Trash Talk: A Review of The Appearance Machine by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig.

For nearly ten years, trash has been the focus of a massive project, an audiovisual work called The Appearance Machine, by artists Willy Le Maitre & Eric Rosenzveig. This project deals firsthand with an overabundance of material that won’t go away and with seeing the beautiful possibilities of trash, giving recycling a new context. The result is conflicting, producing a sense of alienation and comfort, disbelief and wonder in the viewer.

The once aimless material waste becomes the nexus of a unique art project that celebrates waste and the odd notion of an enjoyable wasteland through complex processing and image-making. The Appearance Machine’s permanent residence is in New York City, the unofficial centre of the detritus crisis, as the home to the largest landfill in the world. The machine is housed in a warehouse space that doubles as a factory or lab for audiovisual ‘performances’ set to an orchestra of digitally produced sound.

The Appearance Machine is a production mill that generates non-narrative audiovisual by-products, relying on a steady stream of incoming refuge to sustain itself. Trash enters a conveyor belt-like system where objects are photographed in a manner unlike how a photographer might capture the image of a fashion model. Artificial wind, mechanical impulses, and vibration work in concert to animate the objects to provide them with context, dimension and, to some degree, personality. Multiple camera angles ensure the same quality of perspective and dimension to produce audiovisual works of art in increments that last about ten or fifteen minutes.

The final video output is best understood as the combined results of data responding to other data. Captured images react to machine activity, where objects are analytically sorted by type and compatibility. Sound is formed in real-time through data analysis of the video imagery. In other words, the accompanying sound is produced by a computer program that reacts to object movement. Through this data mining and analysis, the trash objects construct music that appropriately complements the objects’ movement and character. Sound and image are then joined, transmitted through computer translation, and made available online for the general public.

Going green, a now popular concept that has surfaced with widespread assuredness convinces the average person that through simple shifts in practice, we can transform our homes, schools, and environment. While useful tips for change promote awareness of this global cause through energy conservation, reducing material waste, and recycling matter, there are also mediated ways of addressing our environment, which can activate a different attitude toward the overwhelming trash problem. By channelling waste through digital form, detritus becomes raw material for art.

Trash and found objects have been the subjects of art since Marcel Duchamp decided to wow his gallery audience with found objects, placing them in unexpected contexts and giving them a weight they hadn’t had but ultimately deserved. Le Maitre and Rosenzweig’s Appearance Machine provides audiences with new ways of experiencing once-banal objects and repurposing refuse in a manner that is in keeping with the crux of environmentalism.

Though immaterial, this project allows trash to embody a new form. Refuse is recycled into representations of matter that have character and produce visually stunning, energetic movements and sounds that stimulate the senses and demonstrate recognisable patterns that allude to narrative and metaphor. Some sounds resemble the theremin-produced soundtracks of 1950s science fiction films, while the visual imagery produces non-descript shapes and colours. Both are what one might expect to encounter on another planet.

The Appearance Machine works on many levels. It draws attention to an environmental concern over an overabundance of material waste and deals with it by providing an outlet through technology. In doing so, audiences are confronted with trash in a manner that is pleasantly accessible, mediated through the representation of imagery and sound. This is a form we collectively understand.

While this project does not aim to resolve environmental problems, it moves toward alleviating concerns by creating a purpose or function for refuse, making the most of its extended afterlife through its reuse while placing it back into the public realm in its new form. This cinematic performance does more than shed the look and feel of its raw form. It engages the viewer/listener in an enjoyably complex fusion of image and sound.

We’re used to creating sense from image sequences, it’s what we do when we watch a film. We piece the sequences together and form a narrative so that we can travel along a trajectory that takes us from one place to the other. Either an emotional starting point or an intellectual one that ends at some other place. We hope to have changed in some way even if it’s just questioning what we’ve seen. So we should be fully trained by our culture to view the image sequences in The Internet Speaks by Richard Wright create stories from them.

Yet viewing the images and putting them into context doesn’t necessarily come easily to the viewer. It could be because there is no context in which to relate the continual change of images that come at us, no obvious linear process that would give us the chance to be lazy and just view the images without thought. We have to actually think and add something of our own imaginations to make the piece work for us.

There are two versions to this project. The gallery based piece that automatically selects random images and displays them on the gallery wall, and the Internet version that offers the viewer a next and back button with which to scroll through and reverse the sequence so that they can return and reconsider the images. The second, Internet-based work allows the viewer to cheat a little bit, giving them the opportunity to think through the sequence and rework the narrative as it unfurls. It also tempts the viewer to play around with how much they are able to remember the previous image: go back, was it that, what does it mean now?

The ease of use belies the complexity of the questions that the work asks of the Internet. If it is truly the Internet speaking to us, surely we should be granted the right to see the words that it uses as well as the images? Perhaps so, but the words are pushed back here and asked to take second place. We need them to become invisible and not interfere with the pleasure of the work. Given that the text and indeed hypertext, is the basis of the web, and sits as some kind of post-Derrida response to the importance of the text over all else, The Internet Speaks is a reminder that we are dealing with thousands of images everyday and not always taking on board the text surrounding them. We may feel as though we have access to a huge library resource and as much text online as any half decent library could offer, but really, most of us are only viewing the videos and images anyway.

Drawing the images from the Internet also brings another interesting issue when trying to make sense of the work (and you will find yourself trying to do so, as Wright himself has remarked: we all try to find faces in the flames of a fire, so why wouldn’t we search for narrative in something like this?). This pulling together of the images means that multiple cultures, reference points and ideologies are going to be shown. There may be a technical graph from a PowerPoint presentation, then an image of a mother nursing a child. The mother looks as though she might be from Iraq, the graph looks decidedly American, because after all, Microsoft and the world of computers are inherently US-centric aren’t they? How do we read this? Can we trust that we aren’t just reading these images in the context of our own culture? The Internet is supposed to break down these cultural barriers and open our minds to a whole world of differences and allow us to experience multiple worlds, but it doesn’t. Quite often we behave like the old turn of the 19th century explorers making our way around the globe and always looking with Western eyes at the strange sights before us: viewing things as odd, uncivilized and even worse, not particularly Christian (god-ahem-forbid!). So we have to try to play with the images and piece them together without any kind of prejudice. Which is hard because there isn’t even a reference point to avoid.

But that’s why a project like The Internet Speaks is so relevant to our contemporary web culture. We have no reference points beyond ourselves, and we don’t know if we can trust the images and our own reading, because they might be flawed in some way. If the Internet is speaking to us, it is saying that we should be cautious and not judge too quickly what we see. We should ensure that the narratives aren’t just created from our own pre-conceptions, but take into account the cultural references of others.

The Internet Speaks in many voices, despite the attempts at global homogeneity some would try to impose on us.

Dolls behaving truly madly, but not really badly…

French Absurdist artists Antonin Artaud and Eugene Ionesco would be proud of some of the cruel and absurd organized nonsense that is flaming through the Internet art world right now. Accidental-on-purpose artistic endeavors in today’s developing Net.Art world are dizzying enough to make one want to just sit down and read a book. Anticipating this archaic return to exercising the imagination instead of typing the brain into pap, prescient Net Artist Kate Armstrong has contrived a book that infiltrates a decidedly non-literary universe. Billed as a graphic novel the piece is created to be experienced within the Facebook platform. Why Some Dolls are Bad invites the user to a collection of streamed images culled from the Internet, which take on random editorial positions in the frame of an original text written by Armstrong. The result- a bespoke book for the users of Facebook is an infinite precipitation of stirred structure a ribald evolving commentary on our world of Good and Bad dolls. Bold and occasionally wry, nonlinear storytelling has become high art. In the cinema, for example director Quentin Tarantino has made banal, albeit shocking and grisly tales buzz by cleverly rearranging their story lines. In his wild musical chair structures the story remains the same while the viewers’ experience of it is shuffled. In Armstrong’s work the images shift perpetually and this re-invents the meaning of the narrative.

Capturing precious Doll moments
The idea of this work more than its execution is the compelling element. Anyone who has clipped articles out of a newspaper, saved snippets of poetry or edited together their own home videos has experienced the process that is re-created in Dolls. But Armstrong cleverly nurtures a circumstance of wry tension that illustrates the fraying tether between traditional literary and neo-digital expression. The same page never appears twice but the user can capture and save a favorite page. This is an intriguing re-enactment of the experience of reading a narrative book where particular passages haunt the imagination and are saved to our cognitive hard drive. The impact of these literary moments etched in our psyches sometimes leads us to rave and recommend books to friends. Sending off custom tailored pages of Dolls however is rather like sending postcards from a literary journey. “Can personal moments sent to a friend – ever be re-captured” by said friend?

At the very least, Dolls explores a fabulous range of themes including but not limited to everything from ethics to fashion. These themes are explored through an absurd collection of systems and materials, from Mohair, through contagion to Venus Fly-traps. Absurdity is perhaps the resuscitated and re-fertilized Venus Fly-Trap of today’s digital art world not to mention the now myriad ‘send to a friend’ online communities. Everything old in the recent history of culture is new again online. Repetition begets re-examination.

In the Valley of the Dolls ad-infinitum
In 2002 Armstrong published a book CRISIS & REPETITION: ESSAYS ON ART AND CULTURE (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan, USA). The Dolls experiment neatly addresses the phrase by essentially erasing the possibility of repetition. In this respect, Armstrong’s work is reminiscent of Chris Borkowski’s aleatory video piece CODEX (2007, HD & SD video/ Jitter/ Mac mini/ 24inch Flat Screen) wherein a program culls images into a film that is ceaselessly being extended and re-edited. Unlike more Classical storytelling mediums (books and movies) neither Armstrong nor Borkowski’s re-inventions really implicate the user. It is curious to consider these eternal electronic works calculating incessantly, while somewhere on some rickety caf’e seat someone may actually be reading a book. The engagement of imagination involved in reading a book, be it graphic or pure text, is less important in these new works where the reader is more passive observer.

Who plays with captured Dolls?
Whether or not her project will successfully infiltrate the ‘send to a friend’, realm and restore art to the masses remains to be seen. In an informal survey of Facebook users the most common observation was that this was not what they went on Facebook for. But Googling Dolls confirms that Net.Art aficionados who are also Facebook members are game to participate. In a way Armstrong has leveled the playing field with her choice of platform. Her story becomes everybody?s story so Facebook groups like ‘If all men looked like Johnny Depp I’d be such a Whore’ could potentially join book clubs that are born of Net Art bastions like Rhizome.org or, um, Furtherfield.org. In fact Facebook groups like ‘I like Cupcakes and making out’ (mostly girls) ‘and Beer…it’ll get ya drunk’ (mostly guys) may actually be the perfect audience- in spite of their apparent disinterest. Aesthetically inclined Avatars in the Net art community who interlope on such sites might also discover that a crisis like Facebook could actually beget innovation.

http://www.katearmstrong.com
http://www.chrisborkowski.org

Addressable Memory
Touring exhibition by Michael Takeo Magruder
TheSpace4, Peterborough, 22nd September – 18th November 2007

Andy Warhol’s audio cassette tape recorder was his constant companion and confidant. He used to call it his wife. Many of Warhol’s tapes were of nothing other than white noise and the occasional sudden background sound. Warhol also carried a Polaroid camera, shooting tens of thousands of photographs over the last decades of his life. His obsessive recording of the minutiae of his existence must have appeared eccentric in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Traditionally the technology of mechanical recording and reproduction of sound and image has been the resource of mass media, of news media. News is the first draft of history. It is the sensorium of shared memory, dominated by a few powerful centralized voices. A lone artist such as Warhol could not reproduce the workings of the mass media no matter how hard he tried. He could however allegorize and represent it.

The analogue technology that Warhol used has given way to digital audio and video. High-definition, high dynamic contrast range chips are now included on even relatively cheap mobile phones. Warhol’s two devices have become one. Anyone can record dozens of images and many minutes of sound or video each day if they want to. With broadcast distribution giving way to the more decentralized distribution system of the Internet they can share their personal media with friends around the world instantly or even with the entire on-line world via sharing sites. In the twenty-first century Warhol would just be a mid-volume user of Blogger and Flickr.

Personal digital technology and the publishing medium of the Internet blur any line between personal and shared memory, and between experience and representation. This may be experienced as empowered citizen journalism, the future embarrassments of youthful digital exhibitionism, or the spectre of a participatory surveillance society.

Michael Takeo Magruder is portraying this landscape of digital memory with its own tools, producing portraits of its inhabitants with its own palettes. In Addressable Memory the first draft of history is allegorized as a process of combining and quantizing disparate experience and telemetry. Of mashing-up and composing. The technology and aesthetics of mobile phones, Internet news feeds, video screens, computer image processing and virtual reality are all turned on themselves. At TheSpace4 in Peterborough this show takes up all three rooms. It will be touring the UK throughout 2008.

The first room contains large scale prints and projections of pixellated camera phone images and video along with smaller images on camera phone screens. Even the placards next to each work are small video screens, emphasizing the feeling of the pervasiveness of digital media.

Pixels are an established enough visual form now that they have a certain cultural resonance and are a part of everyday experience. They are ephemeral and functional grids of colour, quite the opposite of the carefully considered coloured grids of abstract high art.

The large-scale prints and projections abstract and compose the pixellated images to the point where this opposition collapses. Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie performed a similar but more celebratory synthesis of media overload and contemplative reflection combining urban architecture and mass mediatized music with the modernist abstracting grid in the analogue age of mass media.

Phone images and video clips are fragmentary records of life in a visually saturated corporate information culture. Recasting them in the visual language of high art’s slow contemplation affords the viewer a different, less commodified and commodifying way of looking at the representations of this culture. The critical aesthetic engagement of the work is one that the viewer can share and take with them when they leave the gallery if they wish.

The middle room has generative art prints on its walls created by software that produces compositions from reprocessed digital imagery. Strangely this seems the most visually and technically traditional work in the show. Surrounded by this, on the central platform a hardware based piece presents the hardware and software of handheld sound and image as a microcosm both of the social and media networks of digital media. In a wirelessly networked age the wiring under the board is in the air between devices, the analogue video artist’s shtick of taking the casing off of televisions wouldn’t show how this system works. This is a transition from the personal imagery of the first room to the mediatized imagery of the third room.

The third room is dark but lit by the projections, screens and monitor banks of works that remix the visual, audio and textual representations of reality created by the mass media. The loud, bright, pervasive, confident voice of the mass-media is reimposed on itself. Letters become pixels that images are rendered into, web sites are projected onto virtual reality geometry, striking news imagery is broken down across grids of monitors or at different speeds.

This is a redoubling of the experience of broadcast media. The media selectively quantizes, re-maps and filters reality before presenting its representations as added value. Here this process is applied back to the representations produced by the media and thereby to the media itself. This is a mapping of media’s hyperspace back onto itself.

Such recursion is the stuff not just of memory but of awareness, the start of a strange loop (pace Douglas Hofstadter) that comes to know itself through repeated introspection. The machinery and techniques of mediatization turn unique experience into fungible data. The works in the third room of “Addressable Memory” reverse this process by continuing and intensifying it.

Addressable Memory as a whole steps back from a world pervaded by the representational machinery of digital media that reduces both personal and shared experience to economically leveragable ephemeral information in order to pause and reflect on it. It re-presents the representations of the personal and institutional products of this machinery in a more contemplative and more contextualising way, intensifying the use of technology to the point where the presence of that pervasive technology is again visible but the content and operation of that technology is defamiliarised and contemplatable. This is a coherent and mature body of art that works with the viewer to produce a revealing portrait of their visual environment.

http://www.takeo.org/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I came across the Net Artwork Norwayweb whilst receiving my usual mass of e-mails. Even though I usually use filters, far too much spam still gets through. So, like so many other’s around the world, I have the arduous process of picking out what is deemed worth keeping. Lost in despair, numerous individuals choose to delete everything rather than cyphering through an ever expansive junk mail infestation. In 2004 yahoo found in their research “that the average British PC has nine ‘sick days’ per year, two more than the average for workers. Six of these are wasted battling with spam and three more days are lost due to viruses. Nearly half of British computer users find dealing with junk e-mails more stressful than traffic jams…”[1]

As we all adapt and mutate in response to a more technologically determined world, we become something else. New generations join the mass shift to be digitally dependent via games, the Internet and other post-analogue activities. As we use the Internet or fill in a form to the tax office our information is stored digitally somewhere, yet many do not think how safe the submitted information really is. In the UK, “The government was forced to admit the most fundamental breach of faith between the state and citizen yesterday when it disclosed that the personal records of 25 million individuals, including their dates of birth, addresses, bank accounts and national insurance numbers had been lost in the post, opening up the threat of mass identity fraud and theft from personal bank accounts. MPs gasped when the chancellor, Alistair Darling, told the Commons that discs containing personal details from 7.25 million families claiming child benefit had been lost. They went missing in the internal post after a junior official at HM Revenue & Customs in Washington, Tyne and Wear, breached all government security rules by sending them by courier to the National Audit Office in London..” [2]

As I went through the (programmed) mannerism of switching between looking at e-mails on my Thunderbird client and clicking back to the Firefox browser to view how Norwayweb was doing; and visiting Facebook to see the various messages that had been left there for me by those who I wish to know and those who I do not wish to know. At first, when visiting the project it all seems simplistic in layout and then one begins to feel the deeper workings behind the page, the cogs and wheels digitally chugging away. The profundity of it all brings about a tip of the ice burg metaphor to mind. A frozen moment, like when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork. As William Burroughs’ discovered in the writing of Naked Lunch. To me, the fork is a simple trigger, example of a realisation that something big is happening and what one sees in front of them may be micro but also intrinsically connected to a macro, set of happenings and situations that are overwhelming.

Bjorn Magnhildoen is known for his various net art works, incororating databases and networks. He’s the author of more than fourty books, many of them collaborative and generative works, and has also published books concerned with net art and net writing. Recent projects deal with net art books, writing machines and software implemented on the net, live or performative writing and programming, codework, hypertext, and e-poetry.

Norwayweb was originally part of a series called “Protocol Performance” realised in 2007 with the support of the Norwegian Cultural Council, section for art and new technology. This work uses specific data collected from a source or sources originating from the national system’s database. The information is scraped from about 4 million Norwegian tax payer’s databases. As soon as you visit the web page, you automatically trigger off the action of collecting the data. On the left side of the interface figures cascade down the page before your very eyes, which gradually evolves into what Magnhildoen calls a carpet. The term carpet is a reference to the textile based craft of weaving

Recent information from the carpet…

172848 172849 172850 172851 172852 172853 172854 172855 172856 172857
172858 172859 172860 172861 172862 172863 172864 172865 172866 172867
172868 172869 172870 172871 172872 172873 172874 172875 172876 172877
172878 172879 172880 172881 172882 172883 172884 172885 172886 172887
172888 172889 172890 172891 172892 172893 172894 172895 172896 172897
172898 172899 172900 172901 172902 172903 172904 172905 172906 172907
172908 172909 172910 172911 172912 172913 172914 172915 172916 172917
172918 172919 172920 172921 172922 172923 172924 172925 172926 172927
172928 172929 172930 172931 172932 172933 172934 172935 172936 172937
172938 172939 172940 172941 172942 172943 172944 172945 172946 172947
172948 172949 172950 172951 172952 172953 172954 172955 172956 172957
172958 172959 172960 172961 172962 172963 172964 172965 172966 172967
172968 172969 172970 172971 172972 172973 172974 172975 172976 172977
172978 172979 172980 172981 172982 172983 172984 172985 172986 172987
172988 172989 172990 172991 172992 172993 172994 172995 172996 172997
172998 172999 173000 173001 173002 173003 173004 173005 173006 173007
173008 173009 173010 173011 173012 173013 173014 173015 173016 173017
173018 173019 173020 173021 173022 173023 173024 173025 173026 173027
173028 173029 173030 173031 173032 173033 173034 173035 173036 173037
173038 173039 173040 173041 173042 173043 173044 173045 173046 173047
173048 173049 173050 173051 173052 173053 173054 173055 173056 173057
173058 173059 173060 173061 173062 173063 173064 173065 173066 173067
173068 173069 173070 173071 173072 173073 173074 173075 173076 173077
173078 173079 173080 173081 173082 173083 173084 173085 173086

When opening the web page the viewer becomes a participant in the collection of the data, each number represents one singular individual which is added as you watch it in real-time. It stops when you close the browser and starts all over again if you return. Once the total of the numbers reach 3943077 the carpet is completed. If you leave the browser open on the page of the Norwayweb artwork for I minute, you will have triggered off and received information equivalent to 60 people. The whole work itself is complete once there has been 555 hours of viewing of it. By taking part in the process of web-scraping we become affiliated as peer scrapers in the accumulation other people’s personal tax details based in Norway.

Bjorn has mentioned that he is aware that collecting such data could be ethically questionable and is not clear himself how real it is that a law is actually being broken. As a kind of opt out clause or fail-safe he suggests that, visitors to the artwork could also be peer criminals due to the fact that they are (or we are) going through the systematic process of collecting this information and are not necessarily just passive observers. The complexity of acting out a simple thing as clicking onto a web page and becoming a co-conspirator without the intention of criminal intent, poses some confusing questions. Not only regarding our liberties in respect of are we really to blame for someone’s work of art by just viewing it? But it also begs the question that if Magnhildoen unintentionally (or intentionally) broke the law and involved other people visitors to the work, surely he is the main culprit. Like a drug dealer who peddles drugs, perhaps he is peddling illegal information, by actively setting up a system in sourcing it and then distributing it to others to potentially use. My guess is that all is fine if the Norwegian Cultural Council funded and supported the project.

For me, the Norwayweb project deals with one of the most contentious issues that we all face today. Recently, the British Parliament discussed ‘Function Creep’, which is about digital surveillance in all its forms taking over our everyday lives. Consuming, following and data-basing our movements outside as well as our activities on the Internet and public databases. At the Select Committee on Home Affairs Fourth Report, July 2004, the then Home Secretary said in respect of the introduction of ID Cards to the UK “The identity cards scheme is intended primarily as a United Kingdom wide measure to help deter and control illegal immigration by helping to establish the nationality and immigration status of UK residents.”[3]

Critical Art Ensemble 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 doppelg~nger. 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.”[4]

This is a fascinating artwork. I am interested in discovering more of Bjorn Magnhildoen’s future explorations, as well as his other works. Norwayweb is poetic, intelligent and thorough in its conception and understanding, of the cultural context on the subject of our civil liberties. It is refreshing to experience a net art project that is able to incorporate a clear argument with the very medium that he uses in challenging its uses by others.

[1] Spam is making computers sick.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3832305.stm

[2]The Guardian. Lost in the post – 25 million at risk after data discs go missing.
Patrick Wintour, political editor Wednesday November 21, 2007
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,,2214460,00.html

[3]Select Committee on Home Affairs Fourth Report (74).
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/13007.htm#a26

[4]The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net.
Critical Art Ensemble Summer, 95.
http://www.t0.or.at/cae/mnterror.htm

Notes (mostly norwegian by Bjorn Magnhildoen)
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
2. http://www.sprakrad.no/Ordboeker/Dataspraak/
3. http://www.skatteetaten.no
4.http://norsknettskole.no/fag/ressurser/itstud/fuv/torgeireidsvik/gram/pronomen/relative.htm
5. http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1270919.ece
6. http://www.datatilsynet.no/templates/Page____2109.aspx

You Can’t Stay Here PAM!

by Eliza Fernbach December 2007.

Online Video Portal Streams Artists into community and exhibition.

[PAM] Live and in Person
Participation lies at the heart of the online video portal [PAM]. In fact the site has generated such response that the best way to communicate with the PAM founders is to find them in person. They are a visible, engaged group on the New York Art scene; Lee Wells, a curator and Artist in his own right, was introduced to Christopher Borkowski, a digital artist and IT specialist at the Guggenheim by Raphaele Shirley, whose credentials include working for Nam June Paik. Artist Aaron Miller had already been collaborating with Borkowski following on their with Scope Art fair on the horizon, [PAM] was born in December 2005 two months after an impromptu brainstorming session at Shirley’s studio.

‘With [PAM] we sought an interactive and inclusive means of bringing artists and their audience into the curatorial process. Says Wells, ‘We figured out a simple way to present it in a non-hierarchal fashion. [PAM] is more of an educational tool than anything else.’ Arguably [PAM] is more than just instructional. [PAM] is an online smorgasbord of video creation and a real time installation that is reviving the sense of community in an art world where dollars seem to be overtaking sensibility. Like the commercial behemoth, Youtube, [PAM] was created with open source software but its start up cost was less than $500.00. The [PAM] founders essentially hacked a system that would have necessitated hundreds of thousands of dollars for a commercial venture. The result is a dizzying array of one thousand video artworks by artists in over eighty countries.

In [PAM] we trust
Trust and collaboration ensure [PAM] evolves smoothly. ‘Alexis Hubshman and the Scope Art Fair made us realize that [PAM] wasn’t a one time gig.’ Says Wells ‘Alexis is our partner and one of our most trusted advisors.’ Wells and his partners are quick to acknowledge other influences: ‘I have been lucky enough to learn from a lot of great people. Kerry James Marshall, Phyllis Bramson, Julia Fish, I-igo Manglano-Ovalle, Steve Campbell, Stewart Home, God and the Stars, Hannah Higgins, Critical Art Ensemble and Miroslaw Rogala to name a few.’ Wells also cites a wide range of co-operative inspiration; art portals such as Rhizome.org, Furtherfield.org and organizations like the Coyote Arts Festival in Chicago as well as The United Nations. Raphaele Shirley references her experience assisting Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim as groundwork for the sort of interpersonal and technical work that [PAM] has required. ‘On a conceptual level we are walking in his footsteps so it is a great joy to be able to reference him and review what he originally predicted for the age of technology.’

[PAM] comes to life
TELECULTURE a show curated by Wells at PACE University Gallery in New York in December, showcased a selection of [PAM] artists. At the opening photographer Eric Payson paid tribute to both PAM and PACE as vital new elements of the video art scene. His haunting transparencies (Ghostplay, 2007), rich in sociological observation, (the NFL as a metaphor for slavery) were as dynamic as the moving pictures in the show. Of these, the four-channel video (SisterCity, 2007) by newcomer Jennifer Jones was technologically ambitious and psychologically challenging. Jillian McDonald, Co-Director of the Gallery and practicing new media artist singled out Taras Hrabowsky’s Amalgamide Tide (2006) as a highlight. A projection careening down a wall overlooking the main staircase, the CGI video was a year in the making, the work depicts thousands of human figures; tossing, floating and whirling in patterns of weather systems that Hrabowsky has mapped them into. Mesmerizing and disturbing, it is uncanny in its decorative and political balance.

Making [PAM] pay
Now that [PAM] is established and thriving, the founders must face the inevitable- a reconciliation with the Art Market. Alongside plans for the site to become a vehicle for art sales, developments include shifting the focus of the website to engage artists in commentary as well as providing exhibition information. Says, Chris Borkowski ‘We would like to find a way to sustain the organization and put money into the hands of the artists involved. At the end of the day artists have to make a living.’

[PAM]’s Progeny
Interpersonal and professional alliances that [PAM] has already fostered bode well for its future. In two short years the project has gone from studio imaginings to real-time exhibits, generating new work and opportunities for established as well emerging video artists Bethany Fancher, a [PAM] member and sculptor, new to the video world was included in the TELECULTURE show and is already at work on new video pieces. She is also planning a work that will incorporate a horseback trip across the United States. Mew Media Pioneer G.H. Hovagimyan whose work spans decades of the New York Alternative scene, has played an active role in supporting the project. His piece, New Orleans Rant2, a wry punk commentary on the tragedy in that city, also challenges the worldwide membership of [PAM] to keep moving forward. His rant You can’t stay here is a call to perpetual action. Lee Wells has great hopes for the creature he and his collaborators have brought into being, ‘[PAM] is designed to be adapting to technology as it changes. She is two years old in December. We are hoping she will have children one day.’

Websites:

http://www.perpetualartmachine.com
http://www.pace.edu/digitalgallery

film, 2008. By Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler.

What Would It Mean To Win? was filmed on the blockades at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in June 2007. In their first collaborative film Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler focus on the current state of the counter-globalisation movement in a project which grows out of both artists’ preoccupation with globalisation and its discontents. The film, which combines documentary footage, interviews, and animation sequences, is structured around three questions pertinent to the movement: Who are we? What is our power? What would it mean to win?

Almost ten years after ‘Seattle this film explores the impact this movement has had on contemporary politics. Seattle has been described as the birthplace for the ‘movement of movements’ and marked a time when resistance to capitalist globalisation emerged in industrialised nations. In many senses it has been regarded as the time when a new social subject ‘the multitude’ entered the political landscape. Recently the counter-globalisation movement has gone through a certain malaise accentuated by the shifts in global politics in the post 911 context.

The protests in Heiligendamm seemed to re-assert the confidence, inventiveness and creativity of the counter-globalisation movement. In particular the five finger tactic where protesters spread out across the fields of Rostock slipping around police lines proved successful in establishing blockades in all roads into Heiligendamm. Staff working for the G8 summit were forced to enter and leave the meeting by helicopter or boat thus providing a symbolic victory to the movement.

‘What Would It Mean To Win?’, as the title implies, addresses this central question for the movement. During the Seattle demonstrations ‘we are winning’ was a popular graffiti slogan that captured the sense of euphoria that came with the birth of a new movement. Since that time however this slogan has been regarded in a much more speculative manner. This film aims to move beyond the question of whether we are ‘winning’ or not by addressing what would it actually mean to win.

When addressing the question ‘what would it mean to win?’ John Holloway quotes Subcomandante Marcos who once described ‘winning’ as the ability to live an ‘infinite film program’ where participants could re-invent themselves each day, each hour, each minute. The animated sequences take this as their starting point to explore how ideas of social agency, struggle and winning are incorporated into our imagination of politics.

The film was recorded in English and German and exists also in a French subtitled version. ‘What Would It Mean To Win?’ will be presented in screenings in a variety of contexts and will also be part of the upcoming installation ‘Jumps and Surprises’ by Begg and Ressler, which will present a broader perspective of different approaches to the counter-globalisation movement.

Concept, Interviews, Film Editing, Production: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Interviewees: Emma Dowling, John Holloway, Adam Idrissou, Tadzio Mueller, Michal Osterweil, Sarah Tolba
Camera: Oliver Ressler
Animation: Zanny Begg
Sound: Kate Carr
Image Editing: Markus Koessl
Sound Editing: Rudi Gottsberger, Oliver Ressler
Special thanks to Turbulence, Holy Damn It, Conrad Barrett
Grants: Bundesministerium fr Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
College of Fine Art Research Grants Scheme, Sydney

A review of THE THIRD MIND at Le Palais de Tokyo
Curated by Ugo Rondinone

THE THIRD MIND
Le Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du president Wilson 75116 Paris
September 7th – January 8th

I first want to congratulate the guest curator Ugo Rondinone and the new director of Le Palais de Tokyo, Marc-Olivier Wahler, for mounting a really high-quality group show (*) that criss-crosses an assortment of generational frontiers and stylistic barriers. Ugo Rondinone is an artist known for his talent for building systems of connections and given the visual results of this exhibit; he has, in large part, very good taste in art. I particularly enjoyed his assembling excellent works of Brion Gysin – William S. Burroughs, Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Andy Warhol, Nancy Grossman, Cady Noland, Martin Boyce, Paul Thek and Emma Kunz.

I think what might be interesting about this disquieting show, is to look at how this group show differs in its conjoining (or not) from other group shows by pinning it to the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs from the early 1960s known as The Third Mind. Also we can place THE THIRD MIND in the context of wider connections and ponder at what point does homage turn into exploitation?

First some background. Beat writer Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin, known predominantly for his rediscovery of the Dada master Tristan Tzara’s cut-up technique and for co-inventing the flickering Dreamachine device, worked together in the early 1960s on a publishing project that used a chance based cut-up method. A cut-up method consists of cutting up and randomly reassembling various fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning. 1+1=3 (**) In the recent biography of Allen Ginsburg, Celebrate Myself, Ginsburg’s archivist, Bill Morgan, excellently recounts some of the genesis of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs forays into radical Dada cut-up technique and collaboration based on Ginsburg’s diary entries.

Gysin in the mid 1950’s pointed out to Burroughs that collage technique has been a regular tool in painting and graphics since half a century. This came as late news to the young Beat writers of that time, so it is perhaps not surprising that Ginsburg’s first exposure to Burroughs’s use of the cut-up was met with distain – Ginsburg considered it something along the lines of a parlor trick. (p. 318) Even more, Ginsburg speculated from NYC that Burroughs had lost his mind through lack of sex (note: Burroughs lusted after Ginsburg in vain). As a joke, Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky cut up some of their own poems and rearranged them and sent them to Burroughs with the note ‘Just having a little fun mother’. (pp. 318 – 319). However Burroughs was so dedicated to the random cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique. When Ginsburg and Orlovsky arrived in Tangiers in 1961, Burroughs was working on an even more advanced use of the cut-up; he and Ian Sommerville were cutting and splicing audiotapes and Burroughs was making collages from newspapers and photographs while proclaiming that poetry and words were dead. (pp.331-332)

Burroughs however soon began work on a cut-up novel, the Soft Machine – drawing material from his The Word Hoard. (**) This manuscript was soon being ‘assembled’ and edited by Ian Sommerville and Michael Portman; Burroughs’s companions. Sommerville was regularly speaking of building electrical cut-up machines.

Burroughs would soon begin collaborating on a book project with Brion Gysin using the cut-up method; cutting up and reassembling various fragments of sentences and images to give them a new and unexpected meaning. The Third Mind is the title of the book they devised together following this method – and they were so overwhelmed by the results that they felt it had been composed by a third person; a third author (mind) made of a synthesis of their two personalities.

Ginsburg remained highly skeptical for some time, but following his travels in India came to appreciate the cut-up technique; even while never employing it.

Now for THE THIRD MIND show itself. Two major works (themselves multitudinal) advance well Rondinone’s thesis of the third mind. Of course, foremost is the Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaboration The Third Mind. An entire gallery is devoted to the maquettes for this unpublished book from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – and it does not disillusion the 4th mind: that of the viewer/reader. It is a golden hodgepodge
feast and serves as the underpinnings of the exhibit.

Then there is the glamorous video installation/accumulation of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests from 1964-1966: a group of silent b&w three-minute films in which visitors to the Warhol factory try to sit still. Here we see an interlaced presentation that visually connect the youthful faces of Edi Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, Nico, John Giorno, Jonas Mekas, Gerald Melanga, Jack Smith, Paul Thek, Lou Reed and the distinguished Marcel Duchamp. The presentation is structurally connectivist given its 4 directional presentation as a low laying sculpture. It is incredibly enjoyable. Plus the room is ringed with black haunting photograms called Angels by the fascinating Bruce Conner from 1973-75.

In terms of a more traditional synthetic associational curatorial fission, the strongest effect was achieved for me in the Ronald Bladen, Nancy Grossman, Cady Noland gallery. Everything here is screaming in harmony of power, sex and violence. The entire space felt hard as nails ? most all of it a macho silver and black. Bracketing the huge gallery were long rows of Nancy Grossman’s famous black-leathered heads, aggressively sprouting phallic shapes like picks and horns. Ronald Bladen’s 1969 minimal masterwork The Cathedral Evening aggressively dominates the interior space with a mammoth triangle breach. This is backed up by his famous Three Elements from 1965. Then, giving the gallery a sense of an almost palpably Oedipal contest, is a large group of superb black on silver Cady Noland anthropological silkscreens on metal from the early 1990s.

The other room that really collectively worked for me held Paul Thek and Emma Kunz. Three wonderful Paul Thek Meat Piece are there; weird post-minimal sculptures that sickly encase flayed body sections in wax in long yellow transparent plexiglas shrines that literally shine. This meat-machine mix is counter-pointed with the healing magnetic-field ephemerality of Emma Kunz’s geometric drawings, done with lead and colored pencils or chalk on graph paper. It was easy to envision some fierce spiritual forces zapping each other throughout that area.

Other rooms bring the connectivest bent to a jolting halt. I simply admired Martin Boyce’s huge neon sculpture (Boyce channeling Dan Flavin), but it produced no associative effects with what else was in the room. Worse of all was a room entirely devoted to the work of Joe Brainard. What was that doing there? One strains to see (or imagine) even a 2nd mind in that space. So the unavoidable thought arises, well, Rondinone must like this stuff – so that is at least two minds in synch. But does Rondinone think there is anything still interesting in a Gober sink? His The Split-up Conflicted Sink from 1985 also played a huge flat note for me in this supposed visual symphony, as did the overly unembellished black crosses of Valentin Carron, the stupid car bashed installation by Sarah Lucas, and the cloying faux-naive canvases of Karen Kilimnik. How to connect this boring, stupid and naive work to the third mind connectivity theme?

OK. I will. On thinking about the show on my way home, I concluded that the show’s relationship to connectivity is gravely naive and passe (if pleasant in a quaint, charming way) in lieu of the multi-networked world in which we now reside. By now various theories of complexity have established an undeniable influence within cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and collaborative adaptability. One ponders if Rondinone has ever even heard of the theories of Tiziana Terranova, Eugene Thacker or other cultural workers involved in the issues of human-machine symbiosis as interface within our inter-network media ecology. So yes, part of the pleasure for me was bathing in this old fashioned naivety, having just spent some serious time reading and writing on the topics of conspiratorial shadow activities (****) and viral software logic based on complex inter-connectionism (*****). Placed against issues of avant-garde cybernetics, the coupling of nature and biology via code, media ecologies, distributed management teams, internet mash-up music, artificial life swarms, the political herd mind, and Negri/Hardt’s multitudes; THE THIRD MIND played in my mind like a romp through a kindergarten playpen. Nice. It felt good to forget about that pervasive nagging political/cultural feeling of stalemate created by the resilience of our current reality in that it assimilates everything.

But no, Ugo Rondinone did not randomly cut and reassemble art to create a new third meaning. He did not cut-up anything. He did, like every music dj, fashion designer, and group show curator, remix contemporary expression from recent decades to permit new meanings to emerge from the mix. The ideas in the collaborative work of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were not needed to achieve this end – and perhaps they were poorly intellectually served here (even though it was great to see the work). There was no use of chance or randomness evident here (even the re-shuffled catalogue pages I heard was rather suspiciously non-random) that is necessary for a really unexpected – and perhaps disastrous – result. This show did not go that far. There was no randomly reassembling of various fragments of something to give them a completely new and unexpected meaning (like I saw in the show Rolywholyover: A Composition for Museum by John Cage at the Guggenheim Museum in Soho NYC in 1994). THE THIRD MIND is just a standard, but good, heterogeneous art show where the whole is greater than its parts. Which is as it must be.

Joseph Nechvatal

The show contains work from: Ronald Bladen, Lee Bontecou, Martin, Boyce, Joe Brainard, Valentin Carron, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Verne Dawson, Jay Defeo, Trisha Donnelly, Urs Fischer, Bruno Gironcoli, Robert Gober, Nancy Grossman, Hans Josephsohn, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Emma Kunz, Andrew Lord, Sarah Lucas, Hugo Markl, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Josh Smith, Paul Thek, Andy Warhol, Rebecca Warren, and Sue Williams. Also applause to Marc-Olivier Wahler for cutting Le Palais de Tokyo into large but manageable discrete spaces. What a relief from the prior cavernous chaos.

(**) Recently I heard Martin Scorsese speak about how any editing together of two shots in a film creates a third subjective image effect in the mind of the viewer.

(***) The Word Hoard is a collection of Burroughs’s manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, and London that all together created the super mother-load manuscript that served as the basis for much of Burroughs’s cut-up writings: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, (together referred to as The Nova Trilogy or Nova Epic). Even Naked Lunch was taken from sections of The Word Hoard. There was also produced a text called Dead Fingers Talk in 1963 which contains excerpts from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded – combined together to create a new narrative. Also, via Burroughs’s artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, the cut-up technique was combined with images, Gysin’s paintings, and sound, via Somerville’s tape recorders. Some of these recordings can be heard here.

There were also a number of cut-up films that were produced which can
be seen here:

http://www.ubu.com/film/burroughs.html
William Buys a Parrot (1963)
Bill and Tony (1972)
Towers Open Fire (1963)
Ghost at n?9 (Paris) (1963-72)
The Cut-Ups (1966)

IF/THEN

A Book Review of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses by Jussi Parikka (Peter Lang Books, 2007, 327 pages) by Joseph Nechvatal.

{loop:file = get-random-executable-file;
if first-line-of-file = then goto loop;
prepend virus to file;}
-Fred Cohen, Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments
We cannot be done with viruses as long as the ontology of network culture is viral-like.
-Jussi Parikka, The Universal Viral Machine

One could be forgiven for assuming that a book with the title ‘Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses’ would be of sole interest to those sniggering hornrimmed programmers who harbor an erudite loathing of Bill Gates and an affection for the Viennese witch-doctor. Actually, it is a rather game and enthralling look, via a media-ecological approach, into the acutely frightening, yet hysterically glittering, networked world in which we now reside. A world where the distinct individual is pitted against – and thoroughly processed by – post-human semi-autonomous software programs which often ferment anomalous feelings of being eaten alive by some great indifferent artificiality that apparently functions semi-independently as a natural being.

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes concerning the ramifications for a creative and aesthetic, if post-human, future. Digital Contagions is impregnated with fear and suspicion, but we almost immediately sense that it also contains an undeniable affirmative nobility of purpose; which is to save the media cultural condition -and the brimful push of technological modernization in general – from catastrophically killing itself off.

This admirable embryonic redemption is achieved by a vaccination-like turning of tables, as Parikka convincingly demonstrates that computer viruses (semi-autonomous machinic/vampiric pieces of code) are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but rather essential traits of the techno-cultural logic itself. According to Parikka, digital viruses in effect define the media ecology logic that characterizes our networked computerized culture in recent decades.

We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular technological and humane strings that have attained virtual consistency. Our current inter-network ecology is a comparable combination of top-down host arrangements wedded to bottom-up self-organization where invariable linear configurations and states of entanglement co-evolve in active process. Placing the significant role of the virus in this mix in no uncertain terms, Parikka writes that, ‘the virus truly seems to be a central cultural trope of the digital world’. (p. 136) Indeed digital viruses are recognized by Parikka as the crowning culmination of current postmodern cultural trends – as viruses, by definition, are merger machines based on parasitism and acculturation. So it is not only their symbolic/metaphoric power that places them firmly in a wider perspective of cultural infection; it is their formal structure, in that they procure their actuality from the encircling environment to which they are receptively coupled.

Moreover, with the love of an aficionado, Parikka lucidly demonstrates that computer viruses are indeed a variable index of the rudimentary underpinning on which contemporary techno culture rests. He astutely anoints the indexical function of the virus by establishing not only its symbolic melancholy power in relation to the human body and sex, but by folding the viral life/nonlife model (**) into key cultural areas underlying the digital ecology; such as bottom-up self-organization, hidden distributed activity and ethereal meshwork. In that sense Parikka describes network ecology as both actual and virtual, what I have elsewhere identified as the viractual. (Briefly, the viractual is the stratum of activity where distinct actualizations/individuations are materialized out of the flow of virtuality.) But some viruses do not simply yield copies of themselves, they also engage in a process of self-reproducing autopoiesis: they are copying themselves over and over again but they can also mutate and change, and by doing so, Parikka maintains, reveal distinguishing aspects of network culture at large.

I would add that they mimic the manneristic aspects of late post-modernism in general, particularly if one sees modernism as the great petri dish aggregate in which we still are afloat. So computer viruses are recognized here as an indexical symptom also of a bigger cultural tendency that characterizes our post-modern media culture as being inserted within a modern (purist) digital ecology. This aspect provides the book with a discerning, yet heterogeneous, comprehension of the connectionist technologies of contemporaneous techno culture. But beyond the techno-cultural relevance, the significance of the viral issues in Parikka’s book to ALL cultural production is evident to anyone who has already recognized that digitalization has become the universal technical platform for networked capitalism. As Parikka himself points out, digitalization has secured its place as the master formal archive for sounds, images and texts. (p. 5) Digitalization is the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us in what we do – and which accounts for our cultural feelings of vacillating between anxiety and enthusiasm over being invaded by something invisible – and the sneaky suspicion that we have been taken control of from within.

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual allegories, antibody a-life projects, various infected prosthesis, polymorphic encryptions, ticklish security issues, numerous medical plagues, the coupling of nature and biology via code, incisive sabotage attempts, anti-debugging trickery, genome sequencing, parasitic spyware, killer T cell epidemics, rebellious database deletions, trojan horse latency, viral marketing, inflammatory political resistance, biological weaponry, pornographic clones, depraved destructive turpitudes, rotten jokes, human-machine symbiosis as interface, and a history of cracker catastrophes. All are conjoined with excellent taste. The shock effect is one of discovering a poignant nervous virality that has been secretly penetrating us everywhere.

Digital Contagions’s genealogical account is proportionately impressive, as it devotes satisfactory space to the discussion of historical precedent; including Turing machines, Fred Cohen’s pioneering work with computer viruses, John von Neumann’s cellular automata theory (i.e. any system that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism), avant-garde cybernetics, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Creeper virus in the Arpanet network, the coupling machines of John Conway, the nastily waggish Morris worm, Richard Dawkins’s meme (contagious idea) theory; and even the under known artistic hacks of Tommaso Tozzi. Furthermore, the viral spectral as fantasized in science fiction is adequately fleshed out, paying deserved attention to the obscure but much loved (by me, anyway) 1975 book The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner and the celebrated cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; among other speculative books and hallucinatory films.

But the pinnacle of interest, for me, of this engaging and educative read is its conclusion where Parikka sketches out an alternative radical media-ecological perspective hinged on the viral characteristics of self-reproduction and a coupling of the outside with the inside typical of artificial life (a-life). He correctly maintains that viral autopoiesis undertakings, like Thomas S. Ray’s Tierra virtual ecology art project, provides quintessential clues to interpreting the software logic that has produced, and will continue to produce, the ontological basis for much of the economic, political and cultural transactions of our current globalizing world.

Here he has rendered problematic the safe vision of virus as malicious software (virus as infection machine) and replaced it with a far more curious, aesthetic and even benevolent one; as whimsical artificial life (a-life). Using viral a-life’s tenants of semi-automation, self-reproduction, and host quest; Parikka proposes a living machinic autopoiesis that might provide a moebius strip like ontological process for culture.

Though suppositional, he bases his procedure in formal viral attributes – not unlike those of primitive artificial life with its capability to self-reproduce and spread semi-autonomously (as viruses do) while keeping in mind that Maturana/Varela’s autopoiesis contends that living systems are an integral component of their surroundings and work towards supporting that ecology. Parikka here picks up that thread by pointing out that recent polymorphic viruses are now able to evolve in response to anti-virus behaviors. Various viruses, known as retroviruses, (***) explicitly target anti-virus programs. Viruses with adaptive behavior, self-reproductive and evolutionary programs can be seen, at least in part, as something alive, even if not artificial life in the strongest sense of the word. Here we might recall John Von Neumann’s conviction that the ideal design of a computer should be based on the design of certain human organs – or other live organisms. The artistic compositional benefit of his autopoiesic virality theory, for me, is in allowing thought and vision to rupture habit and bypass object-subject dichotomies.

I wish to point out here that although biological viruses were originally discovered and characterized on the basis of the diseases they caused, most viruses that infect bacteria, plants and animals (including humans) do not cause disease. In fact, viruses may be helpful to life in that they rapidly transfer genetic information from one bacterium to another, and viruses of plants and animals may convey genetic information among similar species, helping their hosts survive in hostile environments.

Already various theories of complexity have established an influence within philosophy and cultural theory by emphasizing open systems and adaptability, but Parikka here supplies a further step in thinking about ongoing feedback loops between an organism and its environment, what I am tempted to call viralosophy. Viralosophy would be the study of viral philosophical and theoretical points of reference concerning malignant transformations useful in understanding the viral paradigm essential to digital culture and media theory that focuses on environmental complexity and interconnectionism in relationship to the particular artist. Within viralosophy, viral comprehension might become the eventual – yet chimerical – reference point for culture at large in terms of a modification of parameters, as it promotes parasite-host dynamic interfacings of the technologically inert with the biologically animate, probabilistically.

So the decisive, if dormant, payload that is triggered by reading this book, for me, is an enhanced understands of pagan and animist sentiment which recognizes non-malicious looping-mutating energy feedback and self-recreational dynamism that informs new aesthetic becomings which may alter artistic output. Possibly heuristic becomings (****) that transgress the established boundaries of nature/technology/culture and extend the time-bomb cognitive nihilism of Henry Flynt. This affirmative viral payload forces open-ended multiplicities onto art that favor new-sprung conceptualizations and rebooted realizations. Here the artist comes back to life as spurred a-life, and not as a sole articulation of the pirated environment of currency. So the so-called art virus is not to be judged in terms of its occasional monetary payload, but by the metabolistic characteristics that make art reasonable to discuss as a form of extravagant artificial life: triggered emergence, resilience and back door evolution.

(*) A computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an “infection”, and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a “host”.

(**) Scientists have argued about whether viruses are living organisms or just a package of colossal molecules. A virus has to hijack another organism’s biological machinery to replicate, which it does by inserting its DNA into a host.

(***) Retroviruses are sometimes known as anti-anti-viruses. The basic principle is that the virus must somehow hinder the operation of an anti-virus program in such a way that the virus itself benefits from it. Anti-anti-viruses should not be confused with anti-virus-viruses, which are viruses that will disable or disinfect other viruses.

(****) A heuristic virus cleaner works by loading an infected file up to memory and emulating the program code. It uses a combination of disassembly, emulation and sometimes execution to trace the flow of the virus and to emulate what the virus is normally doing. The risk in heuristic cleaning is that if the cleaner tries to emulate everything, the virus might get control inside the emulated environment and escape, after which it can propagate further or trigger a destructive retaliation reflex.

Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech

2nd part of Auriea Harvey’s and Michael Samyn’s retrospective on Furtherfield. In the 1st interview they discussed about the history of their previous incarnation as net art collaborators, Entropy8Zuper! This time Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X), talks with them about their mutation into Tale of Tales and why and how this change came about…

Click here to read the 1st interview

‘Who are you?’ I ask. I am a bit confused: although I know them as Entropy8Zuper!, their most recent piece, The Endless Forest, is created by Tale of Tales. Auriea explains that E8Z! was very personal, as it was the merging of entropy8 (herself) and zuper! (Michael). ‘E8Z! is just the two of us’ says Michael.

It has always been like that, our little personal corner of the web… But with Tale of Tales, we took a step towards an audience in the sense that we wanted to make things the wider audience could enjoy actively.

In 2002 E8Z! Found the for-profit company Tale of Tales. Tale of Tales’s brief is to produce alternative commercial video games for a niche market that does not enjoy the violence and blood-shedding of most mainstream games. According to their website, their aim is to design and develop immersive websites and multimedia environments with a strong emphasis on narration, play, emotion and sensuality.

http://tale-of-tales.com/information.html (retrieved August 2006)

It seems to me that the current work of ToT is very different from E8Z!’s early work. Do they feel that they have lost something? Yes, they have, says Michael, but that was something they wanted to lose. The shift from E8Z! to Tale of Tales was a natural evolution for them. The main differences between the two have to do with their maturity as artists and as a couple, and the technological developments that took place from 1999 to 2003: E8Z! Produced work for each other, while ToT’s main aim is to reach audiences; E8Z! was operating on the crossover between art and design, while ToT looks at the cross-pollination of art and video games; E8Z! Produced work for the web while ToT’s pieces are downloadable.

ToT’s most well-known work? In fact, the only developed work they have released? Is The Endless Forest (2005-). This is a hybrid, multi-layered piece that operates on several levels: it is an online multiplayer game, it is also a social screensaver, a live performance environment, a virtual world, and a collective fairytale: In The Forest, you are a deer. You live deep in the idyllic, peaceful forest. You spend your time roaming around the forest with other deer. You eat, sleep under the shadow of the trees, drink water from the lake, rest by the ancient ruins, play with other deer and collect flowers. There are also things you cannot do in the forest: you cannot speak, for example. This is not just any forest… In The Endless Forest, magical things can happen: beasts can fly, all the flowers can bloom at once, stones can fall from the sky, and the rain can be gold. Nobody knows what the Twin Gods will come up with to entertain themselves… While in the Forest, there are no goals to achieve or rules to follow. Being there is what this experience is about.

So how did The Endless Forest start?, I ask. I actually know that the prototype was commissioned by the Musee d’Art Moderne Grad-Duc Jean (last visit 27/04/2007) (Museum of Modern Art of Luxemburg) in September 2003. (Now that I think about it, this is rather strange given Auriea and Michael’s comments about net artists selling their work to Museums!) “At that time ToT were working on 8, a research project which they tried to turn into a commercial game. This was the first time that they were trying to produce a commercial video game, and it was hard to find a balance between the mainstream publishers’ requirements and their wish to produce an alternative, non-violent and non-sexist title. 8 was still quite traditional in that it was based on action, had a clear-cut narrative and the player had to perform certain tasks in order to achieve his/her aim. So The Forest came up as a reaction against these very specific sets of rules about how a game should function. ToT came up with the idea on a train-ride back from Luxembourg: the train was driving through a forest (Ardennes) and they could see deer roaming in it… It was a bit of a joke to start with,” They giggle.

[M:] So next to that (8) was The Endless Forest, which was sort of an anti-game. It was like ‘you play a deer, in a forest, and you can’t talk, and you can’t level up’, ha ha! And there’s lots of things you can’t do, and that’s, like, cool! ? Once ToT created a forest it took a long time for the project to fully emerge. Originally they were not at all clear about what this forest would be or how it would evolve. There was not a single deer in the prototype forest that was presented, for example.

One of the reasons E8Z! had decided to stop Wirefire was that they found its ‘liveness’ both limited and limiting. Wirefire could only be live once per week, while Auriea and Michael were performing in it:

M: It only lived an hour per week, while there were still people who were very valid and active participants there. They could probably do a performance themselves or whatever. So that’s where the idea of a persistent world came from. Everybody could be present in the environment, and there’s no division between the artist and the audience.

So the idea was to create The Forest as a persistent world depending for its aliveness on its inhabitants rather than its creators. It took a while to get it started as they were busy working on 8. They only went back to work on The Forest in 2005 once it was clear that 8 was too weird and different a game for it to get commercial funding. By then, they had also realised how difficult and expensive these games are to produce, and what building the full design of The Endless Forest would mean in terms of money and time… Eventually, they came up with the idea of chopping the Forest’s complex design into pieces, seeking arts funding to produce each piece and release these sequentially.

From the very beginning of their career, first as E8Z! and then ToT, Auriea and Michael have explored ways for their work to be financially self-sustainable: as E8Z! they did a great many commercial projects, for example projects like Museum of Sex (2002), Making Waves and Next Wave Festival (2002-3), Oblomow (2006); and never sought arts funding. Instead, they sustained their art through the income generated by their web design. They even tried to raise money through the art itself: skinonskinonskin was presented as a pay-per-view project, whereas the Godlove Museum has recently been rebuilt in flash and is available to download for a fee of 20 euros. And, although as ToT they have been dependent on arts funding for the development of The Endless Forest and have not generated any income as yet, their brief is to produce commercial games people will want to pay for.

The Endless Forest is available to download and play for free. This is because it was released piece by piece, and so ToT felt that they couldn’t charge for the first very basic version of the game. Auriea explains that another reason they don’t charge is that this is their first game environment, and they wanted to have as many people/deer in the forest as possible in order to test how the environment works and receive feedback from players. This is a way for them to demonstrate their abilities as game developers and become known in the gaming world. They think that this approach worked as there are more than 13,000 deer currently roaming in the forest (!), and they can see that there is an audience out there interested in their work. This is unlike most net art practices, which are normally accessible online and open to all. Why do Auriea and Michael think that it is OK to ask people to pay to view their work?

It all started because they only wanted a ‘serious’ audience to be able to access their work, explains Auriea. To them, skinonskinonskin was a very personal project, and they wanted to ensure that it would only be accessed by people who would make an informed and conscious decision to visit it. This was more of a symbolic gesture than a real attempt to generate income, claims Auriea. People had to pay minimal fees, and the money generated was shared. Charging people to view the project was just a way of protecting the piece ? and themselves? by anyone who wasn’t interested enough in it.

Charging for downloads of the Godlove Museum is not the same: this time, they really felt that, since re-building the project on a more sustainable technical platform to make it fully accessible was really hard work, it is only fair to ask people who want to download this new version of the project to pay a fee. They did not know whether this would work, and they saw it as an experiment in e-commerce. They both find it difficult to understand why paying for net art is so taboo: people pay for books, magazines, movies, music and games… They pay for a night out with friends. They often pay exuberant prices to collect art objects shown in galleries. Why is it taboo to charge people to view and/or download a net art piece? E8Z! ask. People even pay for the technology to view the piece, like their hardware, software, and Internet connection, says Michael, rather baffled. The only thing they refuse to pay for is the art itself…

I have to admit that I am the culprit of this attitude myself. When I realised I could download a new version of the Godlove Museum for 20 euros, I thought, ‘Well, that’s only fair; that’s not more than I would pay for a book’, but for some reason, I was still resistant to the idea… In the end, I didn’t buy it. I can’t even explain why I didn’t buy it! Why this resistance to pay for art on the Internet? I ask E8Z!:

A: I think it’s the arts community and the way they’re used to relating to what people produce. ‘Art should be free’ someone said to us, you know. We’re like, well, you pay for movies and music… But the sad thing is that most people wouldn’t look at it seriously, even if it were free and online. And I think that this is what happened with net art: people stopped looking at it seriously, stopped examining it. With games, it is completely different. People seriously look at it. They’ll play a game that lasts twenty hours, you know? They’ll play it all the way through, and then they’ll play it repeatedly and again so they can do a speed run and then do it in two hours. And then they’ll record it and put it on YouTube. So it’s a different audience, and that’s the audience that we decided we like better. Not only will they look at, dissect and criticise what you’re working on, but they’ll also pay for it.

Michael thinks that the privacy of a net art experience is another factor that deters people from paying for it: it lacks social status. Visiting a gallery, going to the cinema, and going out with friends are all social activities that may help define one’s identity as a popular, well-educated, cultivated, intelligent person. On the other hand, viewing art online in the privacy of one’s house is something that no one will even know… Why on earth would one want to pay for such a ‘pervert’ experience? Laughs Michael. Whatever the reasons this doesn’t work, it doesn’t: hardly anyone has paid to download the Godlove Museum…

Tale of Tales considers it extremely important that they eventually produce projects people will want to pay for. Whether this is called art or entertainment is, for them, irrelevant. They have never wanted to work within a pure art context, says Auriea, as art means nothing to the culture. Absolutely nothing. They have always worked on the borderline between art and something else, like crafts or entertainment, that is more relevant or accessible to popular culture. They think that games are much more successful in involving their users in two-way communication than many ‘interactive’ art projects have been.

It emerges that they have both been keen game-players themselves. Auriea gets very excited talking about the first games she played. Tomb Raider, for example, was a huge inspiration, she laughs. There has been a very strong community element about many MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games, and ToT greatly like this. It reminds them of the early Internet. It is about communication, exchange, and limited hierarchy.

M: For many game-players, playing becomes interwoven within the fabric of their lives, and this is another element that Auriea and Michael like about games: this blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction, when the fairytale becomes part of one’s everyday life. This is how they experienced Wirefire while it was still active, as another space, always available, where they could withdraw together once per week. They hope that this is how The Forest experience will be for its players:

A: So you go in the forest and play for five minutes and then you go off and do whatever you want. Or you come back to your machine, you notice that it’s playing, you ran around for a little while and then you stop. And so it becomes a part of your life, you know… Something that you play for a few minutes, but then it stays with you for the rest of the day. Or something you think about every now and then… Or you want to go back and visit a certain place, you know… For us that’s what Wirefire was too, like this place we visited for an hour every week.

Do they think that The Endless Forest is similar to other popular virtual environments like Second Life? Yes, they both think that it is, because, like Second Life, the main aim of the environment is for people to socialize, hang out together, have fun and possibly collaborate, while it lacks the central attributes of other MMO games such as specific rules, tasks, targets, violence and competition. On the other hand it differs from Second Life in that is is an authored environment. Whereas SL duplicates elements of RL within a virtual context, The Forest is a fairytale world and places its users straight within a specific narrative. Auriea and Michael’s work has always been about story-telling: they might not produce linear stories with plots, but they like to create narrative environments that transport audiences/users from their everyday lives into the context of open-ended, multi-layered fictional worlds.

ToT are currently developing a new project called The Path. This is a single-player PC game they hope will become a commercial project that people will be willing to pay for. The Endless Forest experience makes them think that there is an audience out there that appreciates their work, and this is an audience that they would like to approach. Incidentally, although there are no official studies or statistics, ToT have evidence from the players that participate in the Forum. that the majority of their players are female, which is unlike most other MMORPGs. ToT hope that, eventually, they will become independent of public arts funding by being able to generate commercial income.

[M:] There is an audience there, so we think that maybe we should work together with the audience rather than the funders. Maybe that’s a deal we can do with them, like ‘you pay, we make, OK?’ ha ha! We’ll see, it’ll be an experiment…

I think that by now it wouldn’t come as a surprise to say that, when asked about their influences (other than games!) Auriea and Michael refer to paintings: they talk about Baroque and Gothic art; Michael also talks about old Flemish painters. They talk about their love of craftmanship and they attempt to shock me by stating that ?cathedrals are the best 3D narrative environments?. They consider themselves ‘conservative’ (this is a word they repeat quite often) because they insist on story-telling, figuration, and content. They are against cynicism. They believe in hope and beauty. Through their art they want to affect communities and give people joy. And they talk about their work with such affection, as if they speak of a child: Auriea describes how she feels physically ill when their server is down…

Do they come from another time?

Well, whatever era they come from, I wish the best of luck to these two pragmatic-dreamers-in-love…

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Edward Picot, originally from Hertfordshire in the UK, now lives in Kent with his wife and daughter. He completed his Ph.D in English Literature in 1997 and then published his thesis in book-form ‘Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945’. It deals with modern landscape poetry in the context of the environmental crisis, and includes substantial essays on five postwar British poets Philip Larkin, R S Thomas, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. It also examines the recurring myths of Eden and the Fall, which have been used to assert and explain the superiority of the countryside or natural world (seen as Eden) to the urban environment (seen as the result of the Fall).

His day job is with the health service but he makes time in his schedule for self-publishing online, where you will find various types of work. He publishes something new every month; usually a piece of criticism for one month, then followed by a visual work the next. In 2003 he set up another web site called The Hyperliterature Exchange[1], a review and directory of Hyperliterature works for sale on the Web, with links to the places where it can be bought. Featuring works by artists and poets such as Mac Dunlop, Peter McCarey, Martha Deed and many others this is well worth investigation.

Edward Picot’s visually playful, web art interpretation of Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird[2] is a curious artwork for many reasons. Once you have visited the work it lingers in the mind and on each return it maintains a strong freshness. So what is it in this work that compels me to re-experience its particularly strange and magical reasoning?

Most of Picot’s web artwork communicates to a younger generation as well as for adults. For instance the Flash piece created in 2006 called Frog-o-Mighty[3], was a collaboration between himself and his daughter Rachel. In this piece they used as the main props for the story ornaments from their living-room window-sill, and also the window-sill as the setting, the scenery. On his web site Edward says “Many of my recent creative pieces have been either entirely or partially inspired by the games I play with my daughter Rachel. They therefore feature a lot of jokes and toys.” Frog-o-Mighty first appeared online in Autumn 2006 as part of the Art of the Animal Net Art Exhibition, curated and designed by poet and net artist Jason Nelson.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is an altogether more complex affair, even though it is as equally as approachable as Frog-o-Mighty when first experienced. The poem was originally written by the American poet Wallace Stevens[4], who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. Stevens main focus and interest was to write on ideas that “revolved around the interplay between imagination and reality and the relation between consciousness and the world.”

Unlike Frog-o-Mighty, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird has a little more interaction, but not much. The only two sections where you can interact (as in clicking) are either at the beginning where you can find some interesting information about the work or at the first page, the main interface for the actual piece itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not desperately asking for interaction here. In fact, there are many out there who dispute interaction and the process of just habitually clicking away. Interaction itself, can become more of a means to an end. Sometimes it is nice to just let a work appear and happen in front of you.

Picot says “the idea for this version of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird came to me a couple of years ago, when I was working on my own one Saturday and there was a heavy fall of snow. In the middle of the afternoon, whilst waiting for the kettle to boil for my umpteenth cup of coffee, I happened to glance out of the window. In the carpark outside grows a crab-apple tree, which bears very bright red fruit in winter, and because of the snow the apples were looking particularly vivid. On one branch of the tree perched a blackbird – a startling contrast with both the white snow and the red fruit. Pretentious soul that I am, I was immediately reminded of Wallace Stevens’ poem, and almost as immediately it occurred to me that the crab-apple tree would make an excellent interface for a new media version, with the bright red apples acting as buttons to call up the different sections.”[5]

On first entering, you immediately come across a silhouette of a crab-apple tree. There are few plants that create greater intrigue or visual impact during all four seasons than the flowering of a crab-apple tree. Colours can range from dark-reddish purples through the reds and oranges to golden yellow and even some green. On this occasion they are deep red and the tree itself bares no leaves so we must assume that it is winter. Crab-apples are usually no larger than 2 inches in diameter, a perfect fruity, nature-nurtured confectionary for a blackbird to peck into. The Celtic year has 13 months and each month is associated with a particular tree and its contribution to mankind, together with its forms of healing and associating for the month they represent. “The crab-apple is the ancient mother of all orchard trees and Britain’s only indigenous apple tree. The flowers are valuable to insects and the fruit is important to birds.”[6]

Before we even touch upon the role of the blackbird or delve into specific areas of the work’s inner content, there are some interesting elements of symbolism at play. Whether this is deliberate or not, it is of course the artists’ prerogative to leave different measures of ambiguity hanging loose according to their process and decision making, which of course can add an extra nuance to the whole mix. In the Garden of Eden story in the Biblical book of Genesis God charges both Adam and Eve to tend the garden in which they live, commanding Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – we know the rest. Picot’s decision to use the archetypal image of a tree as the interface, offers some interesting parallels that may be not as binary, absolute or as literal as the Biblical book of Genesis. Yet it introduces us to elements that symbolically touch upon religion and metaphysics, which weave in and out through the whole piece.

Much of the religious flavour does echo from Wallace Stevens himself, although not with obvious traditional or orthodox values. He believed that God was a human creation. Yet he was interested in something as equivalent which ruled the universe, our hearts and minds. Through his poetic reasoning he found that complete contact with reality was a closer conduit towards discovering the truth of what we really are. Proposing that, ‘with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity.’ He felt that humanity could find truth and our own heaven(s) through sensuous apprehension of the world. “This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that god can never again be.” [7] Whether he felt that god was ever a reality is not clear, yet it is interesting that he believed that humanity could replace whatever void with something equally significant and relevant. He also thought that reality was and is a product of our imagination, this shapes the world.

The various contexts created throughout the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” might be considered from the romantic point of view as haphazard attempts at defining or identifying the writing subject’s relation to an object that is already ambiguous in itself and is a symbol rich in potential for producing hopes and fears. On ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. Helen Vendler.

This mixture of existential realism, metaphysical and spiritual reflection through the process and practice of poetic discourse settles neatly with Picot’s own contemporary version of, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. As you explore the various audio/visual presentations within each section, which feature stanzas from the poem. Each of the Stanzas introduces or guides you into a specific theme or micro-journey that unfolds before your eyes. The first one begins quite simply, with the visitor being taken to a cartoon image of a mountainous vista then the blackbird, then a zooming into its eye. From then on as you move through the different sections you are taken into different worlds and situations.

It consciously acknowledges the original spirit of the text, whilst introducing a response that at the same time attempts to deal with what these words may mean today. This interpretation of the poem not only gives us the opportunity to appreciate how special the original work is by following the text, whether in order, or haphazardly, but it also creates a moment in time that opens up a rare experience of two creative minds as a kind of collaboration.

There are various other clues within the whole work which can enlighten you of the different influences to Picot’s work. If you click on the eighth crab-apple you are taken to a bookshelf. One of the books on the shelf is called ‘Seeing Things’ which is Oliver Postgate’s autobiography. In the UK, Oliver Postgate [8] was responsible right from the late 1950’s to this day for, the most imaginative and magical children’s television. “He is the creator and writer of some of the most popular children’s television programmes ever seen in Britain. Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with Peter Firmin, and were shown on the BBC between the 1950s and the 1980s, and on ITV from 1959 to the present day. In a 1999 poll, Bagpuss was voted most popular children’s programme of all time.” My personal favourites are Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss and The Clangers.

Moving away from the mystical and magical elements that reside in the piece, there are a few darker moments to experience. One of them is the portrayal of the real-life disaster such as the Hurricane Katrina disaster on Louisiana and connected regions. Images of newspaper reportage, snippets of the carnage and the hurricane are shown, as well as the blackbird flying across the scenery.

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

The role of the blackbird seems to me a kind of spectre, a shadow of ours, Stevens’s and Picot’s consciousness. It takes us through the scenes, introducing with each stanza various points of reference, like a guide. It sees what we see, but opens our eyes to re-imagine or remember certain things, letting us come to terms with our own conclusions alongside the poetry, an important trigger and voice of the work.

I am hesitant in continuing with unearthing more of this work. What I will conclude with is that, what I find personally interesting in Picot’s version of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Is that, it is connected to so many different things that exist outside of the work itself. There are jokes, puns, and some darker moments but all presented in a playful light. The world is a backdrop yet at the same time it still manages to maintain a fresh and simple narrative that can be understood at many levels. It revels in its small bites of aspects of human nature; simple yet profound. On the whole, it is a delightful and beautiful experience that can move you and have you thinking about metaphysical matters as well as real situations. It breaths life into our grey and seriously battered worlds, shining a kind of light which asks us to slow down a little and let go of our socially engineered sensibilities and open ourselves up to a snippet of richness that is not trying to impress how clever it is but how imagination can also be about play.

The Hyperliterature Exchange[1]
http://hyperex.co.uk/

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird – Wallace Stevens [2]
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/blackbird.htm

Frog-o-Mighty – 2006, Edward Pictot. [3]
http://www.edwardpicot.com/frog-o-mighty/

Wallace Stevens: Biography and Recollections by Acquaintances:[4]
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/bio.htm

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird – notes [5]
http://edwardpicot.com/thirteenways/notes.html

Celtic Tree Alphabet (Ogham Calendar). [6]
https://orders.mkn.co.uk/tree/birthdaytree/$USD

Southworth, James G. Some Modern American Poets, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, p. 92.[7]
http://teenink.com/Past/2001/April/Books/13Ways.html

Oliver Postgate [8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Postgate

14th July – 9th September 07.

TheSpace4, Peterborough.

Summerbranch is a hyperreal cross-media woodland environment created by Igloo during a residency at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest in 2005. Installed across the three rooms of TheSpace4 gallery in Peterborough from 14th July – 9th September.

The first room contains lenticular prints, a non-interactive projection on one wall, and a suit of an extreme form of sniper camouflage that looks like some moss monster. This sets the scene for presenting an engrossing and haunted hyperreal landscape. That landscape consists of an archetypal woodland. Trees, rocks, ferns and water are scattered across a gently undulating leaf mould and moss ground.

This landscape is first presented as lenticular prints of a virtual scene. Whenever it appears, the level of detail of this virtual environment is astonishing. The SVGA data projectors used in the gallery and the ridges of the lenticular prints break the scene down into coarser pixels or bands than a modern widescreen monitor or high-resolution inkjet print could display it with. The richness of the textures and shading and the density of high-polygon modelling would seem obsessive if not for the convincing illusion of place that necessitates and follows from them.

Lenticular prints are popular with the creators of kitsch religious, commemorative and marketing items such as postcards and cereal box novelties. Consumer cameras capable of capturing the multiple images required to make lenticular prints have been available for decades. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol used large-scale lenticular prints of flowers as part of an installation. But unlike video and VR, there has been no popularization of Lenticular Print technology or techniques for popular production rather than popular consumption.

As you walk by the lenticular prints, they spin, pan, or zoom in and out. The effect is disorienting when the movement of the scene does not relate easily to your own movement. You have to adjust your movements to their framerate and dissociate what your eye sees from what you know your body is doing. You have to suspend your disbelief and accept the veracity of the imaginary scenes that the images present.

On the far wall, a video projector cuts slowly between scenes from what initially appears to be the same virtual environment as the lenticular prints. But it is a real wood, possibly the model for the renderings, recorded by a motionless video camera with a sniper costumed figure lurking in some of the shots. Its haunted emptiness makes it seem as unreal as its presumably inspired virtual environment. The thousands of tiny non-events of light motion and sound in calm woodland are hypnotic. The colours and motion are gentle and gradual, contrasting the harsher lenticular images. The prints and projection complement each other, redoubling the reality of the archetypical woodland(s) that they present.

I found that the walls of the middle room broke this effect. They are covered with wallpaper prints of the virtual forest scene rendered in layered low-resolution pastel-coloured pixels. I have spoken to several other people about the work in this room, all of whom have loved it, so possibly I have failed to see this work in some important way. That possibility raises its head again in my experience of the third room, although in a different way.

The third room is darkened and contains two wall-scale projections of Virtual Realities of the forest scene, one night and one day. Each has a plinth in front of it with a trackball and two buttons on it. Moving forward with one of the buttons is very smooth, but rotating with the trackball is unforgivably headache-inducing. This breaks the suspension of disbelief each time you look around. Fortunately, the visual and sonic richness of the world quickly envelops you again once you stop turning.

Virtual Reality (VR) emerged from late Cold War-era academic and military research. Summerbranch is not a training program for the European Theatre of World War 3, complete with Soviet Troops. It is a simulation of the New Forest, not the Black Forest, and it is at peace, apparently empty of human presence apart from the viewer. But it is haunted by the history of VR both technologically and by the presence of the sniper outfit in the first room.

Early VR systems from the 1980s used advanced display hardware linked to one or more minicomputers. By the early 1990s, cheaper custom hardware was available, and by the mid-1990s, VR was being created using internet-based software on stock personal computers. There were exhibitions of VR at the ICA in London, and excitement grew around the artistic use of the medium. But VRML 2, the HTML of virtual reality, destroyed any company that tried to implement it, and modem-bound internet users baulked at downloading hundreds of kilobytes of mesh and texture data for every location they visited.

Net-based VR and its artistic use had imploded by the end of the 1990s. “First Person Shooter” (FPS) games such as the Quake series surpassed older VR systems and software in power and popularity by the turn of the millennium. The VR torch is being carried by online environments such as Second Life that combine broadband download speeds with the ability to create new environments and objects within the software rather than expensive and cumbersome software intended for architecture or film use.

Using a single-person environment rather than an online VR system is not a technologically determined decision. As well as the unwanted destructive attentions of “griefers”, an online environment would draw other viewers who would destroy the solitude of the piece. There is little point in creating a gallery-based single-user work online, even if the rendering engine can do it. And Second Life currently would have trouble rendering all the details of Summerbranch. Artistic use of computing machinery should be based on the tools fitting the task, not artistic or technological fashion. Igloo has used the right technological tools for the artistic job.

If you are present when one of the environments has to be restarted due to your unseen avatar in the virtual world getting stuck on the edge of a hill polygon, you can see that the environment is rendered using Unreal Engine, a commercial FPS game engine. A decade ago, this kind of environment would not have been possible even with custom “Superscape” hardware.

Using multiple media to present the virtual scene as a complement to the recording of the real scene creates a hyperreal landscape. The reality of this is altered, but not interrupted, in the VRs by the motion-captured dance of moss-covered dancing female forms if you can find them among the foliage. Layer upon layer of invocation of nature, technology and mystery building up to produce the final effect of the work, which consists as much in what is absent as in what is present in it. This experience of the work is hard to put into words, which for a piece of art is a strong sign of its effectiveness.

I did not see the dancing female forms when I first used the VRs, and if the sniper/moss monster forms are in the VRs, I did not find them. Despite trying, I didn’t see them in the video projection on first viewing. Would my experience of the work have been any better if I had found them immediately? Would it have been any worse had I not found them at all? Would this have been a success or failure on the part of the artists or on the part of myself as the viewer? I do not have the answers to these questions, but I suspect that an interactive Fine Art context allows for a more varied, exclusive and hard-won experience than a game or an educational interactive context. Interactive aesthetics very quickly become interactive ethics.

Technically speaking, there is little new for the veteran of art virtual reality. What is new is the way that Igloo places Summerbranch in relation to contemporary art practice and to art history, not as a challenge but as a continuation. There is both a loss and a gain here. The loss is VR’s formal and experiential radicality as an artistic medium, a thread that I hope other practitioners will revive. The gain is a recognition of VR’s broader artistic value to the mainstream art practice, similar to that gained by photography as an art medium after the 1970s.

VR, video and lenticular prints are all low cultural, technological forms with long pedigrees. But they are still unfamiliar enough to have the appearance of modern technology and to surprise and interest people. All are ways of creating 3D illusions mechanically, and deploying them to create illusions of the same imagined world gives a more persuasive reality to that world.

Summerbranch succeeds spectacularly in making the hyperreal experience a rich contemplative encounter with the uncanniness of romantic nature, historical myth and rationalistic technology. This is a rich dialogue between the practices and histories of art and technology. And it is an engaging and meditative artistic spectacle.

Igloo are https://gibsonmartelli.com/works/

How Entropy8 and Zuper! became one: Entropy8Zuper!

3rd of April 2007, 7pm; I am standing outside a tall, narrow building in the centre of Gent, Belgium, waiting for Entropy8Zuper! to let me in. In that same morning, I talked to Auriea on the phone for the first time: our long relationship that developed online and took diverse manifestations –them the performers, me the audience; them the artists, me the curator; me the researcher, them the case-study…– was about to materialise. Our flesh bodies would soon be situated in the same actual space. On that morning it already took a voice: it was Auriea&s deep voice which I had heard before –but now, for the first time, it wasn’t computer-mediated.

The first time I saw a piece by Entropy8Zuper! was in 2001, at the Medi@terra festival in Greece (which I was co-directing at the time). That piece was Wirefire –and that was it… It meant I was hooked! I still have fading memories of “people without bodies mak(ing) love???1: I remember logging on my laptop on Fridays at about 1am (my time in Athens, Greece). I was there to watch the weekly performance of Wirefire that was on every Thursday night at midnight Belgium time for almost four years. The story behind Wirefire was about a couple, dispersed2, making love online, for and with audiences. Their act of virtual love-making was not a photorealistic representation of their encounter –it was love translated into audiovisual poetry: Auriea and Michael were mixing images, flash movies, animations, sounds, live streams and text files to create “compelling and seductive narratives???3 that all narrated the same story: “being digital and being in love???.4

Auriea opens the door. I see an elegant black woman, tall and slim, with long rasta locks, inviting me in what is both their house and studio. Michael is standing behind her: he is of about the same hight as her, also slim, white, with greying hair and what looks to me like a massive beard. Both seem to be in their late thirties or early fourties. Soon, we are sitting around a long dining table, on some funky, squeaky chairs. This is their living-dining room, simple, modern, and playful. There, over a few glasses of Bordeaux, Auriea and Michael talk to me for three hours about their art, life, and love-affair (which has a lot to do with both…).

How entropy8 and zuper! became one…

I have always been fascinated by Entropy8Zuper!’s love-story, which clearly was the inspiration for a lot of their early work. What I already knew was that they met and fell in love online while based in different countries (well, continents…), that they started working together while physically afar, and that they eventually decided to move in together. So Auriea gave up her life in NYC and moved to Belgium to live with Michael. But I didn’t know all the detail: Where and how did they meet? Did they fall in love at first (virtual) sight? What happened then? How difficult was it for both of them to decide to give up their lives for each other? Why is it that their work is so intrinsically interlinked with their love-affair?

“I guess it starts in Hell??? says Auriea. “What is she talking about???? I think. “I mean, in hell.com5??? she laughs. Oh god, that’s funny… What a semantically rich beginning to a career soaked in symbolism! Entropy8Zuper! have based a lot of their work (Godlove Museum, Wirefire) on allegory, and have used ‘grand narratives’ such as the Bible and folk fairytales as sources of inspiration. Auriea explains how she joined hell.com while Michael was already a member, how she knew and admired his work, and how they met there in January 1999 during a rehearsal for a collaborative, online video-performance using i-visit.6 Exactly how this happened is, Auriea says, “shrouded in mystery???.

Image from Godlove.

A: I had a web-cam running all the time –this is why I was interested, I had a streaming web-cam online. It was black and white and I used to do sort of informal online performances. So anybody who came to my web-page would see me sitting at my desk but sometimes I would do fun things with the camera. So when I showed up I was talking to Lia7 -do you know Lia? She is from Austria (…) And Michael didn’t have a web-cam so I remember he was broadcasting images of fruits and vegetables, ha ha! (…) maybe subconsciously I was attracted! (…) Yeah, that’s when we started talking and, I don’t know, it became sex-chat more or less instantly (…) which was odd because, you know, we don’t do that! Ha ha!

So it was love at first sight! And this –can you imagine?– despite the fact that Michael looked like a cauliflower!… That is how the roller-coaster of their relationship starts: the next day, Auriea says, Michael sent her an html page: “I was very excited and so I made one in return. It went back and forth like that, and that’s how skinonskinonskin got made.??? skinonskinonskin is E8Z!’s first piece. Not surprisingly, it talks about love, desire, and fantasies of sexual encounters. Originally, the piece was not even meant for audiences, it was only meant for each other. Until the hell.com server operator found the directory, ‘fell in love’ with the project, and suggested that they open it up to audiences… Eventually, E8Z! presented the piece during the hell.com pay-per-view event (September 1999): they charged audiences for admission to the skinonskinonskin website. The event was quite successful and any income generated was split between the hell.com collective.

Image from skinonskinonskin

After skinonskinonskin came Genesis (1999), chapter one of the Godlove Museum. This was while they were trying to suppress their online passion and just work together. Genesis was supposed to be their business website, “this totally animated crazy thing, you know?!??? shouts Auriea, and it was launched the same day they physically met for the first time:

A: (…) when we finally met in person, this occasion was complete fate in some ways… He was going to be in San Francisco, and I had to be in San Jose and I thought ‘this is ridiculous, we are going to be there in the same week’, you know… So I went to San Francisco, and that is where we met in person. We launched entropy8zuper.org the same day that we met! We met, we launched the site, and then we sat and…

M: …talked! Ha ha! Amongst other things..

A: At the Triton Hotel in San Francisco (…). We were very big on doing these kind of symbolic acts, like meeting in Hell for the first time and then launching the website the first time we met in person…

A lot of E8Z!’s work is autobiographical (skinonskinonskin, most of the Godlove Museum, Wirefire), in that it is centred around their private lives, their remote love-affair, and their dramatic get-together. “I think it was based on that very heavily??? says Auriea, “but we tried to get away from that after a while???. It seems that their love affair, while very romantic, was also quite traumatic for both of them: they were both in relationships and Michael had two kids; they lived in very different cities; they both had different lives and different visions of the future… Within a period of just a few months, they decided to abandon their separate lives in order to start a joint one. This was beautiful, but it was also painful, says Michael. This is why their work of that period is so self-referential: to them it functioned a bit as therapy. Some of it was even too personal or too painful to publish…

The point when they decided that they had talked enough about themselves and had to start reconnecting with the world around them, was when they were making Numbers (2002), chapter 4 of the Godlove Museum:

A: We have a little desert scene and there are these bubbles that you can click on. And that is basically us saying goodbye to this, goodbye to that…

M: (…) the bubbles contain pictures of memories.

Auriea’s moving to Europe in May 1999 coincided with a politically unsettled time and the NATO \\”intervention\\” in former Yugoslavia. The political situation of the time shook them up and reminded them that they were not alone; they had to start making art for the people: “(M:) An American coming to Europe while Clinton is bombing Yugoslavia… The world started linking with our relationship.???

The Godlove Museum, Wirefire and net.art: is it or is it not?

Wirefire started in 1999 as a continuation of skinonskinonskin: like skinonskinonskin, this was an environment for them to meet and ‘make love’. But Wirefire was much more than that: it operated in three different modes, Random, Live, and Replay. The Random mode meant that people could visit the site online and, by clicking on Play, they could generate a new automated performance as the machine would mix audio and visual files in real time. The Live mode was a weekly performance of Wirefire where E8Z! would mix the files themselves for live audiences. This was different as they would also add elements such as web-cam streams, chat, and special effects. The live audiences were visible on the screen as specs of dust, and could also contribute text through the chat which E8Z! would integrate into the audiovisual landscapes.

Images from Wirefire.

Wirefire was, in a way, the performance of the Godlove Museum, as it was recycling all the imagery made for it. So, as the Godlove Museum is based on the Bible, Wirefire also uses allegorical imagery of bees and sheep, raw meet and fire, to narrate the biblical story of Moses’ search for the promised land among war and all the monstrosities that come with it. E8Z! stress that Wirefire was a technically complex piece at the time, strong on visuals and sound. Indeed, I see it as a sensually ‘luxurious’ piece, with explosive bursts and luscious mixes of colours, textures and sounds, like a grand baroque fête… This feast of the senses that is often characteristic of E8Z!’s work is very unlike other net art (or net.art) works of the time, which are more conceptual than visual. Works like Heath Bunting’s Identity Swap Database (1999)8 for example, or Vuk Cosic’s History of Art for Airports (1997)9 are minimal, dry, with a sense of subtle humour and lots of irony. Auriea and Michael are fairly sceptical about that type of work, while they seem to be both melancholic and slightly bitter about the net.art movement. To start with, although they were working on the net at the same time like the people now considered to be ‘the net.artists’, they were never classified by art historians as part of this movement. Which is fair enough, they say, as they never saw themselves as part of this either…

A: We had some issues with that at the time, ’cause we weren’t considered net artists at all, and we didn’t really consider ourselves that either. We were doing design work more than anything else –I mean, not for our own projects, but we were web-designers and were doing projects for other people (…) So we didn’t really feel a part of anything, but there was nothing to be a part of in some ways, you know what I mean?
M: We felt part of the community I think, but not necessarily part of the genre. I remember us being angry with all their flashing pixels (…), and they were always making art about the Internet (…)

There has been a lot of discussion about the net.art movement lately, particularly with books like Rachel Greene’s Internet Art10 coming out. According to Greene, the core ideas related to net.art were \\”a serious engagement with popular media, a belief in parody and appropriation, a scepticism towards commodified media information and a sense of the interplay of art and life.\\” I read this quote out to E8Z! and ask them whether they think that their work fits into this description. Auriea originally says yes, and makes an effort to explain why –but the common ground is not that obvious… She talks about appropriating the Bible and fairytales as the subjects of their work. But then Michael says, no: “it’s more recuperation than appropriation (…) because we come from a Christian society, so it’s not appropriation when we talk about Christian mythology.??? So do they fit Greene’s description? Well, I think not: their art is romantic and epic rather than sceptical; I cannot see any parody in it as E8Z! tend to take things rather seriously; I don’t believe that they engage with popular media in any critical way –they probably engage more with baroque paintings; and yes, there is an interplay between art and life but that is mostly because their art is about their lives.

Other than sensually dry and aesthetically minimal, net.art is also often related to tactical media practices, hacking, activism (and ‘hactivism’), socially engaged systems, and community-building. I think that net.art has been more directly critical of politics, the society, the art system and itself than the work of E8Z! which, although not devoid of social commentary, is poetic, romantic, and timeless –thus lacking in specificities of time and space that are important to any political work. What do they think about that? Do they consider their art to be ‘political’ in any way? Michael is quick to respond:

M: I think both of us have always been very critical of people who are critical, ha ha! So activism was always very suspicious for us. It was I think because it always seemed so trendy and insincere.

MX: Why insincere?

M: Because I find it very easy to sit there and be an activist artist… If you really want to do something there are better ways of doing it…

That reminds me of a quote by playwright Tom Stoppard, who was accused in his early days of refusing to take a clear political position through his art:

I’m not impressed by art because it’s political, I believe in art being good art or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant art. The plain truth is that if you are angered or disgusted by a particular injustice or immorality, and you want to do something about it, now, at once, then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it. That’s what art is bad at. But the less plain truth is that without the play and plays like it, without artists, the injustice will never be eradicated.11

The more we talk, the more I think that E8Z! feel very strongly about certain issues: to them, art is communication and entertainment more than anything else. This is not to say that they are not concerned about the social conditions they live in, or that they don’t care about politics. Indeed, they made clear that the last chapters of the Godlove Museum were made as a reaction to the political situation of the time. They compare George Bush’s speech during the declaration of the war against Afghanistan to “they say it was God???’s [M] speech in the Bible: “when the Israelites had already left Egypt and were approaching the Promised Land, God was encouraging them to take this land by force, kill and rape the people who lived there, or make them their slaves. All justified by the fact that the Israelites were The Chosen People.???12

What I gather from all this is that E8Z! are idealists: they really believed that net art could make a difference for the people, and have suffered a disillusionment in that respect: “net.art did not make a social difference???, says Auriea. They believe that while the origins of the movement were rooted within a healthy reaction against the traditional art system, now ‘net artists’ are more than happy to operate within this same system, show their work in galleries, and sell it to Museums.

A: Everyone was making work (…) and it was great fun, but it wasn’t like ‘oh we ‘re making art!’ you know?! Or ‘put me in your museum now please’… It became like that I think, but it definitely wasn’t that! So it felt a little strange after a while…

M: (…) Well, it’s even worse (…). There were ironical statements like ‘this is net.art’ and all that… This was complete self-mockery basically, but I think by now people are actually taking that stuff seriously!Ha ha!

A: (…) And at a certain point there was the ritual hanging of net art, you know? Net art sort of died as something that people believed in I guess…

M: Yeah, mostly because the artists wanted to be in the museums, ha ha!

A: (…) I don’t know what caused it but it seems that now net art is something people write essays about, it’s not something that lives and people are making. (…) that is what it was made out like, you know, like ‘net art is this thing that happened in a certain year, by these certain practitioners, certain sites’… I mean it was just there for everyone who wanted to participate (…) it was interesting, productive (…). Well, I thought it was part of the development of the web and that turned out to be wrong! It felt like this was making some sort of difference in what people thought about the web, either politically or whatever… But that may or may not be true, I guess time will tell.

It seems to me that E8Z! feel let down by both the net art communities, and the art historians who have failed to talk about their work because it doesn’t neatly fit into what later became known as the ‘net.art movement’. They keep pointing out that E8Z!’s practice is interdisciplinary, merging art and design (applied arts). They stress their disbelief in conceptual art, which they see as ‘smart’ art. They think that a lot of net.art is conceptual, which to them means elitist, while pretending otherwise. As far as they are concerned, artists have to consciously consider their audiences. This became very important to them once they decided to stop producing self-referential art: they really want to address people and involve their audiences in a two-way communication. Which is why they don’t like showing their work in galleries: they run away from the art system, Auriea says, to the web, which at the time seemed to be less hierarchical and more open to communication and exchange; why would they want to return to the art-world?

Wirefire ends in 2003:

A: Wirefire just ended because… –well, we decided to end it, ha ha! We decided ‘this will be the last one’ while we were doing it… Because I think we could see which way the wind was blowing on the Internet and we thought ‘the net is not the same place like when we started’. (…) We had been feeling like that for a while, that Wirefire was a relic in some ways, and we should sort of pack it away a little bit… And also our private meetings to work things out and connect with each other in that way was not something we needed any more I think –we had already been living together for three or four years… So we decided that we were not going to expand the project –which is what it needed– and so we should stop doing it and make something else. That’s why we made The Endless Forest (…).

What happened next? To be continued…

skinonskinonskin:
http://entropy8zuper.org/skinonskinonskin
Wirefire:
http://www.entropy8zuper.org/wirefire/i.html
The Godlove Museum:
http://entropy8zuper.org/godlove
Tale of Tales:
http://www.tale-of-tales.com

_Reality Mapping: Navigating the Social-Nodes_

Web 2.0 is based on a collusive tapestry of adjoining social nodes. Social Networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Orkut, Liveleak, YouTube, Twitter and Pownce aren’t prefaced on pre-set connotative connections maintained through historicized emotional depth or satisfied by biological drives. Friends aren’t friends as we have come to know them: there is no establishment of shared geophysical experiences, no cathartic or chronologically defined friendship markers evident. What’s important is [inter]action and the quantity of it – the residual volume of contact and the fact of shared connection minus a meatbody context. Identity is constructed in these friendship pathways via the idea of notations; of naming labels, of icon attribution, and of clustered info-snippets streamlined through an interface designed for momentary persona snapshots.

_Distributed Identity Compensation_

In digitized social networks there is no place for psychologically defined notions of personality as a cohesive, definable whole. Identity manifests through notational distributions found in multiple profiles across various platforms. Ego-mediated variables are replaced with actuated identity markers defined by the ability to establish links to others likewise devoid of any traditional geophysical baggage. For these articulated identities [now known as versionals] connection is the vital point of communication; not the content, not the geophysical inflection, not the biologically-saturated ties linked to survival, competition, and traditional concrete community building. This method of clustered distribution provokes a type of reality lag found in capitalistic and ideologically frameworked nations; those devoted to maintaining established notions of individuals definable by consumerism and Darwinian drives, monetary wealth, institution-adherence, and paranoid-inducing security.

_Versional Space-Walking_

Mobile technologies such as phones and other wireless tech-detritus have likewise altered the nature of individualised space with unwitting listeners in proximity switching to socially-mediated communication channels. Private data is is now dispersed publically, infiltrating individualised mono-access to private spheres and rewriting them as open-ended versional noise. There is no definitive narrative stream or beginning> middle>end but clusters of “incomplete” identity snippets.

_Social Infowork: Versionals Don’t Do Hollywood_

Contemporary entertainment models are significantly threatened by a versional/distributed identity ethos. The proscribed linearities of passive, individuated entertainment experiences [ie television, cinema and literature] are being currently eroded via clustered peer2peer, gamer-defined, remixed, mashedup copyright left content. Information and work boundaries are collapsing. Pop-cultural lexicons are moving towards a type of modulated system based on versional directed traffic. Hollywood’s kneejerk reaction is epitomized in their rush to remake outmoded movie sequels and for tv networks to rehash content dependent on narrative rite-of-passage tropes. The viewer investment in following an unfolding plot and/or seeking a concrete meaning [ie art/entertainment viewed as a purveyor of ritualised morality lessons] has morphed via social networking into a focus on connective experientiality.

_Doubling the Virtual: Decay of Real Reality_

Notions of a legitimate reality as defined by a grounded geophysical state are altering. Base biological data is being mined and mapped as a potential infostream to harvest and alter [ think: the potential FLOSS utilization of the mapping of the human genome]. Google Earth/Maps/Streetview software exposes geography as an infowork entertainment stream.Versional operation in social networks and avatar use in virtual worlds such as Second Life and MMOGs also contribute to this shift. One such example is a double-virtual layered reality presented in aspects of the MMOG World of Warcraft in the Caverns of Time instance “Old Hillsbrad”. When entering the instance, each character involved is transported to a parallel reality version of an area of the game they have previously [and probably extensively] encountered. The primary game reality is replaced by a secondary reality, complete with altered gameworld parameters such as substantial differences in topography. The avatars themselves shapeshift in order to reflect the relevant aspect of game lore with each “toon” displaying now as a human. In these manifestations, ego-stitched/physical reality and identity concepts are bifurcated through multiple projections – there is no “real” reality concept emphasized.

_Credibility Busting: Citizen Media For The Win_

Institutionalised information facets currently viewed as “factual” are not immune to the versional effect. Canonized distributions embodying previously established credibility markers such as scientific methodology>evidence>history-as-truth are being repulsed to encourage more elastic variations on present non-credible information sources like Wikipedia, which draw on constantly changing data sources. Versionals, being post-[singular]identities, act to obfuscate regular information hierarchies and rewrite “credible” information source points via blogging, wiki creation, photo aggregationism, p2p file sharing, textual moment-capture and info-flagging [microblogging, instant messaging, tagging, social bookmarking], video snippeting, and identity diffusion. Versionals are the new cultural black.

Mediartists is an interactive experiment, an exploration into the potential for digitial artforms to return to the meaning and purpose in art. The site functions as a cyber-gallery, displaying media and digital art, experimentation in video and photography, and pedagogical texts. In the mediart manifesto, for example, creator Simon Kavanagh presents his position as working within a “decomposition movement” concerned with re-introducing the power and substance of the historical avant-garde through e-modern technology and creative thought.

A virtual installation titled “Subliminal” examines the power of subliminal messages while offering an alternative way to exhibit animations. The animation is displayed on the screen, situated beside a large glossy professional high quality print of one of the 1000 frames for sale. A monitor and keyboard invites the viewer to slow down, speed up, pause, rewind and fast-forward the animation. The artistic expression of mediartists does not to point to itself exclusively, but encourages the recipient to become an active participant. The audience shares in the production of the exhibit, contributes its imagination, and becomes incorporated into the work by virtue of encountering it. Engaging with the works, the viewers decisions play an active role in their creation. Reminiscent of Richard Long’s walks in the field, the site further illuminates how a work of art can be an action rather than simply existing as a physical object.

Mediartist calls to mind the viewing experience of, say, a Richard Serra, where in experiencing the work the viewer becomes incorporated into it as an active participant. The art becomes the interface, a dialogue of thoughts, and of cooperation and shared experience. Here, an interesting relationship is formed with the time in art that Kavanagh suggests marks the point of departure from the substance, power and presence of the art object that existed throughout the historical avant-garde, but which, from his perspective, became lacking after the 90’s. After minimalism, when the capacity for painting to invent new strategies appeared to have exhausted itself, sculpture offered a seemingly endless horizon of new possibilities, particularly in terms of the relationship between work of art and viewer. Similarly, Mediartist reveals how modern technology can be used to create art which in relation to the viewer reveals an embodied, lived experience, actualized through one’s perception, movements, emotions and awareness, remembrance and evaluation.

Light, darkness and color are primary in human experience, a concern artists have been involved with for centuries. In ‘Colour Box’, the viewer is invited to explore color and form at the most basic level, causing the work to function as a visual representation of Donald Judd’s prediction that “color to continue had to occur in space”. Entering the darkened space, the viewer encounters a cube levitating and pulsating with color. Visitors are invited to play with color using the 15 color options, or opt to do nothing. If there is no user inside the cube, or if no interaction has taken place in 5 seconds, the cube will automatically begin mixing colours at random. The longer the color key is selected, the longer the color will remain, never the same combination twice.

Experimentation with different media produces works that are visually and psychologically reflective. The artist tests and explores the possibilities offered by new media, revealing evidence of a calculated move from the frivolity of some digital art to a new condition, a quest for a return to the substance of the old masters and the ability for art to transform the viewer and invoke an increased social awareness. Whilst the interactive piece enables the viewer to explore the questions that humans have been asking since childhood: What colors go with what? What happens when two colors are mixed? What color should I choose next? The form, inevitably limited by its place in time and space, and by its medium, arguably does not invoke the power and presence of a Serra or James Turrell. Still, Kavanagh proves he has the skills and ideas to explore this challenge. As the site develops, so should the potential for manifesting new insight into this artistic development.

Visit the project here

When it comes to questions concerning art and blogs, one has to resolve the distinction between blogs dealing with art and blogs being the art. When the editors of Artkrush #57 enlisted Tom Moody’s weblog in their art blog selection, it was included in the former category. But is the latter forbidden for a blog like Moody’s, which, besides containing political thoughts and remarks of other artist’s work, contains entries of the author’s work?

Tom Moody is an American artist who started as a painter and later adopted lo-fi techniques of computer aesthetics that deal with the ubiquitous Internet commercialism and ever-present kitsch of web culture. A focal point of his work is painting molecules. It’s plain enough that every pure notion of objects and their relations (such as the depiction of molecules) invites an immense plethora of interpretations, possibly drawing on sarcastic commentary like “nothing is said when everything is said”. But the structure also implies an important point of absence of contingency, “intension abstracted from extension,” an underlying structure present in every phenomenon of human acts of objectification. The recurrence of molecules in Moody’s work yields “as a matter of essence and an essence of matter”, a crossing point of latent inner structures and omnipresent superficiality.

In his recent work called BLOG, Moody puts his web blog in a white box gallery space. Viewers could approach a simple installation of a computer monitor, keyboard and mouse to browse an artist’s blog in artMovingProjects Gallery in New York. The month-long exhibition, from May 19 to June 24, didn’t change Moody’s blogging routine, though perhaps besides having an awareness of the gallery audience. He considers this the second generation of “net art”.

“I’m going to be performing with changing content, graphics, etc. Not really any different from what I normally do, but with an awareness of a specific, meat space audience, what will work on the gallery’s screen, how to explain to a reader not physically in the gallery what I’m doing and why,” writes Moody on his blog. He reflects on the exhibition occasionally, but most entries are written in a standard manner, following the purpose and tone of Moody’s writing before the exhibition.

“The weblog is a combination of things: it’s a studio diary; it’s an ongoing documentation of past work; and it’s a place for work-in-process, as well as collaborations, original pieces made for the web, and mini-curated exhibitions of things I like (of both an art and a web-oddity nature),” Moody explains in an interview for NY Arts.

What is most interesting about BLOG is Moody’s reflection of the performance, as in what escalates the recursive nature of the concept additionally illustrated by the author himself: it is “BLOG on BLOG during BLOG.”

An artist’s ego has always played an important role in the art world, but within social media culture, one doesn’t have clarity of an artist’s front and back stage. It is supposed to be considered art if it is put it in an art context, like a gallery, but does that mean that everything else isn’t art? Weblogs, and the web in general, have proved to be successful outlets for art. The gallery context is no longer the only legitimate venue for presenting art, adding another dimension to Marcel Broodthaers’ notion of an artist being an author of definition since Duchamp’s era.

Truly, the tongue-in-cheek situation stems here from Moody’s decision to make public something that is already public in a full-fledged way. Furthermore, visitors are invited to interact through commentary on the web page in the curatorial text and Moody’s blog entries. The duality of perception brings about a duality of the audience. Blog art can easily blur the line between artistic content and curatorial mission. However, Tom Moody isn’t concerned with curating immateriality. This plain overlap of understanding art as actual and virtual, institutional and lively, makes his performance an important gesture.

The overriding effect of On Everything, Icelandic media artist Pall Thayer‘s most recent web-based work might best be summed up in two words: self-propelling excess.

Thayer’s website explicitly disregards what seems to be the crucial recipe of every successful web interface and the number one survival strategy in information-based environments: selection. Quite to the contrary, his work proposes web space as an information waste disposal site for randomly gathered media material. In On Everything, the text has become an arbitrary combination of fragments passing across the screen as an infinite stream of cooking recipes, marketing phrases, and personal diary entries, embracing any possible topic that can potentially find its way into the text. Images, meanwhile, seem similarly decomposed and fragmented. Processed by something like a digital shredder, they are cut into shavings and rearranged into colourful, collage-like compounds only vaguely reminiscent of their originals.

Suppose Thayer’s piece borrows from the profane language of garbage removal. In that case, it is certainly not because it wants to make cynical or judgmental assumptions about the media material displayed: On Everything, Thayer’s accompanying notes explain, “knows nothing of the content of these materials. It reflects everything while reflecting on nothing.” In its sheerly mechanical and automated import of content, Thayer’s version of the web points to an uncanny momentum that can be found in both the realm of file-sharing and networking tools and the reality of waste disposal: disinterested accumulation, a cancerous growth driven by an addiction to numb, latent productivity like an output device that runs on auto-mode with nobody being able to bring it to a halt.

But only switching on the audio track, the third element of the piece, fully unfolds the uncanniness of the scene. We can hear a speech synthesis algorithm attempting to reanimate imported textual remains. But its monotonous and emotionally empty timbre only bears half-lives, vocal ghosts that can never fully exceed the ontological status of mere data. And yet, it strikes one only then that On Everything does perhaps not, as it first seems, exhibit the incapability of machines to render a human voice convincingly but rather point to a collective human agency trapped in automatism, a collective agency knowing no difference between the language of love letters and the empty chatter of the advertisement industry.

To this end, On Everything registers a certain disillusionment resonating through networked cultures and the discourses surrounding them, with the latter adopting notions of “social soft-war”? Or “control”? To describe tendencies prevalent in these domains. Following Fred Scharmen’s article ‘Myspace and Control’, environments for social networking are now less freely accessible spaces of escape in which new, alternative identities can be played out than “just another layer of life”? Subsumed by the commodification and advertisement apparatuses that have integrated participation and social interaction as effective operational means. The users’ attention to web content and their potential to form new connections and networks, for example, are now fewer instances of consumption than a commodity that can be consumed and sold. Accordingly, interactions of Myspace users lend themselves far more often to the language of (self-)marketing and (self-)management than personal communication.

On Everything compels us to contemplate these schizophrenic dynamics. Stalking around aimlessly, stumbling upon some forgotten fictions of the net that are ceaselessly babbling to themselves. Eventually, we turn the thing off. But even then, we are left with the suspicion that some net slaves’ talk is always on, and no one is there to stop it.

It’s difficult to imagine a world where people work harmoniously toward utopian socialism, an almost laughable concept in the face of our present state of dystopian capitalism. Yet communities were once formed in America, no less, to create such a flawless way of life based on cooperation. Sharing and working together, two very “Sesame Street” sounding concepts are explored in Ripon, a video game art installation presented by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, currently on view in New York City.

Through hand-drawn depictions of a dystopic society set within an original video game, artists Troy Richards and Knut Hybinette of Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, have created an imaginary life in one of said utopian socialist communities. Viewers/players of Ripon are surrounded by oversized digital prints of icons from the game for heightened, experiential play and observation.

The game’s cleverness is in a player’s inability to win, that is, to survive, creating a situation of equality in which game novices like me and seasoned gamers like Knut all “die” within minutes of gameplay. The capability of outsmarting the game through repetition is omitted, eliminating the notion of player immortality, one of the video game’s core and most celebrated features. Unlike most video games, Ripon is designed to de-centre its player or players, making them slower and less powerful than their counterparts in the game and better suited for background activity. But it goes further than this: the game provides commentary on the general breakdown of a utopian society.

Ripon, pronounced RIP-in, is also the name of a small town in Wisconsin modelled after the influence and writings of French philosopher and advocate of utopian life Charles Fourier. In 1844, a group of followers started this small town observing Fourier’s fundamental guideline of having a complete set of personalities among its members to provide a balanced community and fulfill their mission of cooperating effectively. Theirs was an experiment in Socialism gone awry, quickly replaced with a new political vision. Ripon now ironically boasts the claim “Birthplace of the Republican Party!”

However, this video game installation does not critique Fourier’s philosophies or the failure of the Ripon community’s initial efforts to realize them. It is an experiment developed to promote critical thinking among players and illustrate the quick dissolution of communal interactions with fellow players. Even the group at the exhibition who took this game for a spin, declaring it a cynical outlook on life, fell trap to humans’ tendency to hold up the old adage “every man for himself”. These players abandoned the idea of sharing, working together, and surviving based on a team effort for the more individual, Darwinian approach that resulted in leaving another player dead if necessary.

Yet, Ripon does more than lead players down a predetermined path of demise. It combines technology and art, coming to life in a game with an embedded history lesson. Troy’s drawings give Knut’s games – available in 2-D and 3-D versions – an organic feel, setting Ripon apart from the cookie-cutter hyper-reality of most contemporary video games. The oversized drawings surrounding players in the installation magnify the decaying society depicted in the game and allow viewers to understand and appreciate the level of detail that went into composing them.

The game’s feel and the environment in which it is presented also indicate a newly emerging type of video game art world practice that isn’t charged by a win/lose dichotomy and seeks to provide a more thought-provoking experience. Ripon is in line with the inventive social issues games that are cropping up with more and more aplomb these days and the art installations that host them.

Ripon has taken various forms since it was conceived two years ago, constantly being tweaked by both artists as their ideas shift slightly in one direction. Troy and Knut will continue to make changes, even throughout a single exhibition, allowing Ripon to evolve based on feedback from viewers and players or simply at their whim.

https://www.gamescenes.org/2010/09/game-art-knut-lsg-hybinette-and-troy-richards-ripon-2008-.html

Twisting Fistfuls of Time with David Rokeby

An Interview with David Rokeby, in conjunction with his first UK retrospective Silicon Remembers Carbon, FACT, Liverpool, (20th April – 10th June), by Charlotte Frost.

Part 1. 2nd part of the interview will be published here on 28/05/07.

CF: You describe art galleries where you install your work as laboratories and your installations as a ‘freeform research’. Can you expand on this idea?

DR: I think particularly when you are using new technologies which haven’t been around for a long time, which haven’t been digested by our culture, putting them out in any way – even as a commercial concern – is a research process. As an artist, if you are working with something like paint, then you are dealing with something where the parameters are reasonably well-known and reasonably familiar to all the people who are coming to the gallery. There is less of a possibility of something research-like happening there. With new technology, there is a question I am asking by putting the stuff out there: what’s going to happen? I don’t know what’s going to happen, to a certain degree, so I’m a bit like a natural historian behind a duck blind waiting for the ducks to mate; I can’t make them mate, I’m not sure they are going to mate, and when they mate, I’m not sure how they are going to do it, but I hope my duck-blind is sufficient to make them feel comfortable so that they will do their thing.

That is part of what I do, but in connection with that, what I’m doing when I’m working with technology is looking for those things that I catch out of the corner of my eye (not literally) that are strangely interesting, that I don’t completely grasp and where there seems to be more to it. Or things I see during the course of working on pieces where I just think that people should see this because it would help them to understand some facet of what’s at play in the shifts in society that are happening because of technology.

On the other hand, the pieces are also artworks and there I have to take off the hat of the natural historian and think about what I want to accomplish, but the two are always going to be in play.

CF: It is quite a complete catalogue of your work which will be shown here at FACT. What are you hoping FACT audiences might give to and receive from such a substantial collection?

DR: That’s a good question. Retrospectives are always curious things because you don’t always see your work together like this and I tend to find myself simultaneously impressed by how much I’ve accomplished and on the other hand saying: “Is that all there is? Is that the entire sum quota of my work?” It’s a really mixed experience.

What presenting the range of work would hopefully say to the audience, it’s hard to know. To the seasoned new media viewer, the range might help them see the fairly peculiar perspective I have on new media. For the average viewer I think, from my experience, the response will be more of a pleasure of engagement. The works are mostly pretty approachable but hopefully very layered at the same time but I don’t expect the average FACT gallery viewer to be considering my career so deeply so much as having the experience of the work. Whether they see it as a disparate, random, spray of stuff or whether it coheres for them is an interesting question too. For me, in retrospect now, I can see how all these things are linked, but on first view some of them might seem quite different from the others.

CF: Do you think it might benefit a on-new-media-initiated-audience to see them together? Or is there perhaps – I was reading in something you’d written about Virtual Reality Sickness or what happens when one gets very involved in [url:http://www.rokebyshow.org.uk/VNSystem.html]Very Nervous System[/url] – an element of overload?

DR: I think any extensive show of media that is time-based is potentially an overload because there is a lot of density in each work, but don’t think that is particularly because of the new media side of things. I don’t think any of the works are in this case tuned to be that kind of heartbeat inducing work. I rather suspect from experience that what will happen is that people will have their favourites and ones they just don’t understand why I’ve bothered to do that and a few will hopefully see from the collection of works the peculiar subjective perspective that I have.

CF: Your work is quite popular with science museums – you’ve had permanent pieces at the [url:http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/]London Science Museum[/url], [url:http://www.technopolis.be/nl/index.php]Technopolis in Belgium[/url] and the [url:http://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/]Ontario Science Centre[/url] – but this exhibition at FACT is your first major art show in the UK. Why do you think this is? And does it bother you?

DR: I don’t really know why exactly. Its always been a question. I’ve had presence in the UK: I’ve given lectures and had the Science Museum show and couple of other shows, but I’m not sure why. Does it distress me? No, not particularly. Its really lovely to finally have been invited to do a really substantial show and to do it in a place that really puts on strong shows.

My career wanders from country to country; its kind of a nomadic career. I did a lot of work in France in the late 1980s, in Germany in the early 1990s, there was an Austrian phase in the late 1990s and then I showed a lot in Italy and Mexico. Right now, most of the work I am doing is actually in Canada, which is strange for me because after getting out of art school I didn’t show in Canada very much. Now I’m showing in Canada a lot, it just indicates the odd transit of my career. So the fact that it comes and goes, or came and went, or did or didn’t happen in the UK is part of that.

I still haven’t shown in Iceland!

CF: Is important that audiences understand the complex level of technology that goes into your work? Clearly you have to and you produce a lot of the coding, for example, yourself, but do you think there is some sort of technological education that’s up for grabs in the pieces or are they really just about setting up that immediate engagement and highlighting the ubiquity of technology today?

DR: I don’t think its important at the first level that people understand any of the technology that’s involved in the works. I think each of the pieces functions satisfyingly on a purely experiential level. That being said, a number of the works do inevitably refer to or comment on technology. Sometimes I think the pieces are trying to help people understand what technology is and isn’t capable of so partly there is an educational thing there – not so much about how something works, but more about the texture and quality of the way it functions. Someone who comes in with a strong programming knowledge is going to take something different from the pieces than someone with no technical skills at all. What I try to do is create supplementary levels so that the work starts addressing you as a human being – that’s the first level of address – and it will address other levels if you are open to them.

CF: Much of your output still stems from Very Nervous System, can you talk me through some of the various different incarnations of Very Nervous System and describe their differing potentials?

DR: Very Nervous System evolved over about ten years. Since the early 1990s I kept generalising and generalising the code that was used for it and it has turned into a very rich toolset predominantly for dealing with live video. That toolset has become almost like a pallet and brush for me; I know it really well and it was designed by me to reflect the things that I’m interested in, to give me the kind of options that I’m interested in pursuing. So I feel like I can gesture with it pretty effectively and so it’s a very compelling tool for me to use to create new work.

The first period of Very Nervous System was about interactive sound installations where body movement was translated into sound. The next big step was in 1995 because the system had been analysing images but it hadn’t been showing the images it was analysing. In 1995 I finally found a way to take information that was being calculated by Very Nervous System and externalise it as video signal so that I could see some of the inner workings. That turned it almost instantly into a new piece called [url:http://www.rokebyshow.org.uk/watch.html]Watch[/url]. It simply took two internal images from Very Nervous System and externalised them – and then I dolled it up a bit to be as effective as I thought it could be – but basically it shows what’s moving and what’s still in two separate images – the still is not a purely still shot but its like an evolving long exposure where anything that is moving is blurred, its only showing what’s not moving – bricks, mortar – everything else is gone.

Then I started to build and expand the tools on two sides – the tools for tracking in video (usually people) and tools for building and working with video. So the next thing was Watched and Measured for the Science Museum. That went deeper into the surveillance side of things and I got into tracking people’s heads and following them around and collecting images. So there has been a continuing path of Very Nervous System-derived surveillance installations including Seen which will be shown here, which was commissioned for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2002, and [url:http://www.rokebyshow.org.uk/taken.html]Taken[/url], which was also produced later that year and is also in the show here.

Just before that there was a new direction with a piece called Machine for Taking Time which is a different type of surveillance piece which records a thousand of images a day from different pan-tilt positions and builds up a large database of images which it can then stitch together in new ways. That’s again using the software but moving away from the core. It has become quite a generalised set of tools.

CF: You’ve mentioned using time as a raw material and I’m wondering what types of time have you worked with in the pieces you have on show in this retrospective; if time is just an essential ingredient in all art and whether it is possible to make art that doesn’t have time as a key material?

DR: It would be an interesting challenge to try to come up with a work that didn’t in some way involve time – it would probably be impossible which would make it an interesting challenge!

I think for me what has been special about my relationship with time has not been so much doing time-based work as being able, through the technology, to mould and shape time almost as a plastic material. You can say that a composer is always working with time, placing notes in time, I have not been placing notes in time, but rather creating the possibilities for things to happen. This places things in time, but doesn’t say where in time they are going to be – so there is a second level of abstraction that happens. In writing pieces for Very Nervous System I often felt like I was grabbing fistfuls of time and twisting it.

On another level, time is an explicit theme in a lot of my work – separate from the fact I’m also playing with it. I’ve been fascinated with time since I was about ten or eleven, and then in high school I tried to imagine the fourth dimension and things across time and the shape they would have and basically what the world would look like as a four-dimensional experience. When I was at art school I think I pushed my brain into all sorts of situations and at one time I felt like I could actually see things across time, I could see the past and the future and the present of a car moving in front of me like it was a continuum. And it was maybe twenty years later that I realised actually realised this in Watch – I had created what I had seen before – so I’ve had a very long dialogue with time.

In terms of the different kinds of time, the computer can only deal with time in a very arbitrary way but the audience will experience it depending upon what is the content of the work and how it is portrayed. So although I’m always working with time in a similar way, I think the ways in which the pieces reflect upon time are quite different. Actually, I haven’t really thought about cataloguing the ways I’ve referred to time! In most of the surveillance pieces its about experiential time. In Machine for Taking Time it is partly about the unfolding of the seasons, but it is also about your experience of time as the viewer and then what happens because you are seeing different time-periods flipping back and forth. You’re experiencing shifts in image but with a coherent framework of the building that was always there every time it was recording, and as those different versions of the same image shift from one to another there is a strange mixture of the sense – almost a shimmering sense – of time and timelessness, so that you feel both a particular moment – the snow that day, the rain this day, the person standing there this day – and on the other hand you feel the almost platonic, abstract form of the garden shed, the bench which never changes!

You might say that what I do with these technologies is take different aspects of time that you couldn’t normally experience and push them into a space where they can be perceived.

CF: Some critics have claimed that despite initially championing interactivity, your more recent works – where unwitting surveillance plays a part – show a more critical stance. Is this true or do you think all your pieces work-thorough the pros and cons of technologies and interactivity, or do they come down on either side?

DR: I think it depends on the year or the day that you talk to me. Certainly at the beginning in the 1980s with Very Nervous System there was at least initially a pretty euphoric, utopian view on interactivity as a good thing that would rescue us from ourselves. As the hype-machines built-up around interactivity in the late 1980s and as it went from being something that a small number of people were doing on their own into something that involved a whole industry it became impossible to maintain that utopian stance. I had the chance over six or seven years in the 1980s to see hundreds of thousands of people interacting with Very Nervous System and seeing both delightful and positive sides of that and seeing really negative things so it was inevitable that I would find myself striking a more critical stance.

I still love the thing that I first loved about Very Nervous System, but I can’t deny that a lot of strange and somewhat disturbing things have been uncovered by watching people with it. Its not really down to interactivity, it comes down to a larger shift. I was nineteen or twenty then, I’m forty-six now. I’ve seen a lot in the past twenty-five years and largely, one of the things that you see, and something that I was disappointed by, was the degree to which people got disappointed by life and got to the point that they were not really interested in getting to the bottom of things or really understanding things, and by how much they became seduced and satisfied by surface. My disaffection with interactivity parallels my learning that people are people. For interactivity to function in the utopian mode I was envisaging in the 1980s requires a willingness to really accept responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, to struggle to learn new languages (for the computer, or of gesture, or whatever), to learn a new openness, which is not always possible even in the best of situations. In this more compromised world – my new vision of the world as compromised that is – the potentials, the energy, the power of interactivity can easily flip from a positive to real negative.

There were other factors though. It became clear after the first four or five years that the intense interactivity of Very Nervous System made me a lot of fans, but didn’t take as many viewers as I would have liked deeper into the question that the piece was asking. It was as though the piece was so exciting for people that if failed on a certain level and the work had to become a little less exciting if it was to communicate the things that I was wanting it to communicate.

Also as an audience for interactive art developed, it came to establish certain formulas of interactive behaviour, of interactive relationships, that were accepted and reinforced which, though not invalid as such, became restrictive. You might say that one of the reasons I got into this field was because it was wide-open, and there is something about wide-open empty spaces that I like, but as it filled up and became more formulaic I found it restricting. When I show a work like [url:http://www.rokebyshow.org.uk/nChant.html]n-cha(n)t[/url], which has seven computers which are intercommunicating and interacting intensively with each other and may allow you to interact with them, it cuts against so many of the archetypes of what we understand conventionally as interactivity that it really just pisses some people off. But it allows, I think, for a range of expression and possibility that is far beyond the simplistic metaphor for interactivity.

I’ve been involved in interactivity for so long that I guess its inevitable that it would be a big thorny mess in my brain by now.

End of first part of interview.
Visit Part 2

TRANSreveLATION was a one-night showcase of live performance, dance, real-time processing, and a reverie of previously recorded audio compositions. Performed on April 26, 2007, in the basement auditorium of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of New York in midtown Manhattan, fifty guests gathered to engage in and aurally witness a unique collection of sound art and movement.

Nature and technology remarkably mix to explore the concept of ekphrasis, the basis for this concert, developed and curated by Melissa Grey and Jim Briggs III. Put simply, ekphrasis is imagery dramatically translated by poetry, but it pertains to any form of media. Pulling us deep into the trail of inspiration, ekphrasis can allow an artist to delightfully bury the tracks of artistic motivation in an interpretative web of rhetoric, freely describing one form with another. That tactic is demonstrated in this program.

TRANSreveLATION comprises twelve pieces created, developed, or performed by artists of varied backgrounds and influences. Each challenges how we hear and experience sound, putting it in the foreground and visual components of their accessories. Still, in our search for narrative, logic, and order, our untrained ears strain to identify recognizable sounds, to make sense of them. As with any subversive mechanism, we must give up on that quest. It takes us a moment to realize — to remember — that all of these sounds are representations of other sounds, layered by recording, manipulation, and ultimately through play. The organism of the real here has been redefined and recontextualized, the byproduct being fluid and intangibly fleeting. Jaime Rojas’ aquatic soundscape “Aquasonora” is no exception. It was conceived as a virtual means of transporting his audience to a body of water, where an immersive swimming experience occurs. There is a celebration of water in all of its noise and movement: falling, crashing, draining, dripping, stopping and starting. Rojas creates an environment that involves no tangible water, enveloping his audience in a mental bath of warmth and play.

Lin Culbertson, a multi-instrumentalist and composer, presents “Aural Spiral”, a geometrically aural and visual composition inspired by one of Robert Smithson’s majestic earthworks “Spiral Jetty”. More entrancing than the graphically spiralling image projected onto the screen is the digitally produced spiralling sounds which intensify it. They are one part psychedelic backdrop to a 1960s Beatles film skit and two parts aural reproduction of a discomforting dream. The combination creates a wonderful balance of seriousness and whimsy.

Jesse Serrins’ “Grohn” delivers a Lynchian drone while the mechanics of sound production are in plain view as audiences watch a real-time processing performance. With his brows furrowed in concentration and creativity, his illuminated expression matches the illuminated “bitten apple” that marks his laptop-turned musical instrument.

Composer Melissa Grey’s “Appassionato” touches on both the digitally rendered and performance-based interpretation of ekphrasis in a live variation with flautist Harold Jones and violinist Mioi Takeda. The impact of the extended subharmonic technique — an unmistakably haunting sound — creates a paralyzing effect, which doesn’t fail to fill the room with an elegantly diabolical air. This technically complex composition is inspired by some music written in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s journal. His self-examining maxim “I destroy”, discovered alongside his score, is translated musically here in violin harmonics. The result is strikingly eerie and captivating.

“Third Remembered Dream”, a live performance of dance, choreographed by Adrienne Westwood and [url:www.viadance.org]VIA Dance Collaborative[/url], accompanied by a musical score by Jim Briggs III. Dance and music cleverly connect through repeated themes and exaggerated gestures.

The final selection of the program, “Bow Falls”, is an audio-visual interpretation of Bow Falls in majestic Banff, Canada, by seasoned artists Earthscore Paul Ryan and Annea Lockwood. The two have successfully created bodies of work that artistically draw from nature and our environment. “Bow Falls” illustrates naturally occurring patterns and sounds that translate gracefully through their recordings.

TRANSreveLATION is not an exploration of a new principle but demonstrates how ekphrasis can be elaborated upon, interpreted, and used in unlimited combinations of different technologies. Nature is refreshingly and thoroughly represented throughout the program, going against what could easily have been a highly digitized evening of mass-produced noise that lacks inspiration from our environment. The delight of an almost exclusively aural program delivers the body a sense of comfort and, surprisingly, an encounter with nature.

Kollabor8 is virtual gallery displaying individual sequences of digital photomontage, an ever-evolving collaborative work of art. Exploring the transitory nature of internet content and the capacity for spontaneous creative synergy between unassociated artists, the images are displayed sequentially like threads in a forum, automatically archived and viewable as part of the process.

Created by Toegristle Studios, Kollabor8 is a “perceptual canvas blog”, where any given chain of images has infinite potential for change as each artist manipulates the previous image, and so forth. Functioning as an artists-hub, members are invited to transform works of digital collage by adding original images, digital photos, reproductions and scans, or by starting a new chain. To encourage collaboration, members are not permitted to upload a direct mutation to their own image. To encourage growth of chains a system of credits is in place. Two credits buy a new chain, and one is earned for every five images uploaded to a pre-existing chain. The art in this case is a virtual archive of the process of creating a work of art.

Kollabor’s images and themes change rapidly, with no outside communication or planning. Initiating a new chain is done with the understanding that this invites others to reinvent, destroy or expand upon the work, an element designed to support free collaborative play without the possibility of causing damage. Each link is in some way a derivative of the previous image, causing the art to be read as an ever-increasing pile of visual ideas, or depending on your perspective, the evolution of a work of art. However, in viewing the sequences of images, it becomes difficult to locate the source of the meaning within the expression. In one sequence, an image of a bird’s head remains a bird’s head but with added detail along the way, whilst in another, the second image is completely different from the first, encouraging the question of what or where is the possible meaning? Within the works, social commentary may become irreverence, or innovation humor. Considered in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s notion that the unity of the mental and physical in perception is signified in a work of art, both language and art-making rooted in the primordial, expressive gestures of the human body, the chains then become a symbolic articulation of a collective perceptual consciousness, the narrative within never fully attainable within the constraints of time and space.

The site’s basis in the internet adds new dimension to artistic process, the active element created or recreated through research or imagination. In this case the creative experience calls for an integrated performance where the subject stands in an ongoing living dialogue with the creator. Considered an experiment in online collaborative digital image-making, the resulting effect is perceptual Wikipedia meets Rauschenburg meta-Combine, where the evolving work can be seen to embody a form of cultural production that is multicultural, alluding to a poststructuralism where meaning and power are not determined by a single dominant viewpoint. With this in mind, the individual image-links are commendable as consistently intelligent design. However, is it art? Fortunately, as Kollabor8 reminds us, where a major concern in making a work of art is knowing when to stop, thanks to digital media and blogging we no longer have to. If the art is, as a matter of fact the process, then surely it is too soon to tell.

Current Version – https://toegristle.com/

lost in metamorphosis: ursula endlicher’s html_butoh

Butoh is enigmatic. Sometimes characterized as dance, sometimes as theatre, sometimes as meditation on what it means to be human, butoh seems to resist definition and easy categorization. Undeniably, however, butoh is about movement. Butoh emerged in post world-war II Japan, in part rising out of dissatisfaction with the prevalence of Western dance movements and influences in that country. Some have suggested that the goal of butoh is for the dancer to cease being him/herself, to stop being human, and to become instead another entity altogether. If butoh drives the human out of the dancer through movement, Ursula Endlicher’s html_butoh “a web-driven performance piece” raises questions about humanness in the realm of the internet.

Html_butoh is based on Endlicher’s movement library, “a web-based repository of short video clips and images by various performers who use html tags, such as,,, as a starting point for generating movements.” Anyone can submit a video clip to the library. Uploading a video allows you to be integrated into not only the movement library, but also html_butoh’s code recital. The performances of html_butoh come to fruition when a particular website is enacted or read. What results is a five by five grid of video clips from the movement library, each clip corresponding to a particular line of html code (,, or for instance). The websites that form the basis for these performances are culled from the ‘global top 500’, a listing ?updated daily” of the most popular websites based on traffic.

In the collaborative, mutable play of html_butoh, all the web is a stage and the performers flit from page to page. One of the webpages on which both they and I landed was [url:http://msn.foxsports.com/]Fox Sports[/url]. With a click, I surfed away from the hypnotic movement and sound of html_butoh, to the steely gray and blue of the Fox Sports website, peppered with images of athletes. It was hard to remember that what I saw in each was the product of the same code interpreted two different ways. I had to force myself to see the Fox website differently, imagining in it the invisible structure that was being so vibrantly performed on html_butoh. The video performers of Endlicher’s work make visible the invisible workings of web surfing, embodying and humanizing it. It is the interpretative work, the decoding, executed by the web-butoh dancers, that drives html_butoh. And it is their work that makes the web-performance so fascinating, no two individuals moving, acting, or looking alike. Some of the html_butoh dancers are costumed, one in toga like robes and head wrap, holding a spear, like Athena, rising fully formed from the net itself. Some, in contrast, are dressed in street clothes, one wearing a bulky coat and carrying a large green purse while she moves in looped translation of the command. The juxtaposition of stage and street is intriguing in a work that is at once randomly generated and wholly constructed.

It is tempting to think of what html_butoh offers as a simple translation, the rendering of code into movement through a sort of ‘open-source’ improvisational dance troupe. Certainly, translation seems to be central to some of Endlicher’s other web-driven works. Websitewigs for instance, renders the hypertext structure of the web into a series of interconnected wigs, each braid based on links and codes that underlie what we see when we look at websites. Singing Website Wallpaper enacts a form of double translation, reinterpreting html code first as sound, then translating that sound into a visual symbol. Although the movement library develops an ‘expandable movement alphabet of the html library’, translation is only part of the equation in html_butoh.

Endlicher makes visible what for many is an unnoticed and unintelligible structure operating behind what we see in a web browser. As we watch, the ways in which browsers scan html code in order to display its content is performed as movement. But what is it that we are really watching? Butoh dancers do not simply imitate, they become. Recalling the ethos of butoh, what takes place in Endlicher’s work is not just translation, but metamorphosis. Websites are not simply reinterpreted; rather they become something else altogether. If Endlicher is humanizing the web, she is also mechanizing humans, their movements and bodies caught in digital code, endlessly looping as we watch. Endlicher’s piece takes place at the intersection of the organic and the inorganic, human and machine. The work shifts seamlessly from the human act of looking to the calculated act of scanning. Endlicher’s work challenges the seeming separation between us and the machines we use, asking questions about the inner workings of both.

Scanpath by Catherine Baker

TheSpace4, Peterborough

Drawing is a record of looking. Learning to draw is, therefore, learning to see. Having learnt to draw, artists look at the world differently from non-artists. For example, they spend more time looking at what they are drawing than at the paper. This is not an elitist claim, and many drawing instruction books claim to help anyone improve their drawing by helping them learn how to look. Technology has allowed the act of looking to be quantified in ways that show how artistic looking differs from everyday regard.

Catherine Baker’s works in Scanpath have been made using such technology. Each piece records the artist looking while drawing but is made by eye-tracking hardware and software rather than by hand. These systems track the eye’s movements (saccades) and rest (fixations), with most of the show devoted to work based on fixations. The use of these systems comes from a long-term collaboration with Dr Iain Gilchrist, Head of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.

After some inkjet prints of fixation points by the entrance, three main groups of large-scale work are in the gallery.

The first room contains ceiling-high installations of dozens of small outlined vinyl circles scattered across the walls. These circles are placed according to data generated by tracking the fixations of Baker’s eyes between saccades while drawing. Clipped to hooks hung from the ceiling to around eye level are dozens of small laser-pointer-like torches. You can unclip one and shine it at the circles on the wall to project an image of an eye. This reproduces the image’s journey in reverse, literally projecting back how the image was made in a nod to Plato’s idea of how vision worked. Give a child one of the torches, and they flicker the projection across the wall crazily, sometimes stopping, looping, sometimes revisiting the same place it was a moment ago.

An installation of hanging plexiglass spheres fills the next room, projecting shadows onto the walls. Like the torches, this use of projective rather than received light reverses the process of looking. Showing is the reverse of seeing, and art is an act of showing. Again, this reverses the vision process and re-enacts it to be experienced and reflected on as art.

The show’s final room is in darkness and contains two pairs of projections. Each has one projection of an eye and one of a recording of that eye’s scanpath as it looks over a scene that the eye’s owner is drawing. This is the more or less raw data that the models of the previous two rooms project. Overcoming any lingering memories of Un Chien Andalou, watching the eye flick to and fro, the landscape being drawn (and occasionally the edge of the drawing), and the scanpath of the eye as dots or lines become hypnotizing. The path taken by the torches and the positions in the space of the globes that project two-dimensional shadows ties into this work to make the show an assertion of the reality of the artistic vision.

This is a record of looking, so by our starting definition, it is a drawing. Even though it is a record of an artist drawing, the lack of human agency in creating the record seems to disrupt this. Taking the verbal description of art as a point of ironization was a strategy used to great effect by Frank Stella, for example. But Baker’s work seems more like a straight inquiry into the nature of art production in a contemporary way. Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock’s painting, filmed from below a sheet of glass, is a technical forerunner to this. Watching Pollock’s hand and eye employed in constructing a painting is fascinating. There are films of another artist at work, including Picasso’s Behind Glass, but none have the simultaneously mythical and insightful character of Namuth’s Pollock. Pollock’s eyes flicker across the composition as he considers where his line will go next. But only with the resolution of a movie camera. We cannot look closer at Pollock looking.

The artist at work implies the artist’s studio or depictions of Realist or Impressionist artists in the countryside. But the movie camera removes this context and focuses on the artist’s body. The eye-tracker goes further than the camera, to the boundary of the involuntary sensory and knowledge-constructing systems that are not available to our conscious minds for introspection. Scanpath is, therefore, a postmodern depiction of the artist at work, not in the studio or the fields but in their mind, or rather in the activity of a specific subsystem of their brain.

A postmodern splintered subjectivity would result if the artist’s commonalities and individualities disappeared into these systems. But it does not. Each individual’s eye saccades are constant and unchanging in their duration throughout our lives, and these are a universal feature of human vision. Eye-tracking systems do record unique patterns of looking and of patterns in keeping with what we expect to see from an experienced artist. This asserts the hard cognitive reality of artistic vision and of the individual exercising that vision.

Scanpath shows that the cognitive basis of artistic visual experience can strongly assert artistic autonomy in the face of relativism when it avoids capture by managerialism or descent into solipsism. It shows that the craft of art can provide a basis for advanced contemporary practice when ironised technologically. And it shows that even the most sophisticated and voluminous datasets created by the most advanced technological systems can benefit from interpretation by a creative artist and vice versa.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

What If We Played A War and Nobody Won?

What If We Played A War and Nobody Won?: Critical Approaches to War in Videogame Art is a mouthful of a title that asks the big question that lingers in our contemporary culture’s collective mind and begs its audience to consider the possibility of deconstructing war through game metaphor. This online exhibition comprises six games that tamper with the rules and styles of standardized games. Each explores an aspect of war — from its gruesome realities to its philosophical blurriness – through play. What is being reinvented here is not the act of play and the skills required to ‘win’ but rather the motivation behind the play and how it relates to our perceptions of war.

A different maker or set of makers creates each game in this collection. Yet, a common thread among them lies in their clever ability to address formulaic, culturally machinized attitudes toward war. Among them, Conker: Live & Reloaded – Saving Private Conker provocatively uses fantasy to illustrate the ubiquitous glorification of war illustrated in war films, in this case Hollywood’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’. The sensationalism of death and tragedy in Spielberg’s recreation of the 1944 invasion of Normandy is recreated here through chipmunk soldiers representing the Americans and teddy bears representing the enemy. What might at first come off as crass ridicule successfully translates into a meaningful parallel between this depiction of war and those generated by the media or Hollywood. All are inherently oversimplified and reduce the seriousness of complex issues to binary polarizations.

One game in this exhibition allows players to “Play the news. Solve the puzzle.” The conflict between Israel and Palestine is the basis for exploration and play in Peacemaker. However, as the name suggests, there is no opportunity for the player to engage in violent conquest. The equivalent of a victory in this game is achieving a peaceful resolution between the two sparring states. Losing this game results in an ongoing political struggle between them. Viable arguments from each side are the only forms of weaponry, giving ‘Peacemaker’ educational potential in a positively subversive and amoral take on video games. In a stride for utmost accuracy, the game is available in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

Another piece in this collection operates fundamentally as performance art and documentary art. ‘Dead-in-Iraq’ publicly recognizes the American casualties who died in Iraq through artist Joseph DeLappe’s participation in the online multiplayer game ‘America’s Army’. Under the username ‘Dead-in-Iraq’, DeLappe catalogues their names in the game’s system, which allows players to assume the role of real U.S. soldiers. His is an ongoing pursuit, as he promises to continue to memorialize those lost through the end of American occupation in Iraq.

The other three games in this series offer a fresh approach to videogame play, including a revolutionary, three-player game of Chess that pits pawns against royal forces. As the desensitization of shock value is gaining with increasing quickness, players generally approach games through leisurely consumption. This exhibition is an artistic manifesto that debunks these casual attitudes toward violence and gives voice to the gamers who represent our cultural blind spot toward these issues. In our game and technology-obsessed culture, this exhibition appropriates the products of technology to work with and against the assumed, mass-produced, and highly problematic conventions of games. It creates social change by engaging viewers and players in critical discourse, revealing stylized commentary, pedagogical potential, and thoughtful contemplation on the harsh realities of war. This collection becomes a part of the public record, each game representing one facet of the whole. The absence of winning and losing, as the title of this exhibition suggests, reveals an unpopular possibility and steers players toward an important outcome that eerily represents our fears and, for some, very personal experiences.

https://www.fact.co.uk/event/mywar-participation-in-an-age-of-war

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.

9 March – 3 June 2007
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna

Long live the immaterial!
-Yves Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto

Yves Klein is for me, and many others, the most important French artist after Henri Matisse. This may sound somewhat appalling to some, as Klein enjoyed only a very concise, but invigorating, seven-year artistic career. But I will clarify this controversial judgment by pointing out his historic relevance to our era of digital culture. The emphasis here will be on Klein’s conceptual articulation of the spatial and the ephemeral/immaterial in relationship to our current actual state of virtuality. Indeed the subtitle of the exhibition, CORPS, COULEUR, IMMATÉRIEL (Body, Color, Immaterial), itself brings out the salient viractual (*1) aspects of Klein’s art.

Yves Klein’s own lived life is the first major example of the ephemeral. Klein was born near Nice in a village called Canges-sur-Mer in 1928 of artist parents; Fred Klein, a figurative painter, and Marie Raymond, an abstract painter in the tradition of the cole de Paris. He died unexpectedly in 1962 of a heart attack shortly after seeing the sensationalizing Yves Klein segment of Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Mondo Cane exploitation film at its Canne Film Festival debut at the young age of 34. He was at the height of his fame.

On entering this exhibition the viewer is immediately introduced to the fact that Klein first studied Oriental languages, Zen philosophy and Judo via a highly accomplished digital presentation which was augmented by a plethora of photographs, drawings and texts. Indeed Klein achieved black-belt stature in Judo and taught and wrote a book about the subject after spending fifteen months at the Kodokan Institute in Tokyo. He then went on to found his own Judo school in Paris, making a living teaching Judo from 1955 to 1959. He also played music in a jazz band.

With such a basis in sport and music performance, Klein easily brought his theoretical concerns around space, color and painting into the theatricality of conceptual and performance art and thus negated and undermined the classical work of art object, dissolving art into action and thus styling himself into an artistic personality in a way that anticipated the strategies of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys and Orlan. His staging of even the minutest details and the orchestration of their documentation and framed reception, along with his linking of art and technology, make him a most relevant figures for current art practice.

What was not pointed out in the show very well was that in 1948, at age 20, Klein discovered a book by Max Heindel (1865-1919) which teaches the basic beliefs of an esoteric Christian sect called the Rosicrucians. Klein obsessively studied the book for five years, and after coming to Paris in 1955, began to refer to himself as an initiate in the sect (he was made a Knight of the Order of Archers of Saint Sebastian) and was married to the beautiful Rotrault Uecker (now Rotrault Klein-Moquay) within it’s highly flamboyant and ritualistic ceremony. This exceedingly formal marriage is presented further on in the show in a delightful color documentary film.

Based on the Rosicrucian metaphysical ideology, Klein avowed to indicate to the world a new age, the Age of Space. In the Age of Space, boundless spirit would exist free of form, objects would levitate, and humans would travel liberated from their body. This contextual understanding is essential for understanding Klein’s artistic importance, as this ideology of the immaterial informs all his work, even the paintings but most explicitly such conceptual-technological works as the Sculpture rostatique (1957) which was the release of 1001 balloons, and the Illumination de l’Oblisque (1958) in the Place de la Concorde. Indeed, the exhibition reinstates Klein’s metaphysical ideology as the basis of his ephemeral actions as equal to his monochrome paintings. Definitely the well-known IKB blue monochrome were for him no more than an introduction to his ideological “blue revolution”, which he saw as the diffusion of immaterial pictorial sensibility throughout the whole cosmos, both visible and invisible. So blue color was for Klein was not pigment and binder but a spiritual, cosmic force that stimulates the entire environment, transforming life itself into a work of art.

Admittedly, Klein’s idea of pure virtual open space (free from form) was first actualized in his blue monochrome paintings, where the bisecting nature of line was rejected in favor of an even, all-over, ultramarine-blue color which he called IKB (International Klein Blue). However, later some of his monochromes were painted pink or gold. The Ex-voto Sainte-Rita (1961) which was deposited by Klein at the Convent of Santa Rita in Cascia, Italy (and presented for the first time at this exhibition) is valuable evidence of the importance of pink and gold alongside blue in Klein’s imaginative, viractual, and ephemeral universe.

Of course Klein, by all accounts, was not all theory. He was a showman too. In 1957, not long after the appearance of the first monochromes in 1955, Klein turned to the further exploration of the immaterial aspect of his art through act and gesture. His exhibitions of evanescent performance works, ephemeral sculptures in fire or water, sound works, “air architectures” and artistic appropriation of the entirety of space (extending to the whole cosmos) were all manifestations of the ephemera and invisible idea that for him is the essential experience of art itself.

We must remember when gazing into his luxurious blue paintings that Klein’s interests in open areas of color and light, in vibrating voids, and in sheer saturated colors emptied of figurative presence are primarily directed towards space’s and color’s aoristic qualities, qualities which subsequently will interest future generations of ambient-oriented artists and digital artists.

Most notably, in 1958 Klein went beyond the monochrome rectilinear canvas with a distinguished ephemeral and immersive presentation titled Le Vide (The Void), which was held at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. For this exhibition Klein cleaned out and whitewashed the gallery and “impregnated” the empty space with his consciousness; filling the freshly whitened gallery (emptied of figurative presence) with Le Vide, through which Klein led small groups.

Yves Klein, Le Vide, 1958

I consider this installation to be of utmost importance to the identification of the immersive ideals of virtual reality in that it crystallizes the body’s entrance into a consciousness of aoristic space. (*2)

Further along these lines, in early-1961 Klein installed, as part of his retrospective at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld Germany, another immersive walk-in installation called Raum der Leere (Room of the Void) in reference to his Le Vide which consisted of a 285 by 442 by 172 centimetre room (approximately 9 by 14 by 5.6 feet) painted white (with slightly rough textured surface) lit by neon lamps. This work is documented through photographs and drawings in the exhibit.

Also notable is Klein’s faux Leap into the Void: Man in Space! The Painter of Space Throws Himself into the Void! of 1960 of course deserves some mention concerning immaterial idea art. Klein’s famous photomontage Leap into the Void, which depicts him floating above a street, is a symbol of the desire to overcome gravity and thus enter into the unlimited aspects of virtuality. It is a manifestation of Klein’s will to transcend limits, which runs through his entire oeuvre.

Beginning in 1960 Klein devoted himself increasingly to the immaterial aspects of fire as a medium to express elemental energy. I very much liked and respected the Cosmogonies ‘paintings’? on view here, which capture the imprint of wind, of rain. Fire and air, two invisible fluids that Klein officially claimed as his own, give rise to works both real (fire paintings) and utopian; such as his air architecture projects and his schemes for planetary air-conditioning. But the gorgeous color film of Klein painting various Anthropometries through the use of “living paintbrushes” (i.e. female nudes) in a black dinner jacket while his proto-minimalist one note Monotone Symphony (1949) is performed is certainly one of the high points in the show, even though it perhaps it was responsible for his death after he viewed it in the dreadful context of the Mondo Cane film. The music is performed brilliantly live as the nude models paint each other from the buckets of lush IKB Blue painnt, gently pressing their naked bodies against the canvas that had been placed on wall and floor – while Klein (wearing white gloves) directs them verbally, never touching the paint or the bare models. (*3)

This is, needless to say, a highly ephemeral way to paint which pointed the way towards (and then away from) the Nouveaux Ralistes (New Realists), the French post-war avant-garde movement which was organized and theorized by the French poet and art critic Pierre Restany (1930-2003). The core issue of the Nouveaux Ralistes was the conception of art as formed by ‘real’ elements, that is, materials taken from the world directly rather than formed pictorially. Influenced by Yves Klein and the general anti-rationalism that opposed the machine-like logic which underlay the killing efficiency of aerial war, many artists followed in these deep but shifting footsteps.

Despite numerous retrospectives, among them the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, much of Klein’s immaterial-oriented work remained somewhat unknown until recently. In bringing together 120 paintings and sculptures, some 40 drawings and manuscripts and a great number of contemporary films and photographs, this exhibition offered me a new reading of Klein’s work, this time in the context of virtuality. Adhering as faithfully as possible to the artist’s own intentions as revealed in his recently published writings, the design of the exhibition brought out the importance that Klein accorded to the diverse aspects of his artistic practice: not only painting and sculpture, but also immaterial performances, sound works, interventions in public spaces, architectural projects and, most essentially, immaterial art theory. This diverse oeuvre, all produced during a period of just seven years, is indeed impressive as much of it anticipated the trends of Happening and Performance Art, Land Art, Body Art, Conceptual Art and Digital Art. Thus it has had an, ironically, a durable influence on art through its essential interest in and expressions of the immaterial.

Joseph Nechvatal

Fall 2006, Paris

(*1) The basis of the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer technology has become a significant means for making and understanding contemporary art and that this brings us artists to a place where one finds the emerging of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merge – which tends to contradict some dominant techno clich’s of our time – is what I call the “viractual”. This blending of computational virtual space with ordinary viewable space indicates the subsequent emergence of a new topological cognitive-vision of connection between the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world.

(*2) Aorist is a classical Greek spatial term which was used when discussing an occurrence without limitations. Aorist literally means without horizons.

(*3) A short film, a Klein painting performance can be viewed on-line at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqLwA0yinWg

The Last Tag Show, a live ‘net performance’ took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centred around tracking its users’ music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation through wikis in creating artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM’s technical structure to pull off a 24-hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow’s profile page. These were no ordinary songs. However, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include ‘Moderator’, ‘Hannah’, ‘Voiceover’, ‘Instructor’, ‘Marck’, ‘Zita’ ‘Vass’, and ‘Gregg’, with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters takes the role of a musician in Last.FM’s data-centric view, each of them has a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, the Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.

Yet, while this was a particularly clever subversion of Last.FM’s intended use, judging by their description of the piece, it seems that the artists failed to think through the conceptual implications of their performance fully. The idea of a ‘net performance’ is immediately suspect, especially in the context of a social network like Last.FM for whom archivization and aggregation take precedence over live performance’s immediacy and ephemeral nature. So, while inventive and whimsically guileful, The Last Tag Show as a performance was starkly out of place in an environment existing in the future as much as it looks to the past.

Yet, it is from this oversight that perhaps the most interesting aspect of the piece arises. After the performance was finished and the Show creators had moved on, their once purely diegetic characters began to take on a life outside the confines of that single 24-hour period. It seems that there are several other Last.FM users who listen to tracks in which the artist is listed as ‘Voiceover’ or ‘Papa’ (another character in the Show) and several other names. As these other users consumed their oddly labelled tracks, the artist profiles, which served as a stable signifier for the Show’s players, began to change. Suddenly, their “most listened to tracks”? Were not out-of-context snippets of dialogue, but what seemed to be…actual songs; the real possibility of users coming in and subtly changing Gregg’s biography comes to mind.

Indeed, the fact that these fictional characters can continue to ‘live’ – produce and be produced – long after their utility to the performance has ended makes The Last Tag Show so interesting and the limited period of its run-time so constricted. Where the creators began this piece as a “hack” of a social networking site, in the end, it may turn out that they are the ones hacked – by their creations.

EVENT: RAPIDFIRE.001 Montreal. March 15, 2007, StudioXX, Montreal

PRESENTERS : (in order)

Angela Dorrer(germany) – program angels and alternative formats for cultural sharing.

Pascale Gustin (france) – Algorismus travelling sound poetry work with Pure Data.

Darsha Hewitt (canada) – Tin Can Telecom + Cantennas.

Laef Anderson (usa) – Cheyenne Story Map.

The FORMAT:

The RAPIDFIRE Session was a ‘first come, first serve’ “sign-up and present” formula, in which individuals were asked to put forward short presentations lasting 15 minutes each. The concept was proposed by Kyd Campbell and Angela Dorrer with the aim of providing a highly responsive environment for presentation, for dialogue about works in progress. This exchange structure stems directly from open formats such as what has been organised by program angels(munich), Upgrade! Munich and Upgrade! Salvador and the Pecha Kucha Network

The local community was invited to expect socializing and cheap beer, to come and milk the public brainwaves. The first !Rapid!Fire! session was presented by frontierlab.org and StudioXX with help from the
Upgrade! International network on March 15, 2007 at StudioXX in Montreal. The event was a success, with some amazingly animated presentations with a small audience, the tension and curiosity was high at then end of each presentation. Following the 4 presentations the dialog continued casually and many contacts were shared. The format provided a two way exchange, artists could ask questions and get critique from the audience and the audience had the opportunity to view some new works and techniques.

Commentary on experiences in Montreal : by Pascale Gustin, visiting the city from March 10-22nd, 2007

I am very impressed by the number of events which take place here (Montreal), I have the idea that each person can have their own event. This is more than the famed “celebrity quarter hour” proposed by Andy Warhol. It’s the possibility to be Andy Warhol for 15 minutes and to place the focus on?.!!! With all that this implies?

There are really so many things happening and yet not very many people attend each one. It’s a sort of ‘sprinkling’ of events and exchanges. Why not !!! What I notice, as a stranger, is that it is full of ‘democracy’, this feast of ‘democracies’ in which things finally seem to be lost in their own meaning. In some way it is the image of a woven fabric ; a canvas but in ‘real’ life ; and language etc, is used only through the tool of a screen or a keyboard.

Here, everything is always possible ; THE WORLD IS A VASTE TERRAIN OF GAMES ; and it’s exactly here that everything seems possible and thus, becomes possible. ‘We can do what we want in our lives’, seems to be the motto of North America, of ‘North Americans’. It is undoubtedly this manner of thinking and acting that effectively makes all things possible ; the ‘virtual’ becomes real. The ‘virtual’ is concretely living ; it exists, it is here, we can touch it with our fingers. Is this the reason for which digital technologies, ‘media arts’ (specific term used here, to define arts which can include analog video and other practices, television and new and digital technologies) have been developed with such ease, a sort of ease which is influenced by these technologies which have permitted this process, this manner of being to be amplified, really concretized ? Who, from the chicken or from the egg ? in essence!!!

I also think that violence in North America is not directly linked to violent images, linked to these images certainly, but in an indirect way. It is equally this possibility, all the possibilities, which make the violence possible. The sentence : ‘THE WORLD IS A VASTE TERRAIN OF GAMES’, seems to be to be much more violent than certain images that are given as forcefully violent. I think that this sentence would be shocking in Europe, at least it would be in France.

Rapid Fire was a superb meeting. I loved taking part in this event organized by Kyd Campbell. I alas was not able to understand all of the items and issues of the works presented. I don’t speak English well enough.

“For the performance at StudioXX on Thursday night, I used two puredata programs to open my patches. One patch was open with the first puredata program and ran the visual component. The second patch (and even a 3rd) was open with the second puredata program for the audio component. This allows me to avoid the having memory management problems.”

[excerpts from the Pascale Gustin’s blog, translated with permission by Kyd Campbell]

photo credits:

1. rapidfire_pascalegustin.jpg
photo by Edith Bories. March 15, 2007
‘Pascale Gustin performing Algorismus at RapidFire.001, StudioXX, Montreal’

2. rapidfire_flyer.jpg
image by Kyd Campbell, 2007
flyer from RapidFire.001 event, Montreal

Photos from the event on flickr

Dial P for Postnationalism.

Jean-Franois Lyotard defined us in the 1970s. He started the ‘post’? era. Since his ground-breaking proposal of Post-Modernism; a conceptual reaction to the Enlightenment, Modernism and its grand narratives and universal pretensions, nothing remained the same. Lyotard argued that Postmodern times were characterized by an incredulity towards meta-narratives. These meta-narratives – sometimes ‘grand narratives’ – are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world. The progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom are just a few examples. Lyotard argued that we have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason Post-modernity is characterised by an abundance of micro-narratives.?

Post-Modernism opened the door for all kinds of movements and definitions that were trying to escape the powerful clutches of established Modernism. Post, trans, meta were useful prefixes in shifting theoretical discourse away from the long established occidental tradition of enlightened positivism.

If all grand narratives were doomed to uselessness in contemporary societies, those arising from the concept of nation-state (itself another grand narrative) were facing the same fate. In a time of post-colonialism, trans-national capitalism, globalized (not far from hegemonic) production of subjectivities, national identities were bound to change. And they did. Massified migrations, easy access to information, all these led to a gradual weakening of the mechanisms responsible for national identities. Or not. Postnational identities are conflicted in their essence. Once again, no more meta narratives explaining the world. Something can be (and is) its opposite and postnationalism encompasses the rise of local, or micro-national identities, nationalistic movements resurface. The assumption of living in undefined, unstable times seems pretty obvious, but wasn’t that what Lyotard expected to happen in the first place? No more universal narratives holding together human action.

Post-nationalism became a trendy word, many have enjoyed using the term in mundane conversations so to impress nearby listeners, but this increase in use may imply a loss in meaning. Dan Phiffer, a computer hacker from California (now based in Brooklyn), interested in exploring the cultural dimension of inexpensive communications networks such as voice telephony and the Internet, is committed to prevent this from happening. He created the Postnational Foundation, a website/series of public interventions, defined as “an ongoing series of brief, personal interventions, an open-ended question about personal agency and a starting point for doing something meaningful”?. Each of these three goals contains a very important concept, contextualizing Phiffer’s practice (and discourse): interventive behaviour, personal agency and meaningfulness. In these three concepts we can anchor the importance of The Postnational Foundation, in the steps of Lyotard’s views of the contemporary world. When all the holding pillars of the modernistic view of the world are shattered, when all the grand narratives that once guided us all towards a future, are gone, what is there to do? Phiffer is a committed pupil of Lyotard’s: he proposes personal agency, through meaningful interventions.

This is a clear and direct example of a critical approach needed in a post-modern world. By asking questions and inviting people to call (the anonymity factor helps and there is a prank call feel to this project) and leave their thoughts about issues such as ‘How do people think about the issue of globalization?’?, ‘What is it that causes us to become involved in politics? What factors keep us from getting involved?’? or ‘What does the word “postnational”? mean exactly? Mainstream references have nothing to offer, so why not find our own definition?’ Phiffer is not only creating his own micro-narrative, a language-game creating a critical thought on hegemonic ideologies, he is soliciting others to do as much, confronting people with the questions mentioned above and inviting them to respond and thus create their own narratives.