Interview with Chris Joseph (Babel) for Furtherfield.org

Chris Joseph is a Digital Writer in Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is a writer and artist who has produced solo and collaborative work since 2002 as Babel.

His past work includes Inanimate Alice an award-winning series of multimedia stories produced with novelist Kate Pullinger The Breathing Wall, a groundbreaking digital novel that responds to the reader’s breathing rate (also with Kate Pullinger); and [url:http://www.animalamina.com]Animalamina[/url], an A-Z of interactive multimedia poetry for children. He is the editor of the post-dada magazine and network 391.org.

Jess: Babel has been extremely active and has maintained a web presence since the late 90s, but only recently, with your new post as a digital writer in residence, have you begun a [url:http://www.chrisjoseph.org/wp/] blog[/url] under your *real* name. What motivated this addition to your internet profile, and how is it different from your other sites?

Chris: I’ve been using the Babel name since around 1997, when the Babel [url:http://www.towerofbabel.info]Encyclopedia[/url] first went live, as (amongst other reasons) a way to distinguish my commercial daytime activities from my ‘artistic’ ones. Very happily, as a digital writer in residence, there is no need to make any such distinction! But it is more than that… babel is (or was) an online identity, and this residency has large offline requirements, so it always made sense to me to revert back to my ‘real’ name, as you put it!

The blog was a requirement of the residency post, and initially, I resisted as I really didn’t want to add to the mass of superfluous texts out there. Eventually, I settled on making it a site that might be useful to other UK-based digital writers, where they can find out about relevant events, calls for submissions, and other flotsam and jetsam of possible interest. It may change over the course of the residency, but that’s pretty much what it is for now. I also try to break up the text entries with creative posts – flash movies, sound files, etc.

Jess: Although initially you say beginning your blog was a proviso of your new role how is it modifying or transforming how you work? Especially since you note that you “try to break up the text” with “creative posts” (suggesting that words in themselves are not substantially creative on their own)?

Chris: Ha ha, would I ever dare suggest such a thing? The majority of my blog postings so far have been calls for submissions, so these particular words in themselves are not particularly creative, rather informative. It’s nice to break up these texts with more creative posts. Completely coincidentally I was invited to post on remix_runran, and the posts there provide exactly the kind of thing I wanted to break up the informative texts on my blog.

Whether the blog is transforming how I work… aside from the remix_runran pieces, which are designed specifically for a blog format, I don’t think so – at least not yet. There is a project in the works that may change this, but I can’t say much more about it yet.

Jess: You’ve lived in Canada and the U.K., how do the different environments affect your creations?

Chris: Profoundly. The different cultural influences and language you are exposed to in (French) Canada are obviously important, but so are the extremes of Canadian weather, which I find cause very particular creative rhythms (for me, winter=creative hibernation, summer=play and procrastination). There are other practical differences: up until very recently, the Arts were very well supported in Canada, and the financial cost of achieving a good quality of life is much lower, which makes it a great place to be an artist or writer. However the quality of life is almost too good, in some ways… the greater friction in UK society is somehow more inspirational. Perhaps that’s because I was born here.

The remix_runran creations you’re doing for Randy Adams seem incredibly tactile. I’m thinking particularly of la cicciolisa. The words which flash all over the Mona Lisa obscuring both her from viewers and us from her, except, very intermittently, do words disappear from in front of her eyes; not often enough for me as I find myself attempting to snatch the words away with my mouse. Of course ciccio means chubby in Italian (interestingly you did not use the female form, ‘ciccia’) but perhaps this reference alludes to the filling out you’ve accomplished with this flash piece. In fact, Randy describes you as someone who “fleshes the invisible words.” Design here seems more than an effort to render something smooth and sexy. What role do you see design playing in this piece and in others for remix_runran?

Chris: The text that appears in this piece was taken and remixed from a previous post on remix_runran by Ted Warnell titled The Porno Italiano text was itself taken from a spam comment on Geof Huth’s blog inflight insight unseen – I really liked the notion of using and reusing spam in this way. So La Cicciolisa is a textual and thematic remix of Porno Italiano, the title and visual being a mashup of those two icons of Italian culture, La Cicciolina and Mona Lisa: the words that deface Mona reveal La Cicciolina, or perhaps vice versa.

Jess: Being a digital writer in residence it is logical (more or less) that you create digital works however most of your (published) creations seem to live online. Do the internet and its possibilities for ‘real-time’ and communication influence how and what you create?

Chris: Actually, the great majority of my creations are offline, awaiting (perhaps forever) their call to online service 🙂

The possibilities you mention are certainly exciting, and I have explored them in pieces such as [url:http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/oo/]Online/Offline[/url] or more recently [url:http://www.391.org/40]Universal Wish[/url], but they probably haven’t influenced what I create as much as the basic ability to distribute work online. Online distribution (for me) generally necessitates creating within certain file size/download time boundaries, or adapting works to attempt to reach non-English speaking audiences. Of course the ability to meet and communicate with collaborators online has been a big influence on how I create.

Jess: Moving from the online environment to offline work, I’m thinking here specifically about your Electromagnetic Radiation Soundmap on display in the IoCT,how is this installation different from works of yours that are created for the internet? What different considerations do you take into account?

Chris: I’ve found offline installation pieces are much easier in the sense that you (normally) have much greater control over – or at least understanding of – how the piece will be experienced, who the expected viewing audience are, and how much time they will have to spend viewing your piece. No more of those pesky platform or bandwidth considerations!

I think each installation piece has its own particular set of considerations, but clearly the immediate physical environment in which the piece is displayed is a key issue. The Soundmap is displayed on a touchscreen in the IOCT, which is a very pleasant state-of-the-art environment: the main consideration here was that it has lot of time-limited visitors, so the intention of the piece and how to interact with it had to be very clear.

A distant version of this Soundmap will be a mobile ‘augmented reality’ installation. This will be less concerned with the particular IOCT audience and environment, and more with the variety of physical features that the soundmap will overlay, and the physical movement and safety of the viewer in a non-bounded ‘live’ environment. The idea of a mobile installation is somewhat oxymoronic, but some of the same considerations of a fixed installation will be relevant, such as the intended audience and the time they will have available to experience the piece.

Jess: What kind of dialogue does the sound in the Electromagnetic Radiation Soundmap enact with its users? What does sound offer this piece that text and image do differently?

Chris: This is something I am still trying to understand… the best answer I can give at the moment is that one side of the ‘dialogue’ is about revealing the unsensed – at least, for most people, unseen, unheard and unfelt. The sound is a simple translation of particular geographical and environmental features (electromagnetic radiation and the way it manifests in a specific space), so in these sounds could act in a similar way to a textual or image location marker: it is a ‘map’ of sounds, though without those additional textual and image markers we have no simple way (so far) to use these sounds for practical navigation through the space.

The other side of the dialogue – how the listener responds to these sounds – is determined primarily by how much they know about electromagnetic radiation and perhaps sound in general, so this is much more variable than the equivalent textual or image knowledge might be. For many people it seems to act as a prompt to find out more, which was certainly one of my intentions.

Jess: As you’re playing a role in the digital arts as creator and [url:http://www.ioctsalon.com/]facilitator[/url] what might your view of a ‘history’ of new media work look like and where would you situate yourself?

Chris: Trying to give a clear account of the history of new media work is like trying to keep hold of two dozen slippery eels: just when you have one in your grasp, six others wriggle loose. Those eels represent photography, animation, film, video art, electronic sound, programming, audience participation, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and Fluxus, to name just a few…. I wouldn’t want to explicitly situate myself anywhere within these fascinating but messy histories. However of particular interest to me is the history of aleatory art and writing, as exemplified by the Dadaists and later Burroughs, Metzger and Cage.

Jess: If early outlooks of the internet might be broadly classified as utopian what would you suggest is a key theme for today’s conception of how technology can influence art (in general)?

Chris: I can’t speak to wider (public) conceptions, but my own conception of how (electronic) technology can influence art is still broadly utopian, though there will always be important contrary opinions: for example, issues regarding who has access to the technology, and the environmental impact of these technologies during their creation, use and disposal.