graffiti from the Commodore 64 Computer’ (2003) by Electronic Arts Intermix who sells/distributes this work as a video in the context of Video Art.

Low Level All-Stars has been shown at Deitch Projects in NYC in 2005 and circulated in the contemporary art world. jonCates writes to me saying the work seeks ‘to isolate + thereby establish cultural values for this ‘quasi-anthropological’ view of demos as found object + functioning as a tasteful ‘testament to a lost subculture.’ It is now being offered online as an educational purchase for $35 dollars.

However, as jonCates and Criticalartware work in the demoscene demonstrates, the demoscene subculture is not lost, nor over. jonCates moves on by writing that ‘the demoscene is a vibrant whirld wit a dynamic set of pasts + presents. this is another of which many (art) whirlds are possible. we seek to make those whirlds known to each others + ourselves out of respect, curiosity, investment, inclusiveness, criticality, playfullness, etc…’

CGAC even glitched ‬the sync...
CGAC even glitched ‬the sync…

Critical Glitch Artware Category and Blockparty.

Jake Elliott presents CRITICAL GLITCH ARTWARE CATEGORY at BLOCKPARTY and NOTACON 2010
Jake Elliott presents CRITICAL GLITCH ARTWARE CATEGORY at BLOCKPARTY and NOTACON 2010

The Criticalartware crew has been taking part in Blockparty since 2007, when it won the last place in a demo competition and was disqualified. One year later, in 2008, through a number of efforts (including Jake Elliott’s presentation Dirty New Media: Art, Activism and Computer Counter Cultures at HOPE, the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC in 2008). CA was able to mobilize and manifest the concept of the Artware category at Blockparty, a category which Blockparty itself retroactively recognized CA for winning.

In the same year (2009) CA organized a talk at Blockparty in which they revealed the “secret source codes” of the tool they used to develop the winning artware of the year before.

By 2010 CA wanted to expand the concept of Artware within the demoscene, which lead to the development of the ‘Critical Glitch Artware Category’ event. Within the CGAC Compo there where 115 subcategory winners, which showed some kind of glitch-critique towards systematic categorization of Artware. Jason Scott (the organizer of Blockparty) personally invited CGAC to pick 3 winners and present their wares at the official Blockparty prize ceremony. Besides these three winners, CGACs efforts got extra credits when Jon Satrom’s Velocanim_RBW also won the Wild card category compo.‪

Satrom + his prize‬
Satrom + his prize‬

Therefore, not only did CA intentionally open up the Blockparty event to outsiders of the demoscene, it also provided a place for new media art and the glitchscene within the demoscene and got Blockparty to accept and invite the CA within their program. Thus, the outsiders (CA) moved towards the inside of the event, while the insiders got introduced to what happens outside of the demoscene (event), which led to conversations and insights into for instance bug collecting, curating and coding.

Some thoughts about what CGAC, Glitch Studies and CA can ‘learn’ from the demoscene.

The Critical Glitch Artware Category has been accepted by, at least, the fringe of Blockparty 2010. Even though the category itself is not (yet) visible on the website, Satrom’s winning work Velocanim_RBW is. Moreover, CGAC was part of the official prize ceremony, streamed live on Ustream, the live Blockparty internet television stream. So how does CGAC redefine or reorganize the fringe between them and the demoscene and how does the demoscene redefine and reorganize the structure of CGAC?

For now, I think crystallized research into the aesthetics of the demoscene can also help describe the aesthetics within CGAC. Custom elements like rasters, grids, blocks, points, vectors, discoloration, fragmentation (or linearity), complexity and interlacing are all visually aesthetic results of formal file structures. However, the aesthetics of CGA do not limit themselves, nor should they be demarcated by just these formal characteristics of the exploited media technology.

Reading more about the demoscene aesthetics, I ran into a text written by Viznut, a theorist within the demoscene (who also wrote about ‘thinking outside of the box within the demoscene’). He separates two aesthetic practices within the scene: optimalism (an ‘oldschool’ attitude) which aims at pushing the boundaries in order to fit in ‘as much beauty as possible’ in as little code necessary, and reductivism (or ‘newschool’ attitude), which “idealizes the low complexity itself as a source of beauty.'[2]

He writes that “The reductivist approach does not lead to a similar pushing of boundaries as optimalism, and in many cases, strict boundaries aren’t even introduced. Regardless, a kind of pushing is possible — by exploring ever-simpler structures and their expressive power — but most reductivists don’t seem to be interested in this aspect”.

A slightly similar construction could be used for aesthetics within Glitch Art. Within the realm of glitch art we can separate works that (similar to optimalism) aim at pushing boundaries (not in terms of minimal quantity of code, but as a subversive, political way, or what I call Critical Media Aesthetics; aesthetics that criticize and bring the medium in a critical state) and minimalism (glitch works that just focus on the -low- complexity itself – that use supervisual aesthetics as a source of beauty). The latter approach seems to end in designed imperfections and the (popularized) use of glitch as a commodity or filter.[3]

Of course these two oppositions exist in reality on a more sliding scale. Debatebly and over simplified I would like to propose this scale as the Jodi – Mille Plateaux (old version)BeflixAlva NotoGlitch MobKanye West/Americas Next Top Model Credits continuum; A continuum that moves from procedural/conceptual glitch art following a critical media aesthetics to the aesthetics of designed or filter based imperfections.

This kind of continuum forces us to ask questions about the relationships between various formalisms, conceptual process-based approaches, dematerializations and materialist approaches, Software Studies, Glitch Studies and Criticalartware, that could also be of interest or help to future research into the demoscene. When I ask jonCates what other questions CGAC brings to the surface, he answers:

“when i asked Satrom to participate in the CRITICAL GLITCH ARTWARE CATEGORY event + explained the concept that Jake + i had developed to him he was immediately interested in talking about it as form of hacking a hacker conference, by creating a backdoor into the conference/demoscene/party/event. im also excited about this way of discussion the event + our reasonings + intentions, but i want to underscore that this effort is also undertaken out of respect for everyone involved, those from the demoscene, glitchscenes, hackers, computer enthusiasts, experimental New Media Artists, archivists, those who are working to preserve computer culture, Noise Artists + Musicians, etc… so while this may be a kind cultural hack/crack it is not done maliciously. we are playful in our approach (i.e. the pranksterism that Nick refers) but we are not merely court jesters in the kingdom of BLOCKPARTY. we have now, as of 2010, achieved complete integration into the event without ever asking for permission. perhaps that is digitalPunk. + mayhaps that is a reason for making so many categories +/or so many WINNERS! 🙂

…also, opening the category as we did (with a call for works [although under a very short deadline], an invitational in the form of spam-styled personal/New Media Art whirlds contacts + mass promotional email announcements of WINNERS! (in the style of the largest-scale international New Media Art festivals such as Ars Electronica, transmediale, etc…) opens a set of questions about inclusion.

…whois included? who self-selects? whois in glitchscenes? are Glitch Artists in the demoscene? etc… this opening also renders a view on a possible whirld, which was an important part of my intent in my selection of those who won the invitational aspect of the CRITICAL GLITCH ARTWARE CATEGORY. by drawing together (virtually, online + in person) these ppl, we render a whirld in which an international glitchscene exists, momentarily inside a demoscene, a specific timeplace + context.”

Some final thoughts on CGAC /vs the demoscene.

Lately the demoscene seems to get more and more attention from “outsiders”. Not only ‘pranksters’, artists and designers who are interested in an “old skool” aesthetic, but also researchers and developers that genuinely feel a connection or interest to a demoscene culture (I use ‘a’ because I think there still should be a debate about if there might be different demoscene cultures).

This development makes it possible to research a subculture normally described as ‘closed/bounded’ and to see where and how these different cultures are delineated. The tension between Blockparty/Notacon and Critical Glitch Artware Category is one that takes place on a fringe. They do not come together, but while it would be easy to just think that probably the CGAC sceners were just ignored (and maybe flamed) by the demosceners half of the time, some more interesting and important developments and insights also took place.

The CGAC-crew has over the years shown itself to be volatile, critical and unexpected, but it has also shown respect to the traditions of the demoscene and in doing so, earned a place within this culture (at least at Blockparty). This gave the CGAC-democrew not only the opportunity to put a foot in the backdoor of a normally closed system, but also to give some more insights into what they expose best: they confronted the contenders with their (self-imposed) structures and introduced them to (yet to be understood and accepted) new possibilities.

So what happens when a polymere is confronted with entropic gasses? I think the chemical compounds get the opportunity to measure the entropic elasticity of their dogmatic chains.

Also read:

Carlsson, Anders. Passionately fucking the scene: Skrju.
http://chipflip.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/passionately-fucking-the-scene-skrju/ Chipflip. May 20th, 2010.

An Interview with Patrick Lichty Part 1

Patrick Lichty, renowned conceptually-based artist, writer, curator and activist. He has exhibited internationally since 1990. Featured image: taken by Anne Helmond.

Adventures of a Networked Explorer.

Introduction.

Patrick Lichty is an individual who seems to be like a non-stop engine. A hungry human being, engulfed in a prolific journey of constant exploration, whether it be making artworks, writing, activism, curating, collaborating, researching or teaching; he’s deeply involved and engaged in media arts culture. Since 1990, he has pursued art and writing that explores how we relate to one another through technology and how we relate to it. This includes art, media, and computer technology. “Media are one of the “glues” of civilization, and this glue is as fundamental in representing all aspects of society, culture, and interpersonal relations. I explore this through critical theory, conceptual New Media art, and performance/social intervention.”

Lichty also works in almost all forms of Digital 3D – Animation, VR, Fabrication, Physical Computing. Translating the work for display through video, animation, live installation, electronics, virtual reality, physical computing, robotics, digital fabrication and imaging. As well as realising virtual works into traditional forms such as plates for print, paintings, expanding the focus of his work in a broader context.

Lichty’s work, concepts and practice do not rest in one place, it crosses over into many areas of creative production. By getting his hands dirty with the medium of technology, with its relational aspects. The spirit of the work goes beyond singular catch phrases and one-liners, adding complexity and value which only media art and its ever widening scope can demonstrate.

It’s big art with big ideas, interwoven with micro levels of human emotion, asking questions about life and more. This two part interview aims to clarify some questions I have been wanting to ask Patrick Lichty for a while now, so hang on and lets see what happens…

Start of Interview:

Marc Garrett: You have been deeply engaged in the creation of net art, networked art, media art and related activities at various levels, whether it has involved you making it, writing about or curating it. What inspired you to choose which is, now unquestionably, one of the most contemporary and expansive forms of creativity, in the first place?

Patrick Lichty: This is a question that has come up repeatedly. “Why did you choose (what is now called) New Media, or the intersection between society, technology, and culture?” It is really a matter of examining my native culture, which has been that of technological culture. I was raised by an artist who gave me my first electronics set at the age of 8, and my first computer by the age of 17, while raising me on a steady diet of science fiction. I was a child of McLuhan; growing up in the electric networks on a diet of very hot media. However, I do also paint, and when I think it’s appropriate, I also do use traditional media. In short, I speak this culture because it’s my native language.

MG: To kick off this interview I thought it would serve our readers well to discuss your work from a perspective of themes. Over the years, exploration through your practice has crossed over into many different disciplines and fields. So lets begin with Psychogeography. To those who are unfamiliar with this practice, the most well defined and serious use of it was in 1955 by Guy Debord: “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities … just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”

“Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping quest for a new way of life is the only thing that remains really exciting. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved glaringly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest indifference. We should therefore delineate some provisional terrains of observation, including the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets.” Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Guy Debord

Patrick, one of your projects which springs to mind, is a work called SPRAWL “…an exploration of the suburban American landscape, examining the macrocosmic issues related to suburban expansion by considering the microcosmic issues of the experiences of a bellwether area of the US: Stark County, Ohio. In navigating the landscape you will view over thirty panoramic photographs of sites that are now forever changed by the area’s development as well as interviews on video and historical documents which create a map of the larger social landscape of the surrounding community.”

A complex and involved project. What inspired you to examine the ‘suburban American landscape’ in such a way, and how long did it take to complete?

PL: In talking about Debord’s definition, I’d like to talk about my own interpretation of the idea of Psychogeography. If you consider the word etymologically in contrast with Debord’s meaning, you can say that it should not be limited to the urban landscape, but the relationship of human interaction with any landscape. From this, we move out of the city to any relation between community and space, which is my interest, and I like to term as a practice of ‘land use interpretation’ to borrow Matt Coolidge’s (CLUI) term. All of my work in this range, from SPRAWL to the three projects in varying stages of completion (the Hulett Project, Ghosts of Adak, and SPRAWL 2011) come from a personal observation that expands to a macroscopic discourse through the larger exploration/research of the space.

Image: Web Interface of Sprawl
Image: Web Interface of Sprawl

SPRAWL began as a 3-year personal investigation of my own distress about suburban sprawl in the late 1990’s near my home town, and linking this to the larger national conversation regarding sprawl at the time. For reference, I was born in nearby Akron, Ohio – the subject of Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders song My City Was Gone, which describes the colonization of an industrial city and its countryside by sprawl and shopping malls, so if SPRAWL has a soundtrack, that would be it. I began SPRAWL in 1998, as a series of panoramic photographs of various sites near my home, with just a vague impression that they were a cohesive body of work. Also, the idea of nostalgia for the pastoral farmland of my younger days seemed far too simple to be satisfying, so I knew there was something to it. So, when the Smithsonian American Art Museum put out a call for works dealing with landscape online, I felt this was a fantastic place to really explore this idea in a larger context. Then they offered me the commission, the project went from a set of 32 panoramas to a hyperdocumentary in about three solid months of production, including travelling back to Ohio from Louisiana, interviewing, doing on-site footage, and performing historical research.

What I think is important about SPRAWL is that it’s ‘sensable research’, in that it managed to manifest the ideas I had about this problem, learning a lot more about community ecology, allowing the articulation of a microcosmic issue in macroscopic terms. In more personal terms, it allowed the development of my question of social issues related to my concern with the understanding that my perspective was only one of many, and from examining a multitude of perspectives, I could learn what the larger issues were, and create a discourse with a larger community.

MG: On your website, for the Ghosts of Adak there is a statement of yours, saying “My father and I have something in common. He was born in 1921 and spent 2-1/2 years in the North Pacific campaign on Adak Island in the Western Aleutian Islands in Alaska. I have heard about it since 1962. So I went there for 10 days. And I found him all over again.”

I also visited another site to find out about the community living there, and on this site called Alaska Tracks. Ned Rozell writes “Adak’s having a tough time, and the community of about 200 people in the mid-Aleutians has been struggling since the Navy pulled about 6,000 people out in 1997. It’s got a feel to it now like the Love Canal area of Niagra Falls had in the 1980’s, like everyone took off and left a few ghosts behind.”

How was your 10 days stay there and what did you learn?

Do you have a clear idea of what this project will become? Also, I noticed that it is part of an artist residency program at Eyebeam R&D Atelier NYC. How do you intend to present this work, in a space, on-line or something else?

PL: That’s a book in itself, and probably will be, which is part of your next question. First, why – My father is nearing 90, and for most of my life, he had gone on about this “place” that he had been for a period of time, and recounting endless stories about it. No place else had that sort of impact on him. Does not talk about Seattle, or San Francisco, or even Chicago (all places he had spent time) like that. I also think that as he is nearing 90, and in that he and I have a very strong bond (actually both Lodge brothers, if you can believe that), and I wanted to know about him in the deepest way possible, and probably in so doing, learn about myself and the site. But then, that fits the process.

The issue with Adak is that it is a tremendously complex place even before I overlay my own emotional architectonic. It was the site of the Northern Pacific campaign of the United States versus Japan during the Second World War, mainly as a diversion from Midway. I had made a deal with the CEO of the facility to exchange the photos for a room, a 40-something Niigata-born guy with petrochemical ties, whose father might have been my father’s enemy, and ideologically, probably was mine, but the personal nature of the trip put that on hold. There were a lot of external and internal conflicts that I had to navigate just to get there.

Image: part of the project The Ghosts of Adak
Image: part of the project The Ghosts of Adak

In short, Adak is currently the remains of the Adak Naval Base and surrounding facilities, which is basically a minor port, petrochemical storage facility, a fishery, and home of the westernmost airport linked to the Continental US, further west than Hawaii. If you rent a car, you rent one of the trucks a local offers, the gas comes from the tank farm, and the ‘hotel’ is a number of duplexes that the residents rent out to visitors. There is a General Store, a cafe at lunchtime, and the old VFW becomes the tavern for dinner, offering an entree or some microwaveable snacks along with a full bar. You sign a disclaimer to absolve the Corporation of any liability if you encounter black mold, fall into an old stairwell, sinkhole, run into an old unexploded shell, etc. I’m speaking a little darkly about this place, but it’s pretty rugged with radically changing weather, frequent earthquakes, and they’re still cleaning up the old artillery ranges.

On the other hand, it’s one of the most amazing places to be. It’s right at the edge of civilization, a volcanic arctic island withn no trees and some of the most amazing wildlife you’ve ever seen – eagles, otters, seals, birds. I can see why my father talked about it so much.

One other thing of note is that while doing the project, I’ve run into all sorts of people who have served, lived, or even been born there, as there was a 6,000-person family facility. On the plane from Minneapolis to Anchorage, I ran into an airline pilot who had just been on a caribou hunt there, and he gave me his GPS information and a lot of pictures. On another trip, I ran into a woman who was born there. It was unbelievable.

What did I learn? I learned about a history that few remember, I learned about my own history and how it affects me. I also learned about the local culture, its history, how Alaskan culture meshes with corporate interests to create a lot of the issues seen in mass media. There isn’t a lot of concern for the area from the locals, and actually the Military was doing a decent job with the cleanup. From a more personal level, I also came to understand that everything is transitory. Art, culture, society, all ephemeral in terms of a mountain. Human beings don’t matter very much to a volcano, but definitely the other way around.

When I was walking on the western (uninhabited) side of the island, I had napped on some tundra and realized I didn’t have my GPS or keys – all my keys. I knew where I slept, and I leave my keys in the car a lot. The worst that could happen was that I would have to walk 5 miles into town in a cold drizzle, get Jimbo the Constable to let me into my car and get the truck in the morning. In the end, I learned that if it isn’t a landmine, it’s not that big of a deal.

“Do you have a clear idea of what this project will become? Also, I noticed that it is part of an artist residency program at Eyebeam R&D Atelier NYC. How do you intend to present this work, in a space, on-line or something else?” This is really tough for me – no, I don’t have a clear idea yet because it’s so hard to frame. It probably needs to be a book, but it isn’t going to be done for a couple more years. I’d like it to be a hyperdocumentary like SPRAWL, but not in the same way. Also, I think it would make a great presentation, and the images are really beautiful. As I mention, it’s terribly hard to frame this project, and I think it should be allowed to be large.

MG: Let’s talk about a piece you created with The Yes Men. As many in the know, know – and of course those who have fallen foul to the Yes Men’s activist-pranks; they are legendary cultural saboteurs. They have impersonated World Trade Organization corporate spokespersons, including Dow Chemical Corporation, Bush administration spokesmen on TV, at various business conferences around the world. In order to demonstrate some of the mechanisms that keep bad people and ideas in power. Focusing attention on the dangers of economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of people and the environment. They have more recently become more known to a world-wide audience for The Yes Men, a movie.

Could you inform myself, and readers about the mock industrial video ReBurger and how it came about?

PL: Right. The animation work for The Yes Men is a strange beast, because it came from previous work for a group called RTMark, from which some of us came from to do Yes Men, which is well documented in the two movies. Again, the process for these animations, which I later edit into industrial videos is also an odd one. Usually, when there is an intervention (and I have sometimes appeared in person), Mike will give me a call and say something like, “Hey Patrick, we have this idea for this, for that company…” In this case, it was an idea for recycling feces for the Third World, and not much beyond that general concept. At first, I was thinking of translating dietary fiber to textile manufacture, creating a suit that would look like S**t, but shortly thereafter, brainstorming created the McDonald’s parody. I knew it was going to be shown at Plattburgh College, but beyond that, I didn’t have much context. So, that’s where my process in context with the larger presentation sort of diverges. Mike, Andy and Matt were developing the presentation, and I started in on the simple metaphor of eating shit. In short, I get some basic ideas together, and then produce the clips (not the full industrial video).

Image: Screenshot from ReBurger, watch video online
Image: Screenshot from ReBurger, watch video online

Beyond that basic joke, it’s really just exaggeration – the idea of an international infrastrucure for the collection of post-consumer waste, the branded toilet, and the special product names, like “McDung”. The scene that seems to get people is the one of the Ronald McDonald Colostomy Machine (the paste dispenser) as it creates the brown coil of reprocessed waste and then presses it into nice patties. For me, this is the use of pure literal metaphor, and maybe that’s why it works. Maybe it’s because it stands for a corporation that offers “choices” for healthy eating that few choose, and McDonalds willingly contributes to the obesity and illness of billions. In my opinion, ReBurger just tells the truth.

Screenshot from ReBurger
Image: Screenshot from ReBurger

But the reason why people like the video is also a reason why it was a real problem for the sale of the movie at Sundance 2003. Although it was obvious fair use, many in the film industry were also buyers looking at the movie. Mike Bomnano told me that the legal departments of the movie companies were trying to determine the degree of risk of satiring McDonald’s, complete with branding. This was obviously Fair Use under US Copyright, but again, the possibility of an egregious law suit could have happened. In the end, McDonalds decided to ignore the piece, which was great, since I believe it’s one of the stronger Yes Men pieces.

MG: In the UK, June 1997, the infamous McLibel Trial (mcspotlight.org) came to an end. The case was between McDonald’s and a former postman and a gardener from London, Helen Steel and Dave Morris. It ran for two and a half years and became the longest ever English trial. “…Helen and Dave decided that they would stand up to the burger giants in court. They knew each other well from their involvement in community based campaigns in their local North London neighbourhood and felt that although the odds were stacked against them, people would rally round to ensure that McDonald’s wouldn’t succeed in silencing their critics.” The defendants were denied legal aid and their right to a jury, so the whole trial was heard by a single Judge, Mr Justice Bell.

“The verdict was devastating for McDonald’s. The judge ruled that they ‘exploit children’ with their advertising, produce ‘misleading’ advertising, are ‘culpably responsible’ for cruelty to animals, are ‘antipathetic’ to unionisation and pay their workers low wages. But Helen and Dave failed to prove all the points and so the Judge ruled that they HAD libelled McDonald’s and should pay 60,000 pounds damages. They refused and McDonald’s knew better than to pursue it.” Mcspotlight.

I can imagine that McDonald’s were considering their past experience, with cases such as the McLibel Trial. “The legal controversy continued. The McLibel 2 took the British Government to the European Court of Human Rights to defend the public’s right to criticise multinationals, claiming UK libel laws are oppressive and unfair that they were denied a fair trial. The court ruled in favour of Helen and Dave: the case had breached their rights to freedom of expression and a fair trial.”

For your project 8 Bits or Less, in 2002, you wrote a brief statement which I am assuming must be about your own condition, saying “An artist who has become blind (whether physically or ideologically) has resorted to viewing his world through the prosthetic devices that constitute his sense, like cell phones, and wristcams. The result is a distorted landscape that considers Situationist theory, surveillance culture, identity, and alien abduction.” Can I begin by asking why this statement came about and then what part of the project you feel communicates or is expressesed most successfully?

PL: First on the matter of ReBurger, I think that the smarter entities know not to react, but that isn’t always the case. Perhaps the ones who have been burned, now have a smarter PR team.

8 Bits or Less is a series I did that was influenced by several things.
Image: 8 Bits or Less, 2002

8 Bits or Less is a series I did that was influenced by several things. For many years, I had felt that as technological artists we are slaves to “innovation”, which is merely an exciting word to stand in for the commercial upgrade path in software and hardware. This set of videos addresses my dissatisfaction with the notion of verisimilitude in regard to techological art, or the “big ticket” piece. Ever since the late 1990’s my response has been to either get by with just enough aesthetic polish to make the work believable/legible, or to willingly embrace a low rez/grayscale time. The lo-fi grayscale is not the same as 8-Bit, which has 256 colors and refers to early personal computing and video games. Perhaps it is closer to my passion for Slow Scan television (a 1970’s video modem technology in which a frame is transmited every 7 seconds) or my position of eschewing resolution and color depth as a form of intransigent aesthetics. In addition, the fact that the frame rate is at most 3 frames per second, and was shot with a Casio Wristcam at one frame every 1.5 seconds was also my homage to Muybridge, mainly in terms of the grayscale and serial qualities of the video. Beyond that, and the fact that each video consists of about 900 frames, all hand edited, perhaps 8 Bits or less is more about my politics about the technological industry and personal differences with New Media and technolust.

On the personal side, 8 Bits or Less is an allusive fable having to do with the fact that I have been blind a couple times in my life, but this blindness can translate to the fact that for a period of time I felt that I had immersed myself in my studio for long enough, that I saw the world primarily from my screen. Therefore, although I had been visually imparied for part of my life, much of which has been fixed by having cataract removal in 1999, I still felt that there was a metaphorical blindness caused by society’s use of mobile devices, the existential distorions of 24-hour cable networks and the Internet. Therefore, the series (if you listen very closely) incorporates a mix of postmodern theory and hyperbolic statements about aliens, obscure jokes about bits and nybbles, surveillance culture and the abjection of low fidelity.

What I think is successful about it is that it holds together at all, or that it engages the viewer without necessarily relying on leading edge technological conceits, but perhaps using the wristcam aethetic is a conceit in itself. Antoher aspect that I have enjoyed about it after five or six years is that it is a really hallucinogenic series of pieces. But then, I think this is the point that Gibson made about cyberspace that has been expanded on by the Baudrillardian mediascape and the Internet – the consensual mass hallucination (facilitated by mass communications).

———
Watch 8 Bits or Less series. Images link to videos online.

A wristful of bits. Found on DVlog.

A wristful of bits. Found on DVlog.

8 bits or less. Found on DVlog.

8 bits or less. Found on DVlog.

http://www.dvblog.org/movies/04_2007/lichty8bit/closevision.mov

Close vision. Found on DVlog.

Big thanks to DVblog for 8 Bits or Less images & video links.
http://dvblog.org/

F.A.T. Lab at Transmediale.10

Featured image: F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab) were found causing trouble at the Transmediale.10 this year.

A collaborative review/interview by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati

An interesting outsider project at Transmediale.10 this year, was F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab). A collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, musicians and trouble-makers who have been working together for two years, on the intersections of Pop culture and Open source. Their stapline describes them as “An organization who is dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media”. Beware, they love using the word ‘Fuck’. A lot! Which means they are cool, and some you grown ups may feel slightly unnerved by their over generous outpouring of flippant explitives, but the kids out there just love it!

You can read an explanation of their work in the about section on their website, and view a video presenting some of their ideas and works. With a simple rap base with nasty yellow and pink colors, it could be considered as a joke. Perhaps, to some degree it is, but at another level they are playing around with social contexts of the Internet culture’s, presumptions and acceptance of things. Through an omnipresent ludic approach they reuse what is given to us all with a contemporary pop attitude – showing us the many contradictions from these given systems. Proposing other possibilities in order to loosen and to free things up from the copyright laws and prescribed rules of both big companies and clumsy governments.

One of their projects called Public Domain Donor, consists of D.I.Y stickers saying “In the event of death please donate all intellectual property to the public domain”. They write “Why let all of your ideas die with you? Current Copyright law prevents anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death. Live on in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation. By donating your IP into the public domain you will “promote the progress of science and useful arts” (U.S. Constitution). Ensure that your creativity will live on after you are gone, make a donation today.”Simple and humurous.

'In the event of death please donate all intellectual proerpty to the public domain'

Yet, behind their process of cultural detournment exists a reference to earlier net art critique, by Critical Art Ensemble who way back in 1995 said “Each one of us has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person’s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is his or her data body -a state-and-corporate-controlled doppelganger. What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.” The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net. Critical Art Ensemble Summer, 95

Also as stimulating, is the idea Graffiti Markup Language, an XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags, and easily reproducing them.

Their style is easy, effective and of course – Pop!!!

For Transmediale.10 they presented a project called Fuck google, one of their more involved works, appropriating the image of Haus der Kultur der Welt, the futuristic bulding hosting Transmediale, formerly known as the Kongresshalle conference hall, a gift from the United States, designed in 1957 by the American architect Hugh Stubbins Jr. as a part of the Interbau exhibition. John F. Kennedy spoke there during his June 1963 visit to West Berlin. Fuckgoogle focuses on reminding us all how this big company has become omnipresent in our digital lives, refering to the risk that too much data is owned and is going to be owned more and more, just by Google alone. It exists as a collection of browser add-ons, open source software, theoretical musings and direct actions.

For Transmediale.10 they presented a project called Fuck google, one of their more involved works, appropriating the image of Haus der Kultur der Welt, the futuristic bulding hosting Transmediale, formerly known as the Kongresshalle conference hall,

Not necessarily trying to be a definitive solution against the big G in any sense of the word, but more a reminder, a provocative virus to diffuse. So we have a graffiti firefox skin, fuck google pins, The F.A.T Pad or some plugins to reclaim your public individual space on your browser. Everything is D.I.Y and opensource, so you can easily replicate it. The approach can be find with FuckFlickr a free image gallery script offering everyone who visits a Flicker-like image gallery.

a free image gallery script offering everyone who visits a Flicker-like image gallery

The F.A.T. Lab is an example of technological sabotage. Of course, it’s not a new thing in respect of the hacker community: using the instrument, medium directly, in order to change perceived assumptions of our reality. What is quite new is F.A.T. Lab’s blatant exploitation of everyday Pop culture and its language. The hacker counterculture has always had it’s own way of communication, built in the late 80’s and 90’s. These days, more and more people use the computer, not just hackers. Using Pop culture in order to communicate one’s message could be one possible way to escape the duality culture/counterculture. On the other hand, F.A.T. Lab could be creating a fresh paradigm which allows others who would not normally appreciate hacker culture or even media art culture, filling a space beyond art culture which could be considered as too refined.

Interview with Evan Roth from F.A.T. Lab at Transmediale.10

Marcello & Gaia: Can you describe who you are and how do you connect each other?

Evan Roth from F.A.T. Lab: We are a group of friends. There’s not any formal application process or open call, many come from typical art organizations. It started out as a group of friends and then slowly, more friends joined. We also made more friends, collaborators on line. Here at Transmediale.10, it’s actually our first chance to meet face to face and some of us have not met before. There are two things that mainly characterize us. On one side, there is the open source culture and advertisement free culture, but also the idea that this all should be fun. Art and political activism doesn’t have to be a boring, the interface of it all, can be accessible to more people. We try to push this candy coding, get the those audiences who are using youtube videos, that is our primary audience. We like it when art organizations pay attention to us but really our main audience is at the borders of things, using different networks, commercial networks out there, happening outside of the gallery.

M&G: If we look at the projects you are showing here there is a kind of aesthetic in common, the colours are really interesting, the pink and the yellow remind us early 90’s spam. Is that aesthetic a primary decision, is the style you choose to define you, or has it just happened in the progress of your work.

E: I answer that in two. There is a thing from open source development culture that is ‘release early and release often’, we try to apply this model to the media production. We try to release ‘early and often’. If you are on the fence where you should release something or not and it is not quite ready, just push out the door, because it is better to have it in the public counter system than not. So the aesthetic of the website is in part probably pushing out the door rather taking care of the nuances or the color it is. We just try to get this thing published quickly. Someone could be sitting on their brilliant idea and waiting for years to release, waiting for some details and then you find that no one really cares about this in the end. But there is also an aesthetic interest in common, that comes from this ‘dirty style’. There is an artist friend, Cory Arcangel who is one of my favorites, and he describes the dirty style as ‘either you take little interest in design so it becomes so un-aesthetic or you over-work it to a point that the work itself becomes something too trivial’. We don’t have meetings about how the website is going or what it looks like.

M&G: Don’t you think that this “dirty style” is somehow hiding the real content or the message? The use of ‘dirty style’ is obviously an answer of the hyper sensibilization, concern of the form but at the same time this makes your work splitting in between the no-attention of form and pushes content in the corner.

E: The way our websites look matter’s less and less now, because people don’t go to websites for content anymore. Most of the traffic in the websites do not even see the pink and the yellow, design. There is some kind of form/function relationship going on. We are interested in rolling up this web 2.0 idea a little bit, and that’s what this installation here is about at Transmediale. The early 90’s aesthetic was with people hand coding html and making tables, not downloading a WordPress thing. In that sense, there is a sort of connection to the DIY, rolling back to the way of 1.0 – where the files are hosted in your own server and not google or yahoo.

M&G: Isn’t it more interesting to try and critique in a more constructive way, creating something else, not just another google appropriation but other kind of net platform for a community? Could that be one of the important challenges for artists now?

E: Open source is a big movement and free culture is even bigger and so we know that there are people out there hacking in this way right now, but we are not programmers, there are programmers taking part but these are not our skills. Our place in this movement is in the media side. We do have programmers in our group but we feel more like media makers. We make these videos and they are kind of funny and taking something from the pop/culture, twisting them, possibly people have a look and pass them around. But there are messages in them. And the messages are trying to reveal the money and the branding business that google is making and saying it is not cool, and being involved in an alternative open source culture looks better. We also have a development tool like fuck flicker and flv player where you can have your own videos up like you tube.

M&G: Why are you are supposed to win this year’s Transmediale? You stood up on the stage during the award claiming the award for yourselves!

E: Oh no, we don’t think we are supposed to win. Do you know Kanye West? This is a USA story, we joked about Kanye a little bit. We’re always trying to pay attention to what is going on in pop culture and surf a little bit. Kanye was notorious for interrupting a ceremony whenever he lost, grabbing the mic. As we were for this fuck google project – last night, the winner was a youtube related project, and google is a sponsor. The message we tried to get across last night, was a reference to this, and we are gonna have an official press release on it soon. But I think that for Transmediale, our project was an anomolie, showing this fuckgoogle in contrast to accepting web 2.0, which is actually a range of projects. We were surprised to be invited, who know’s what for? But we think that it was a very wise decision, and we are really happy to be here.

On their website you can get a clear impression of their feelings towards Google “So, what is so “fuck-worthy” about Mother-google? It is the fact that a corporate entity, even one as beloved and competent as Google, is in control of such a large stake in the digital network and public utility upon which we have all grown so reliant. And, that as a publicly traded company, it doesn’t have to answer to anyone but its largest shareholders, despite the fact that its decisions effect the lives and private information of millions of people. Few even question or raise a voice in opposition to the Google-ification of the Internet.”

There were more than 1,500 submissions for the Transmediale.10 awards, nine art projects were nominated and F.A.T. Lab was a runner up amongst them. Showing contemporary, activist art within a larger more incorporated festival is to be commended, it is not an easy thing to do. And we all know how easy it is to criticize rather than make something ‘real’ and positive happen. F.A.T. Lab are a tangible byproduct of a culture, caught in the trappiings of Hyperreal situations, a confused world losing itself even further into a perpetual state of denial. Pop culture and celebrity related banalities are constantly distracting our gaze. It is an interface which can only handle life via mediated proxy. F.A.T. Lab know’s this, and have adapted themselves to literally scrap with it on their own terms. Their role and place in the world is to get out there on the front line and go places where the common people reside. They want to be on the main stage battling it out, whilst challenging the interface presented to us all – making it their playground.

You can also read Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati’s article about this year’s Transmediale.10 here…

HTML Color Codes

Curated by Carolyn Kane for Rhizome September, 2009.

#60605 plus #20101 does not equal black, but it looks like it to me. And despite Newton’s insistence, a rainbow is never made from seven colours in neat lines, nor can I see millions of colours on my calibrated monitor. It is more likely that each day I engage with the screen as a greenish-blue glow infused with hits of magenta. Or as it is today: a summer grey of sea fog glimpsed through the rain. Is that a colour? Carolyn Kane curated HTML Color Codes in order to ask these questions of the relationship between colour, code, and subjectivity. Tracing a carefully structured path through twelve artworks Kane seeks to examine whether artists working with the Internet are limited to a ‘ready-made’ colour palette. Asking if digital colours reflect the programming languages that have been adopted, Kane considers whether the Internet adds its own rules for colour through the adoption of the hexadecimal system of colour values. Does the language determine the content?

20090419.html, HTML, 470 x 340 by Chris Ashley (2009)
Untitled, 20090419.html, HTML, 470 x 340 by Chris Ashley (2009)

The answer is, not quite. It all depends on where and how the viewer approaches the screen. Rather than trying to be paintings these works engage with the materiality of digital colour and the manipulation of a different kind of flat predetermined surface – the screen. Chris Ashley gives us rectangles within rectangles, Dlsan manipulates circles within circles, and Michael Atavar offers the blue screen of an empty window with text written as if in the condensation of a cold morning. It is the noise of the digital image embraced by the inadequacy of a gif representation of a treasure heap of digital gold in Jacob Broms Engblom’s “Gold”, or the absence of any controlling frame in Owen Plotkin’s “Firelight” and the flickering spaces nested within and alongside one another in Rafael Rozendaal’s “RGB” that suggest different rules for the digital image. In these latter works the illusion of immediacy raises a spectre of some kind of phenomenological directness.

thethingasitis TM by Michael Atavar (2001)
thethingasitis TM by Michael Atavar (2001)

Twentieth century colour field painting was never a single set of experiments yet it carried within it a set of cultural and formal presuppositions. The digital colour field has its own baggage set. It is inbetween: inbetween code and software, browser and window, network and bandwith. More often than not the experience of the digital colour field is the result of an image within an image or a screen within a screen. Despite its origins in hexadecimal notation digital colour is not a ready-made, but an experience and a process of light and interaction. Anyone who has attempted to capture or translate a colour between screens knows that accidents occur. Noah Venezia’s “The Rainbow Website” suggests that a kind of synaesthesia can be experienced through the screen, that colour exceeds the values assigned to it. Andrew Venell’s “Color Field Television” mimics the flicker of experimental film from the 1970s. Perception becomes a process of seeing the colours inbetween, the work turns back on itself mirrored within a screen. Structural film experiments were about exploring more than perception they too turned back to the medium. Morgan Rush Jones gets even closer with the phased colour space of “Number of ManufacturingIndustriesbyNumberof Product ClassesinanIndustry”. The work is simultaneously overloaded with image and abstracted from it. There is a strange congruence reflected here: in their formality these works do not push new experimental boundaries but reflect older ones.

Colors Combination Tool by dlsan (2002)
Colors Combination Tool by dlsan (2002)

Michael Demers explicitly engages the materiality of the digital medium by establishing a series of systems within which abstraction can occur. Sampling Morris Louis’s oil painting “Where” from 1960, Demers generates a sequence of flat colour planes (windows) from left to right that disappear as quickly as they appear. The drip and movement of Louis’s work is rendered temporal. Brian Piana’s “Elsworth Kelly Hacked my Twitter” also addresses the temporality of the digital. Real-time data orders the compositional frame in a direct chronological sequence. Each square is a representation of an invisible network. Manipulation of the scale, size and shape of the frame is left to the viewer. For me it is Elna Frederick’s “@ = landscape” that allows an interactive experience of the subjective dimension of colour that is specific to the digital. The click of a mouse becomes the experience of putting a finger into a stream of water and disturbing the flow. It is not necessarily the colour that makes the rain but the movement and the belief instilled in us from Super Mario that onscreen fluffy white blobs potentially contain rain. There is a cool sensuousness to the trickle of pixels as it becomes water and when left alone returns to simply being yet another onscreen blue.

Gold by Jacob Broms Engblom (2009)
Gold by Jacob Broms Engblom (2009)

There is a risk of over determination in this show, the kind of visual parity that results from too many works looking at the same thing and becoming somewhat redundant. It is the quiet spaces between the works, the mutable changing structures of the blue screen that resist this limitation. As long as bandwidth remains with us, and the links stay live, these works are infinite and through their repetition we experience an abyss of generated colour and code. These are predominately forms consisting of colour alone, and surprisingly, that is enough. This is how the medium of digital colour should be approached. There is no translucency, but there is an unlimited interplay of substitutions.

Color Field Painting ("Where," after Morris Louis), Browser Windows by Michael Demers (2009)
Color Field Painting (“Where,” after Morris Louis), Browser Windows by Michael Demers (2009)

Transmediale.10 – Futurity Now!

A collaborative review by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati

The article features artwork, projects and conference highlights from individuals and groups/organisations such as Honor Harger, Gebhard Sengmuller, Franz Buchinger, Ryoji Ikeda, Julian Oliver, Damian Stewart, Clara Boj, Diego Diaz, Ken Rinaldo, Michell Teran, Aaron Koblin, Daniel Massey, F.A.T, Warren Neidich, Kahaimzon Michel, Bruce Sterling, I-Wei Li, Steve Lambert Matteo Pasquinelli and more…

Opening-concert at Transmediale.10. By Jonathan Groeger 2010.
Opening-concert at Transmediale.10. By Jonathan Groeger 2010.

This year’s Transmediale.10 Festival explores the theme ‘future’ through connections between arts and technology. A part of the introduction read “Futurity is a concept that examines what the ‘future’ as a conditional and creative enterprise can be. At its heart lays the intricate need to counter political and economic turmoil with visionary futures. […] what roles internet evolution, global network practice, open source methodologies, sustainable design and mobile technology play in forming new cultural, ideological and political templates.”

2010 is a year that has often represented the future in Science Fiction literature, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, and now here we are. A good time to compare how we percieved the future, the past, and assess what is really happening, what we lost and what we have gained, and ‘perhaps’ find better ways to proceed. Art can offer different perspectives, ways of seeing and understanding, revealing our present states of being, sharing alternatives or even new meanings for our futures. This festival allows those visiting and taking part, an opportunity to explore, negotiate possible avenues in understanding together, what all this means.

Most of the Transmediale.10 events and art presentations were hosted at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the same venue for past editions. The main exhibition Future Obscura, was curated by Honor Harger. A big dark room, a labrynth of exhibits divided up with high black curtains. Presenting different artworks enhanced by their own resonances of light. The concept was to use the actual light-sources from each of the artworks, as a kind of curatorial, installation metaphor. Immediately effecting the visitor’s experience through its overall ambiance, built around the theme or vision of future.

We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel? Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006).

An electronic camera obscura and media-archaeological, interactive sculpture.
Parallel Image by Gebhard Sengmuller, transmediale 2010

The work Parallel Image by Gebhard Sengmuller, in collaboration with Franz Buchinger, supported by Fels-Multiprint may of inspired the whole concept. An electronic camera obscura and media-archaeological, interactive sculpture. An apparatus for presenting different possible fictions, futures. “Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel Image” is technologically completely transparent, conveying to the viewer a correspondence between real world and transmission that can be sensually experienced.” It presents the fiction that the technology of transmitting moving images was not discovered or invented at all – so no electronic pixels, just a camera and a monitor connected by 2,500 cables in order to track the movement of a body or an object.

Whilst weaving through the dark, curtain bound maze, discovering the separated presentations of Future Obscura, or what we can consider playfully here, as the ‘futurity tunnel’. We come across the video-audio installation data.tron, part of the datamatics project by Ryoji Ikeda. A huge screen (about 15 ft high & 40 foot wide) stands in front of visitors on a flat wall-surface. Various projected sets of data – consisiting of databases, computer consoles and white noise move and unfold before your very eyes. Music plays along with the images issuing forth deep hypnotic sensations. Each single pixel is strictly calculated by a mathematical principle and composed from a combination of pure mathematics. Ikeda reuses and deconstructs the data, building it up into a massive art-work, which also becomes an immersive experience. The same concept was used in his live performance at Transmediale.10 ‘Test Pattern’.

Various projected sets of data - consisiting of databases, computer consoles and white noise move and unfold before your very eyes.
Data.tron by Ryoji Ikeda, transmediale 2010

The Artvertiser, a work by Julian Oliver, Damian Stewart, Clara Boj and Diego Diaz, is a tool to swap advertisement with art in public spaces. With a self-made binocular device and dedicated software, you can experience a new metropolitan landscape, replacing the omnipresent adverts which plague our urban environments with art or images of your choice. The swapped, proposed images are often a play on the words of the original advertisement. Whichever image one substituted, the central message of the Artvertiser remains the same; our public city landscapes are bulging with publicity, we want to take that space back and personalize it – quite the same concept of graffiti, but dealing with the reproduction and re-representation of our public spaces. The software running on the device is an open source project and it will soon be available for all to download and use with Smartphones and Standard Camera phones. The Artvertiser points out a thoughtful and critical view point of our present, proposing an alternative future directly linked to our everyday lives. Ironically, this is a theme that is unfortunately scarce or missing in most of the selected Transmediale.10 works.

With a self-made binocular device and dedicated software, you can experience a new metropolitan landscape, replacing the omnipresent adverts which plague our urban environments with art or images of your choice.
Artvertising Berlin, Transmediale 2010 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo. http://vimeo.com/9291451

The work Paparazzi Botsby Ken Rinaldo, consisting of a series of autonomous robots. Each of them upright, the height of the average human. Packed with lens-based hardware, such as “cameras, sensors and robotic actuators on a custom-built rolling platform, they move at the speed of a walking human, avoiding walls and obstacles while using infrared sensors to move toward humans.” Capturing images of the visitors as though they were celebrities, flashes go off, then the images are projected up onto the surrounding walls. A popular installation reflecting on the abuse of reproduction and exhibition: some of the images were also uploaded and then distributed through social networking sites – a mass mediatic celebration of the visitors as well as the celebration of the bots.

Packed with lens-based hardware, such as "cameras, sensors and robotic actuators on a custom-built rolling platform, they move at the speed of a walking human, avoiding walls and obstacles while using infrared sensors to move toward humans."
Paparazzi Bots by Ken Rinaldo, transmediale 2010

The selection of Transmediale.10 seems to award reproduction of content rather than consciousness of a different form of creativity. Also, the main prize is unexpectedly given to a woman, Michell Teran, with the project Buscando al Sr. Goodbar: a real tour through Murcia, a Spanish town, taking place at the same time on Google Earth and YouTube, an interaction between reality and social media. The work was presented at Transmediale.10 as a video remix of the original work. “The tour audience was introduced to everyday performances and actions happening in the city that often go unnoticed. Somebody solves a Rubik’s Cube in under 2 minutes, a young man plays a piano, a group of friends drunkenly sing together, a 14 year old boy headbangs in his bedroom, somebody is choked, a man teaches himself Arabic and two people fall in love. At certain points the audience left the bus and met some of the video authors who presented them with re-enactments of their performances.”

In the same way the second prize was awarded to the project Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey. A web-based, software able to record people repeating what they heard, then they used these voices to make a reconstructed version of the song Daisy Bell – the first song that implemented musical speech synthesis in the 1962.

a real tour through Murcia, a Spanish town, taking place at the same time on Google Earth and YouTube, an interaction between reality and social media
Buscando al Sr. Goodbar by Michell Teran, transmediale 2010

Speaking about the difference between re-production and creation, it is interesting to notice that the group F.A.T were present at the awards. Using intentionally, and excessively open source and pop culture as way of expressing their creative actvities, claiming and distributing activist propoganda-like projects, on networked territories and facilities (facebook/google ndr.) in order to stress out the holes of content present in the Web2.0 culture. For Transmediale.10, they presented a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to free software, browser addons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, they also built a fake Google Street View car and toured it in the city of Berlin.

Using intentionally, and excessively open source and pop culture as way of expressing their creative actvities, claiming and distributing activist propoganda-like projects, on networked territories and facilities (facebook/google ndr.) in order to stress out the holes of content present in the Web2.0 culture
Fake Google Street View car, F.A.T,, transmediale 2010.

A more singular approach, which revealed different or other connections of a network is shown in Neuropower, by the biologist and artist Warren Neidich who won The Vilem Flusser Theory Award 2010: he researched new ways to manipulate the process of ongoing cerebral reconstruction. Exploring the potential of Neuroaesthetics, formulated in the mid-1990s “as a paradigm capable of describing the complex conditions of the ‘now’-a moment in which global technological networks and novel potentialities for subjectivity are coming into greater focus and correlation to each other. As knowledge becomes ever more commodified, and labor increasingly immaterial, our notions of art, work, and politics…”

For Transmediale.10, they presented a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE
Fuck Google workshop by F.A.T., transmediale 2010

The gap between what could be the future or what we are imagining through the mass-media industry and the challenge that artists and creative thinkers are asked to face, is not really elaborated. A good example is the conference Phuturama: a space dedicated to the possible alternatives of an ‘imaginary’ for the future. One of the guests was Kahaimzon Michel: his description of the new version of Far Cray was mostly focused on the technical improvement of the game and no word at all was spent on the idea, the concept itself: the umpteenth war-games, colonialist and male-centered. The celebration of technology itself was the splitting point of this Festival, as it was somehow already announced at the opening day by Dr. Franke. His main contribution seemded to be about the importance of ‘Avatar’ the movie, for its big technological improvements.

Going back to the events, one of the most awaited speeches was Bruce Sterling’s keynote speech “Atemporality – A cultural speed control” about time and its relation to ‘future’. The main introduction text for Atemporality – A cultural speed control read “The speed of our society is constantly increasing in terms of processes, logistics and media, causing the present to ‘shrink’. We are experiencing the dissolution of meaningful frameworks in a similar way as Henry DeTamble: in politics, the intervals of planning and acting are reduced to the duration of a legislative period and in post-industrial economics volatile unpredictability has come to replace regular traits of growth and stability. Progress as the paradigm of modernity has been replaced by the continuous modulation of events. If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The structure of the future has changed, and with it our sense of time. Are we running out of a future as a resource for growth, progress and stability? Has our cultural cruise control become defective?”

Reflecting on the proposed theme, Sterling presented Atemporality as he viewed it, an approach in understanding and recontextualizing history, “an effort in humanities” to embrace reality, the now.

“Step one – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.

Step two – write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys.

Step three – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted.

Step four – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.

Step five – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.

Step six – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.

Step seven – create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Step eight – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.” Sterling.

The philosophy of history studies, an objective point of view, a map that does not always reflect the real. Atemporality instead, has to be a “calm pragmatic skepticism about the historical narrative” like telling stories of people who were not the winners, report history that has no literacy or playing fiction into reality, being a “personal public testimony of a future that doesn’t exist”.

“Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.

Futurity was expected, futurity is here now, there goes futurity into the past, so long futurity, thank you for an exciting, fulfilling and worthwhile time.” Sterling.

The Atemporal approach asks us to cool things down, challenge the need and desire for a constant, linear future. Proposing not to rush ever onwards, remembering what we have now, reclaiming and rediscovering the qualities we possess rather than feverishly running forward all of the time. You can read Bruce Sterling’s whole speech here – Atemporality for the Creative Artist

"Atemporality - A cultural speed control" about time and its relation to 'future'
‘Atemporality – A cultural speed control’ conference, transmediale 2010

A subject which played a central role for much of the discussions held, was related to the economy and how it addresses the creative work (a third of the speeches were about this topic). The financial crisis had also influenced much of the artistic agenda. Unfortunately all this talking about commerce was often presented without critical reasoning, and so we had a lot of showing off and gesturing about how amazing certain new technologies were. Which gave off a more bland sense of enthusiastism, a technologically determined, already accepted future, without the necessary awareness of the overall social contexts of what it all really means. Yet there were some projects that tried to propose a different view on this theme. The performance Values, by I-Wei Li, pretended to calculate, with the help of a computer, the value (artistic-value) of the participant, based around questions on art and art practice. The Laboratoire Deberlinisation uses an uncommon way to discuss about immigration and value in our globalized world, with the provocative use of an African value, the Afro, an international insurance card and passport.

The Laboratoire Deberlinisation uses an uncommon way to discuss about immigration and value in our globalized world, with the provocative use of an African value, the Afro, an international insurance card and passport.
Baruch Gottlieb and Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Laboratoire Deberlinisation

A deep critical, discussion of the current socio-economical situation produced by the international financial crisis, was held in the main auditorium, Liquid democracies. Steve Lambert presented his works and talked about direct politics, re-using our culture and how to subvert it. In his opinion, utopia has to be used as a direction and not as a destination, living moments of freedom: an alternative approach for direct, political change, using small actions and persistence, participating tactically through our cultures. Matteo Pasquinelli later focuses attention on the whole of net society and the digital matrix. He wondered who has the strongest power, who detains the monopolies and which place is dedicated to the workers and specifically to the cognitive (creative) workers? Pasquinelli used the concept of a “new feudalism” to define contemporary societies. The multitude is not fluid but embroils in a participatory process that traps it in-between the oligarchy of the big companies. Democracy in this sense has ended and gives the go-ahead to a post feudalistic society. The end of this construction is an open question: is there any subject able to break the power of these big monopolies?

Parallel to Transmediale festival is Club Transmediale Festival CTM a music and visual arts event held every year in Berlin. The festival started as the musical side of Transmediale and then added more and more interests involving the arts. Through the years it has become more popular and expanded, not just with music during the night, but also with their own exhibitions, talks and lectures during the day. This year the event was even longer than Transmediale itself, starting from January 28th and ending February 7th 2010, with the subject “OVERLAP – Sound & Other Media” giving a lot of attention to the relationship between music and videogames.

A missing element worthy of attention at Transmediale.10 this year, was its audience. Even though the amount of visitors were three times more than last year. The time for questions and discussion with the public was often too short, or ineffective. A contemporary approach in acknowledging the audience would be to understand there is not a clean divide anymore. And even though the old protocols still count in some cases, its representation at the festival was not necessarily a true reflection of the nature of networked, contemporary art and its culture. A hidden and dynamic audience which could have offered their own ‘valid’ interpretations around the subject was lost. Yet, on the whole the festival was extremely interesting in many ways, and had some excellent works and discussions well worth experiencing.

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Scribner Book Company, December 2009
ISBN 1439116830

Featured image: We Feel Fine project poster

“We Feel Fine – An Almanac Of Human Emotion” is a hardback book that in just under 300 pages of well designed montages, data visualisations, diagrams, illustrations and text presents and analyses the data gathered by the We Feel Fine project. Started in 2005 and launched in early 2006 by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine is based around a database assembled using a webcrawler that searches the blogosphere for statements of the form “I feel” or “I feel like”. Any matches are stored along with as much contextual data as the webcrawler can find (a photograph nearby in the blog post, the poster’s age, gender, and location, local weather). The database contained twelve million such entries by the time the book was published.

Sections of the book categorise statements of feelings by age, gender, the location of the poster, and subject of the statement. Individual statements are presented superimposed over images found in the same blog post. The photographs presented with their accompanying expressions of emotion have a high-contrast, shallow depth of field, and highly focused look that resembles Lomography. But this is a product of the presentation of photographs on the web rather than an hipsterly ironic invocation of the contingent aesthetics of mass photography. The images are for the most part JPEGs, and show the contrast, mach banding and visual noise of that technology.

The montages of “I feel…” statements in a standard format superimposed over an image found in the same blog post serve to provide a (sometimes incongruous) context for the statements that the project is based on. They resemble Gillian Wearing’s “Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say” 1992-3 featured photographs of people holding up placards on which the artist had asked them to write down what was on their mind. Going back further into the history of art, the montages and in a novel way particularly the data visualisations and graphs bear comparison to Vermeer’s seventeenth Century paintings of bourgeois social relations and reverie. Both “Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window” and “We Feel Fine” present social class, social self-presentation, advanced communication technology and consideration of the thoughts of others in a medium and way that epitomises the way people see things in that era.

Collage of images from Girl reading at an open window and We feel fine

The book’s volume of data and graphics quantifying social phenomena might resemble a “state of the blogosphere” corporate social media report in some ways, but its presentation directs attention back to the emotions featured rather than trying to tie them to any corporate or governmental agenda. This is a book by, about and for individuals in contemporary mediatised society. I found reading it became quite overwhelming sometimes once I had adjusted to its presentation.

Dictionary definitions, statistical breakdowns of the kinds of words, ages and genders of bloggers and other demographic and affective data are presented in compact graphic form on every page, and larger charts show more general conclusions. Feelings, or the words used to refer to them, are shown to vary between genders and as people age. This is an exemplary application of Edward Tufte’s science of the graphical presentation of information. They even have sparklines. But that science is applied to data that is at its heart qualitative rather than quantitative.

Photographs, quotes and data from the book We Feel Fine - An almanac of Human Emotion

Such “data visualization” was a hot trend in 2009. Visualisations of crime rates, corruption, climate change and other issues can be produced using such data, and have become an important weapon in the arsenal of visual persuasion. On the We Feel Fine web site, feeling data is mapped to coloured blobs in an interactive user interface to the constantly updated (every minute) database. In the book, feelings and demographic information are processed to produce graphics that represent the prevalence of feelings over time, between genders, in different locations and in relation to each other. But as visual persuasion this is directed back to the vividness of human, qualitative experience rather than a more political or economic agenda.

“Sentiment analysis” was also hot trend in social media marketing in 2009 and its limitations quickly became apparent. Current systems simply cannot handle irony, sarcasm, regional differences in the usage of words and in many cases even simple negation. The We Feel Fine system is an exercise in gathering affective or sentiment data to visualise, but it avoids the pitfalls of sentiment analysis by automating only the gathering of the statements of emotion themselves, not analysis of how they relate to what they refer to. This is a classic example of well-chosen limits strengthening a project.
The problem of the relationship between qualitative (how you feel) and quantitative (how many people feel what you feel) data and how to deal with this in a non-voodoo way are avoided in We Feel Fine because of this.

Another 2009 hot trend was “big data”, the assembling of datasets that vary from many megabytes to many gigabytes in size. Datasets from regional and national governments, scientific research and freedom of information requests can be used in “data mining” to search for facts among the numbers. The We Feel Fine system is a good example of a big data dataset (and API, application programming interface, for accessing that data over the web). Unlike global temperature data it neither offers the possibility of objective accuracy nor involves any great risk if it lacks it. But it does reintroduce the human subjectivity that big data threatens to replace with numbers.

The striking thing about this is that although the We Feel Fine book is very much of the zeitgeist for 2009 the web-based system it presents started five years ago in 2005. At that time blogs were regarded by the mass media as disposable, narcissistic and somehow inauthentic. They were an unlikely subject at that time for art concerned with the authentic expression of emotion. We Feel Fine’s history, subject and results therefore both prefigure and go beyond the current state of the art in Internet social and corporate culture.

Coloured diagram on mood swings

Harris and Kamvar are admirably candid in laying out the history, methodology, technology and in the case of the book’s production even the finances of their project. The code listings included in the book are tantalising glimpses into how the We Feel Fine server works, allowing a rare chance for students and artists to study such a system, and are licenced under the GPLv3. The book is under the obscure but principled Creative Commons “Founders Copyright” licence which will automatically expire the copyright on the book in twenty years time. This is all invaluable for critique and study of the project by artists, academics and anyone with an interest in art and technology, and more artists should do it.

In the FAQ and other essays contained in the book Harris and Kamvar are open about the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the We Feel Fine system. They acknowledge the limitations and demographics inherent in profiling bloggers (who are younger, wealthier and more technologically savvy than is usual). They also make a convincing case for the very real conceptual strengths of the project, discussing how the system holds up as science and statistics. And the project itself is overwhelming as an aesthetic and, strangely, somehow as a social experience.

Colour line diagram about emotions

Even if we don’t deny or question the existence or status of emotions for ideological reasons, do we know what we really feel? And even if we do know what we really feel can we really express it in a way that will be understood by others? We Feel Fine doesn’t address these questions. They are outside of its scope. Its acceptance of sentiment at face value and its mechanical (re-)production of representations of sentiment might look like the hallmarks of kitsch. But that would deny the subjectivity of the original authors of the expressions of sentiment that We Feel Fine processes. And a progressive art needs to represent the masses, not merely rulers and pop stars. Not everyone will be feeling ironic or critical on any given day. Given this, the transparency, scale and effectiveness of We Feel Fine mean that ideological objections to big data, to emotional taxonomies, or to the very idea of emotion face a problem in the project’s aesthetic and affective success rather than vice versa.

Some of the stories found while researching the posts and presented in the book are heartbreaking or uplifting, but the statistical nature of the project makes these outliers – they are rare events and can be identified as such. What comes through from page after page of casual statements of feeling is an impression of the range of human experience, or at least the range of human expression. If you can adjust to the montage format and the diagrams then the book can inspire sympathy, pity, and joy for your fellow human beings.

The book ends by considering the philosophical and spiritual meaning of feelings, how they affect our lives, and what we can do about this. The data gathered to back up this consideration makes the conclusions both persuasive (this is a paradigmatic representation of humanity) and surprising (that would be telling).

We Feel Fine faces up to the challenge of making Internet art that realistically deals with the scale of the contemporary web. It does this by tackling the millions of daily new entries in the blogosphere but crucially it retains a focus on qualitative, subjective human experience. In its engagement with multiple levels and kinds of representation, from emotional taxonomies and statistical methods to digital photography, weblogs, and data visualisation, it shows just how broad are the range of systems and modes of depiction that artists can and possibly must deal with today. And it’s a project that simply wouldn’t exist if the people who made it couldn’t code.

We Feel Fine is a persuasive and insightful portrait of the individuals that make up the blogosphere. It can be overwhelming in terms of the amount of information and in terms of the volume and strength of emotion presented, but that is part of what makes it vivid. It is a paradigmatic, realistic and persuasive depiction of the qualitative experience of individuals within networked information society.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

State of Art – A Conversation with G.H. Hovagimyan

A conversation between G.H. Hovagimyan and Mark Cooley conducted through electronic mail – January 2008.

MC: Over the years, you’ve had experiences with various authorities that have tried in one way or another to censor your work. I’m interested if you could identify and comment on particular sites of censorship that exist in and around Art institutions and identify some the taboos that tend to generate negative responses from potential censors (curators, board members, sponsors, politicians, and other interested parties).

GH: The most blatant example was a piece called, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture. It was a text piece. I was going to put it in the windows of 112 Workshop (the first alternative space in New York City & the US) in 1974. Since 112 depended on grants from NYSCA and National Endowment for the Arts I was told I couldn’t do the piece because it would jeopardize their funding. I did do the piece later for another exhibition called the Manifesto Show for COLAB (an artists group I was a member of). When I first started working on the internet twenty years later in 1994 I put the piece up as a hypertext work. I have also updated it from a manifesto to an interactive textual maze http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect . The piece is not cute. It deals with the dark side of the American psyche. It is a meditation on the psychological states that would bring one to be an anarchist. It is a New York Punk Art piece. Punk was a rebellion against the fake hippy utopian art that was being produced at the time. That type of art is still being produced. It gets a lot of funding because it is uncontroversial.

From TACTICS FOR SURVIVAL IN THE NEW CULTURE 1994.
From TACTICS FOR SURVIVAL IN THE NEW CULTURE 1994.
http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect/tactics.html

There are of course several ways to censor artists for example the simplest is to not include the work in an exhibition or ask the artists to alter the work to make it more acceptable. This happens to me a lot in the US. Several of my artworks in particular my net.art works have sexual content. One of my first internet pieces Art Direct/ Sex Violence & Politics was always raising hackles because of the sexual content. It was not included in several major internet shows because the museums were afraid that children would come upon the images and they would be liable. In this case both the government and the institution censored the work. In France the same work was featured in a centerfold of Art Press magazine in a special issue on techno art.

From Art Direct/Sex Violence & Politics
From Art Direct/Sex Violence & Politics

People who censor are often corporations flexing their muscle. One of the pieces in Art Direct … called BKPC used Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls. At some point the isp host, *the thing* received a letter from Mattel toys demanding that the site be removed for violation of copyright. I had to get a lawyer and send them a letter saying it was fair use and for them to back off. Luckily the people at the thing were not intimidated by Mattel so the site stayed up. By the way BKPC is about interracial sex so it makes people uncomfortable or it’s titillating. When I showed the physical work in a Christmas showed called Toys/Art/Us, I was asked by the curators to make sure that children could not view the art work. I did this by mounting the works in glassine sleeves on a podium that could only be seen by standing adults. I was lucky the curator wanted to show the work and was willing to work through the problem with me. In other cases the curator would not be that imaginative and simply shy away from showing anything that was vaguely controversial.

Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls
Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls

Another case of censorship was the Whitney Art Port an online new media projects gallery. I did a piece called Cocktail Party that featured synthetic voices in conversations as if they were drunk and at a cocktail party. I was asked to remove three sequences because of their sexual content. I wanted so much to be included in this project and the curator was a friend that I altered the piece, removing the offensive parts. The curator was afraid that the corporation would stop funding the project if I offended them with my overt content.

This happens all the time to every artist and it’s quite a dilemma. If you do the work unaltered it often means that you are not ever selected again for exhibitions. But then again Michelangelo had to paint a fig leave on the Sistine Chapel.

MC: The funding issue is interesting to me and seems to come up in many of your experiences. Censorship stories, as rarely as they are covered in the news, seem to focus heavily on the ideological component of censorship and whether public money should be used to fund controversial art. I’m interested to hear more about how anxieties regarding funding (public or private) influence curatorial decisions inside art institutions. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this sort of economically determined censorship and its effects on art and public discourse around art. I’m also interested to know if these funding anxieties have worsened or changed as art institutions have switched over to the Arts management model and have made themselves so dependent on corporate sponsorship for programming?

GH: I did a large billboard piece called Hey Bozo… Use Mass Transit. It was five large billboards scattered around New York City to convince people to use mass transit. It was part of a competition put on every year by the MTA and Creative Time. I received an Honorarium of $500 and they produced the billboards. The piece caused such a stir that it was in the papers for a week straight and I was on TV on all the networks. One of the upshots was that conservatives wanted to know why public money was used to produce an artwork that insulted motorists and the other thing that happened was that Bozo the Clown tried to sue me for trademark infringement because I used the word Bozo. These are symptoms or indications of a deeper issue albeit a populist one. One the one hand you have a media figure (bozo the clown) who tries to sue anyone who uses the word Bozo. He’s got a sort of cottage industry. This is the way that corporations deal with the avant garde they can’t control. On the other hand you have mass media that tries to produce outrage in order to keep the attention of the population. This is also called delivering eyeballs and is a way to sell advertising. As you can see the main tool to attack an artist is money. either cut off funding or sue them. This is a way to stop them from getting their message out whatever that message might be. But there’s a flip side to this coin. We live in an information environment. There really is no way to stop information from coming out. It will be presented in a different venue for example the internet or in the case of art, alternative festivals, galleries etc.. So the idea of censorship is media specific or venue specific. It becomes a power game that is about who controls the venue and therefore controls the message. In this case it’s a reflection of the capitalist marketing system and art is a part of that system. But I see art as something beyond that system.

Hey Bozo... G.H. Hovagimyan. May, 1994
Hey Bozo… G.H. Hovagimyan. May, 1994

There are essentially two economies for art. One is the market for objects this includes galleries, museums, magazines and all the ancillary services of art fairs etc.. The other is the academic economy, which trains artists, curators and all the people interested in art. These systems shape what art is seen and what the content and style of the work is about. Both systems have self perpetuating mechanisms. In the market it is about the object. If you don’t make art that has a physical object you can’t be in the market. There is a component that has to do with entertainment and ticket sales in museums. This allows for installation and performance art as well as digital art and screen based art. Indeed, the economies of temporary museum spaces are a reflection of corporate manager style art.

The academic system on the other hand allows for artists who don’t necessarily fit the market to have some financial patronage by teaching. The problem is that the artist’s work and creativity is all about getting students to attend the university and their own class. This is another form of marketing.

I believe in a different type of art, an experimental, anarchic art that shakes things up and operates outside the existing art economies. In many instances this has been confused with the idea of an alternative life style that is a sort of well of inspiration for entrepreneurs looking for new products, ideas and people to sell to. Anarchic art is about something different it’s about challenging and critiquing the existing systems. Why? because I believe that art is about seeing things clearly and is one of the few areas that has freedom. That form of art becomes dangerous because it is uncontrollable. It can’t be packaged and marketed. That is why there is always a move towards censorship of radical art works.

There is also fake censorship or more precisely using outrage as a way to manipulate the art market. This is used successfully by people like Maurice Saatchi who had a show of his Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum. This show was also shown in England and there was outrage in London as well. The outrage in the US was about Cris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in a virgin mary painting. A nice piece of art that was about his African roots. The outrage in London was about a photograph that portrayed a famous criminal child murderer in England. The public and the press demanded the works be “censored.” The works themselves went up in monetary value because of the outrage. The position is that of an artist that uses an epatez de bourgeois position in their art. This reinforces the patron’s sense of being better than the masses. It is an elitist position. I happen to like the art works but the content of the pieces are standard for the art world. The Ofili piece is multiculturalism and the other work is punk. Both styles were first presented in the late 1970’s and I view these latest pieces as stylistically conservative.

As you can see the notion of censorship is more of an unfulfilled demand by an outraged person in the street than any sort of actuality when it comes to the marketing of objects. Those works that are actually censored one never sees or hears about.

MC: I’m interested in what you call “fake censorship” or the use of public and media outrage as a marketing tactic. I’m reminded of an article – http://rtmark.com/rockwell.html – by Jackie Stevens concerning “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” a 2000 Exit Art show concerning biotechnology. The article points out that, though the show included some very hard hitting criticisms of the biotech industry, it was nevertheless sponsored by biotech companies – companies that would have much to lose if consumers in the U.S. had the same sorts of concerns about biotechnology as some of the artists in the show. The obvious question of why would the biotech industry sponsor exhibitions that are openly critical of the industry’s practices is answered with the help of interviews with the chief biotech investor behind the show. Stevens writes, “The reason is simple: art about biotechnology, especially with a critical edge, serves to reassure viewers that serious concerns are being addressed. Even more importantly, biotech-themed art implicitly conveys the sense that gene manipulation is a “fact on the ground,” something that serious artists are considering because it is here to stay. Grotesque and perverse visuals only help to acclimate the public to this new reality.” I am also reminded of a transcript I used in a piece once in which a Sara Lee Corporation executive, speaking of the corporation’s “gifts” of impressionist art to the Art Institute of Chicago, stated, “Sara Lee’s art collection has made a statement – a quality statement – about our company. Art is all about excellence and vision and striving for perfection – the same standards that we uphold for our portfolio of leading brands. We are quite certain that the ‘brand names’ of Monet, Renoir and Degas have been a great complement to Sara Lee and have become icons of excellence that reflect our approach to doing business.” It seems that the mythology of fine art or the aura produced around fine art itself (namely, mythologies concerning artists being prophetic or ahead of their time, that art is about transcendence, universals, timelessness and so on) is a very useful context for the deployment of marketing schemes. Cases like these I’ve mentioned could almost make one nostalgic for old school censorship – the kind in which an authority comes down on an artist for producing work that is perceived as being offensive. At least in these scenarios the content is working – the work is having an effect. All this raises a couple of questions that I’d like to know your thoughts on. Firstly, do you agree with Stevens’ assessment that the content of an artwork as intended by the artist can be eclipsed (effectively censored) by the curator, sponsors and institutional framework surrounding the show and fine art itself, and if so, should artists be trained (in academia and elsewhere) to be able to anticipate how their work is being used in a larger context and be prepared to engage in content production beyond the frame (so to speak)? What are the lessons you have learned over the years in these regards?

GH: This goes back to Wittgenstein’s Dictum, “the meaning of a word is its’ meaning,” and “The meaning of a word is its’ use.”

Look at it another way Steve Kurtz http://www.caedefensefund.org was creating some bio-art that was also political when he was arrested. The event caused the USGOV to come down hard claiming he’s a bio-terrorist. The art world has rallied around Steve and is doing what it can to stop his persecution. Steve’s artwork was in process and never exhibited so you can’t say that it was censored and yet the USGOV is trying to pin a terrorist label on him. The context here is fluid between a media occurrence, freedom of speech, and forces of unreasonable paranoia. Steve and the people around him now have an ongoing performance work that is a cause celebre about free speech. In the end it doesn’t matter if anyone ever sees the actual work, the censorship and repressive activity of the USGOV is the key factor. When realpolitik comes up against art, art always loses. On another level both sides of the Steve Kurtz dilemma are winning because they are using the event to create meaning for their separate actions.

Back to your initial question which is the context created by the venue and the funders. There is always a deal struck between the funders/patrons/venues and the artists that show in the venues or accept support from the patrons. The patrons are seen as progressive and open because of their support of the arts. The artists are seen as giving their support/approval of the patron and the gallery system by participating in it. That’s the simple deal. The complex deal has to do with the content of the artwork. When the church is your patron you do religious paintings. When the Dutch merchants are your patrons you do domestic scenes. When the government is your patron you do heroic art that glorifies the government and its programs. In America the market has become the patron or more correctly corporate marketing capitalism and its technocratic bureaucrats/ managers are the patrons. The content of art reflects that reality.

However, there are many forms of art that operate outside these realities. The notion of experimental art is an art that doesn’t function in established arenas. Maybe we can call this theoretical art because it posits an art that can function outside of the normal venues set up for art.

In terms of censorship it may be more of a case of power and control. If one chooses to work in theoretical art one can expect no support from the existing patrons of the arts. This is a very fundamental struggle about who controls the meaning of art (content). Who controls the how, when and where of art? That is one of the reasons that I choose to work with the internet and digital art. The venues are much freer. There is little or no market action attached to this type of artwork. Indeed, this very interview is an artwork that uses the internet as its vehicle. I can state that it is an information/meditation that comes from the use of the networks. In this case it is an outgrowth of all the other communication artists that have come before me such as Fred Forest or, Joseph Bueys or Allan Kaprow.

MC: Earlier, you spoke of an anarchistic art practice that would function in opposition to the status quo. I’m assuming that this art practice would take on the political economic structure of an anarchist community. What might this look like? Are there examples of art subcultures that operate on anarchistic principles like anti-authoritarianism, free association, nonhierarchical organization, consensus decision making, egalitarianism, etc? I’m also interested in your estimation of online communities and new media art portals (like Rhizome.org for instance) who seem to reference some of these concepts in their mission statements yet seem to fall short in their editorial structure and policies. Perhaps, the concepts that sites like Rhizome imagine – decentralized and nonhierarchical – and indeed the internet itself seems to offer – would work in such stark contrast with what the dominant values of the fine art establishment (and our dominant political economic systems) that it becomes impossible to maintain funding, affiliations etc. Do you think the openness and opportunity for alternative systems and practices that electronic networks offer(ed) is now closing up, or do you see as much opportunity now as in the mid-to-late 90’s when it comes to networked art practice?

GH: There are many artists groups that are functioning at the moment. There is always a struggle and a dynamic where groups are involved. Rhizome has set up a sort of blog/news reporting website that has a brand name and a loose community around it. They have a mailist that functions somewhat as a place for critical discussion but the fundamental question is how does one move from discussion to action. The answer for rhizome is to be techno-centric and highlight emerging artists and technologies. They also spend a lot of time fundraising. The original project of rhizome by Mark Tribe was a simple anarchic mailist. This was also happening with nettime and thingist lists. There is one functioning now that is called [empyre] that comes out of Australia. Empyre was one of several list/communities that was featured during the documenta 6 in Kassel. I was actually involved in the discourse. My position was that I wanted to have my thoughts presented at the documenta http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1718 .

There’s a back and forth flux on the internet that has some onerous aspects of fake digital democracy and fake creative freedom. This is web 2.0 where everyone can be creative and be content providers ala blogs and youTube etc.. This is the corporate bullshit of Facebook and Second Life. There’s an interesting piece in the Guardian about facebook that has be re-published on post.thing.net http://post.thing.net/node/1883 .

In any case, I am involved with three very vital digital art groups that have online/offline communities. One is called [PAM] http://perpetualartmachine.com – this is a video-artists community that has a physical kiosk presentation mode that is very much about non-hierarchical presentation. Another is locus sonus http://locusonus.org in France – that is an experimental sound art lab. I’ve also organized an artists group called Artists Meeting http://artistsmeeting.org that is just beginning to pick up steam. Part of what these groups are about is using the technology to create a media space for group interactions to occur. The funding model is pooling resources. I maintain the server nujus.net that Artists Meeting and locus Sonus use. The sysadmin is an engineering student in Split Croatia who is donating his services. Locus Sonus is funded by the French Cultural Ministry as an experimental lab. [PAM] got its’ start by being included in the SCOPE art fair and artists Meeting is bootstrapping it at the moment.

What these groups have in common is the notion of doing projects together rather than having an individual artists’ voice. I like to engage in both positions, that is, I do individual pieces and I do group works. Two previous projects are accessible on the web right now. One is called rantapod http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod and is a series of performance/meditations that is downloadable to ipod. The other is called Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt, which is a podcast/sound art piece. These all challenge the art market in some way because they exist and are seen by large numbers of net audiences without any artworld support whatsoever. So I can say that the internet does still function as a good venue for experimental anti-hierarchical art.

ADDENDUM

MC: In preparing this conversation for publication I noticed that in one of your initial emails to me – before we actually started the interview – you stated that you’d been censored for not using particular software or hardware in the production or display of your work. I think this ties in nicely with our discussion concerning corporate funding, but something that seems more of an issue in new media art then anything else (I can’t imagine a paint company sponsoring a show and requiring the artists to only use their brand of paint). Perhaps you have some thoughts on this.

GH: There’s a lot of net.art and digital curators who set up defining parameters for new media shows. These often focus on a piece of hardware or a type of coding as an organizing principal. This plays into or is a symptom of the computer/technology scene where there are *platform* wars such as internet explorer vs. netscape or mac vs pc. There are software wars such as Dreamweaver vs GoLive. These competitions are about dominating a market. This also happens in digital art where a group of artists insist that for example they are the only net.art artists that exist and try to corner the market with the willing help of a number of curators. Often artists working in new media believe that you must write your own code in order to be a digital artist or you must use JAVA or you must use open source software or …. You get the idea. I remember once speaking at a panel where there was a net artist who was using perl and php and Peter Sinclair and I were using Max MSP. The other artist talked only about the coding structure. Our piece used custom built software as well but we were interested in the content and the user interactions. This happens all the time where a person mistakes writing code for art or insist that digital art is only code. It’s a rather boring discussion about hardware and software.

The original interview with G.H. Hovagimyan by Mark Cooley in 2008, can be seen here: http://flawedart.net/conversations/hovagimyan

G.H. Hovagimyan – nujus.net

Mark Cooley – FlawedArt.net

Main top image is from ‘A Soapopera for Laptops- A Soapopera for iMacs – Exercises in Talking’. A collaboration between Peter Sinclair and G.H. Hovagimyan. http://nujus.net/~nujus/html/soapopNu-2.html

This interview is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported