The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) is a project created by the University of California at San Diego’s Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, and still evolving today. Here Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of EDT (with Brett Stalbaum), Principal Investigator of b.a.n.g. lab, and Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, discusses the project with Lawrence Bird. The interview includes input from other members of the collective: Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll and Elle Mehrmand.

Lawrence Bird: Simply put, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a hand-held device to aid crossers of the Mexico-US border. As far as the cultural and political implications of this device, it’s loaded. But as a starting point, could you tell us a little bit about the technical side of the device?

Ricardo Dominguez: We began with the basic question: what ubiquitous technology would allow us to create an inexpensive tool to support the finding of water caches left in the Southern California desert by NGO’s? Our answer was that the sub-$20 iMotorola phone series could be made useful for emergency navigation. The early generation of the platform we targeted can be made reasonably useful in a better-than-nothing scenario. Meanwhile, later phone generations (that don’t yet cross our price barrier but are getting closer everyday) are already fully useful as practical aids without even a SIM card installed or an available network service. With proper use, the GPS performance of newer phones equals any GPS designed for desert navigation, and their used prices are falling. Moreover, GPS itself does not require service and has free global coverage, courtesy of the United States government. In an emergency scenario, we trust these later mobiles to direct a lost person to a nearby safety site. The TBT’s code is also available on-line to download at walkingtools.net, sans water cache locations, for any individual or community to use for their GPS investigations.

Lawrence Bird: It’s an interesting instance of technology intersecting with geography. You have referred to Donna Haraway’s work in your own comments on the intersection between “border crossing” and other forms of “trans”-being. Would it be accurate to see the TBT as a cyborg component; and if so, what does this mean for the relationship between technology, politics and poetics?

Ricardo Dominguez: Part of the TBT project is to call into question the northern cone’s imaginary about who has priority and control of who can become a cyborg or “trans” human – and immigrants are always presented as less-than-human and certainly not part of a community which is establishing and inventing new forms of life. When in fact these flowing in-between immigrant communities are a deep part of the current condition that Haraway’s research has been pointing towards – for us it is a queer turn in its emergence, both as unexpected and as desire. The investigation of queer technology and what this queering effect has been or might be is an important part of our conversations – especially via Micha Cardenas’ research. This gesture dislocates the techno-political effect with aesthetic affects that become something other than code: a performative matrix that fractalizes and reverses the disorder of things with excessive transbodies acting from the inside-out of those enforced borderless borders. These affects assemble new empirico-tran(s)cendental forms of multi-presence(s) incommensurable with the capitalist socius of the so called “immaterial” Empire. As the Zapatistas say, “we do not move at the speed of technology, but at the speed of dreams” – the heart of the trans-border-borg.

Lawrence Bird: As you say, that –borg is spatial. Do you do any work with professionals of space design – for example, you have mentioned elsewhere the architect Teddy Cruz, who’s done design projects and spatial analyses focused on the Mexico-US border, especially urban borders?

Ricardo Dominguez: We have not worked directly with any urban space designers, such as Teddy Cruz, who teaches here at the Visual Arts Department at UCSD as well – but we have learned a great deal about the nature of the border-as-design and auto-assemblage – especially from the Political Equator gatherings that he has been at the forefront in creating. But recently we were invited to create a gesture for Political Equator 3 that we really enjoyed and offered a poetic materialization of bringing TBT into Mexico: at 12:30 p.m on June 4th, 2011 the Transborder Immigrant Tool was walked into Tijuana, Mexico via an aquaduct from the U.S. side of the border by artist Marlène Ramírez-Cancio (a video of this event is embedded above).

Lawrence Bird: Does any of this work intersect with American fear over border permeability to terrorism? The criticisms of TBT seem to focus on economic migration but the reaction bleeds into fears over security.

Ricardo Dominguez: TBT does crisscross a number of these types of affective conditions that have been floating around the border since 9/11; or one might push it back to early formations of the Mexico/U.S. border. And yes, it intersects with the growing state of fear in the U.S. (and around the world) about immigrants dismantling the U.S. economy – which has always struck me as extremely ironic – since as we have encountered in these past couple of decades, neo-liberal economics on a global scale have done much more to dissolve the romance of the nation via a series of self-made economic bombs than any immigrant “invasion.”

Lawrence Bird: In fact your development of this tool has come at a significant personal cost. You’ve been accused of supporting illegal activity and misuse of public funds. You’ve been called a traitor. Your position at UCSD was threatened. Could you talk about that and where this situation stands today?

Ricardo Dominguez: The entire group of artists who are part of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab working on the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) was being investigated by UCSD and 3 Republican Congressmen starting on January 11, 2010. Then I came under investigation for the virtual sit-in performance (which joined communities statewide against the rising students fees in the UC system and the dismantling of educational support for K–12 across California) against the UC Office of the President (UCOP) on March 4, 2010. This was then followed by an investigation by the FBI Office of Cybercrimes. So, it was three investigations in total— and they were all seeking to find a way to stop TBT and threaten to de-tenure me for doing the very work I was hired to do and then tenured for. In the end all the investigations were dropped. I did agree not to do another virtual sit-in performance on the UCOP for four years, but the day I signed the agreement, a number of supporters across the nation did a virtual sit-in on UCOP again. One strange element about the agreement that they wanted me to sign without even giving me or my legal team time to look it over was that I would never speak or write about what had happened, create any artwork that might disturb anyone and refrain from an artivist performances. Of course I agreed to none of it.

Lawrence Bird: The vitriol in the attacks on you is remarkable, and disturbing: you received a great deal of hate mail and a number of death threats because of this project. You mention in your play Sustenance (published in Artists & Activists 12) that these messages “constellate into remarkable patterns”, form a chart as it were of the agitated contemporary discourse over immigration, security, and national purity vs. liberty. It’s significant that you’ve built a play around this. Do you see the political and popular response to your project (you refer to it as “viral reportage”) as part of the TBT’s performative aspect?

Ricardo Dominguez: Part of the history of the Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0/2.0 and b.a.n.g. lab (stands for bits, atoms, neurons and genes) at CALIT2/UCSD has been to develop works that can create a performative matrix that activate and take a measure of the current conditions and intensities of power/s, communities and their anxieties or resistances. So, for us the U.S. Department of Defense launching “info-weapons” at us for a virtual sit-in on September 9^th, 1998 or the current confluence of “viral reportage” and the affective contagion of hate about the project that followed are all part of the performance – of course we would much rather the hate-mail never occurred – dominant media is bad enough to deal with. The aesthetics of working in the zones of post-contemporary artivist gestures cannot really escape these types of encounters; it is part and parcel of the patina of our work. But, we also feel that the hate mail or the general fear of losing national purity is co-equal in importance with the poetry that they were attacking. In fact Glenn Beck, an extreme right wing pundit on the Fox News Channel, attacked not only TBT’s use of poetry, but that the poetry itself had the power to “dissolve” the nation.  The performative matrix of TBT allows viral reportage, hate-mail, GPS, poetry, the Mexico/U.S. border, immigrants,  to encounter one another in a state of frisson – a frisson that seeks to ask what is sustenance under the sign of globalization-is-borderization.

Lawrence Bird: Can you tell us a little more about the poetry that accompanies the guidance system? How was this chosen, what does it concern? How do you envision the poetry developing as the project continues? 

Ricardo Dominguez: Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0/2.0 has always been invested in experimental poetry as part of its gestures – from the found poetry of the “404 file not found” of our ECD performances in 90’s to the border hack actions with the Zapatista Tribal Port Scan in 2000 on U.S. Border Patrol servers, where we would scan and upload Zapatista poems that we had written into their servers. When we started to develop TBT it became important once again to have a core impulse of the gesture. In 2008 I asked my partner, Amy Sara Carroll, who is an experimental poet and scholar, at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor – one of the areas of her research is on art and Mexican/U.S. border. She thought that TBT becoming a geo-poetic-system (gps) could expand the frame of experimental poetry and artivism. She then began to work with us and established two geo-poetic tracks – one conceptual and the other an echoing of desert survival manuals in multiple languages, which speaks to the multiple borders that are crisscrossing the planet and the multiple languages that are crossing Mexican/U.S. border via immigrants. Here is Amy speaking about TBT:

“…my collaboration with Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) on the Transborder Immigrant Tool…(is) imagined as a global project under development, my own involvement in that ongoing process is linked to the question of what constitutes sustenance in the quotidian of the conceptual, on the varied musical scales of the micro- and macro-. For, often—rightly enough—conversations about crossing the Mexico-U.S. border refer to disorientation, sun exposure, lack of water. The Transborder Immigrant Tool attempts to address those vicissitudes, but also to remember that the aesthetic—freighted with the unbearable weight of ‘love’—too, sustains. A poetic gesture from its inception, the Transborder Immigrant Tool functions, via the aspirations of such a dislocative medium, as dislocative media, seeking to realize the possibilities of G.P.S. as both a ‘global positioning system’ and, what, in another context, Laura Borràs Castanyer and Juan B. Gutiérrez have termed, a ‘global poetic system.’ The Transborder Immigrant Tool includes poems for psychic consultation, spoken words of encouragement and welcome, which I am writing and co-designing in the mindset of Audre Lorde’s pronouncement that ‘poetry is not a luxury.’ … speaks to the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s overarching commitment to global citizenship. For, the excerpt, itself infused with the ‘transversal logic’ of the poetic, acts as one of the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s internal compasses, clarifying the ways and means by which I and my collaborators approach this project as ethically inflected, as transcending the local of (bi-)national politics, of borders and their policing.” http://bang.calit2.net/xborderblog/?tag=poetry

Here is a poem that made Glenn Beck extremely angry:

TRANSITION
(song of my cells)

Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la migración de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlán” (1999 [1987]: 33). The historical? The mythological? Aztlán? It’s difficult to follow the soundings of that song. Today’s borders and circuits speak at “lower frequencies,” are “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Might (O chondria!): imagine the chips’ transliteralization and you have “arrived” at the engines of a global positioning system—the transitivity of the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Too: when you outgrow that definition, look for the “trans-” of transcendental -isms, imperfect as overwound pocketwatches, “off”-beat as subliminalities (alternate forms of energy which exceed Reason’s predetermined star maps). Pointedly past Walden-pondering, el otro lado de flâneur-floundering—draw a circle, now “irse por la tangente”—neither gray nor grey (nor black-and-white). Arco-iris: flight, a fight. Of fancy. This Bridge Called my Back, my heart, my head, my cock, my cunt, my tunnel. Vision: You. Are. Crossing. Into. Me.

 Here is a beautiful video version that Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand did of the poem: http://bang.calit2.net/xborderblog/?p=49

In the strongest possible sense poetic practice has emerged in TBT that is co-equal with Brett Stalbaum’s idea of a “last mile” tool and his development of the code necessary to have it work. In fact we also think of the code-as-poetry as well – an expansion of codeswitching – literally.

Here is one of the desert survival poems:

En última instancia, muchos dirán que

la naturaleza establece el estándar de

la neutralidad. A diferencia de los seres

humanos, la naturaleza no hace lazos

de lealtad con la nación, la familia, los

negocios o la religión. Usted sabe bien

que el mayor peligro que enfrentará en el

desierto puede no ser el clima o el terreno.

Habrá quienes no tengan en consideración

su bienestar. Los rescatistas tienen el

compromiso de ayudar a quien lo necesite;

exíjales cumplir esa promesa. No confíe su

vida a nadie más, a ningún extraño.

All them are available in multiple languages to the user on TBT.

Lawrence Bird: How do you navigate the legal issues? Did you have a strategy in place ahead of time for dealing with these, or have you had to deal with them ad-hoc? Does your strategy/defense link up at any level with that of apprehended border-crossers?

Ricardo Dominguez: We are not attempting to navigate “legal” (national or international) issues – but we are trying to establish a reconfiguration of the border and immigration in terms of what we are calling transborder justice – the question of a “higher law” doctrine that David Henry Thoreau established in On Civil Disobedience. Also, in a more speculative manner as artists we see TBT as still in the process of becoming – it is still shape shifting and performing itself into potential spaces of use and poetics. TBT is border disturbance art that constitutes a visible geo-aesthetic/geo-ethics gesture against the boundaries and borderless borders that are crisscrossing every single body on the planet – we call for a geo-aesthetics that starts at the nanoscale and reaches to the GPS (Global Position System) grid system that floats around the planet, we call for a geo-aesthetics that connects both the human and the inhuman, geography and ethics, we call for a geo-aesthetics that crosses into and dislocates the smooth space of geo-spatial mobility with ethical objects for multiple forms of sustenance. We live in a world where only goods and services have rights to cross borders – a world that is a chaosmosis of markets that demand global exchange and aggressive state social filters. We need a geo-aesthetics that can construct ethical and performative complexities for the new earths to come, that can touch new geographies for new bodies – transbodies with transborder rights – artwork that can function as a geo-philosophy for bodies that are flowing as transborder bodies across all the borders the world – a flowing-trans-nation the planet cannot survive without.

Lawrence Bird: Have you considered applications of the TBT more globally, in Europe for example, or the Canada/US border, which has its own tensions relating to indigenous sovereignty? Or would this take it out of the specific politics you want to focus on?

Ricardo Dominguez: We imagine TBT’s code and gesture as open to use on multiple borders and that it is not bound to just the Mexico/U.S. border. One way that we have attempted to promote this possibility is by making the code available to anyone or any group at walkingtools.net.

Lawrence Bird: How extensively has your system been used on the Mexico/U.S. border? Or is it primarily rhetorical so far (it’s certainly been successful that way). How is it coordinated with others’ humanitarian efforts for border-crossers?

Ricardo Dominguez: On a very practical level our work with NGO’s has been focused on working with groups in Southern California who have established networks of water caches for immigrants crossing that area of the border – specifically Water Stations Inc. and Border Angels. Water Stations Inc., the longest running NGO working on this issue, has been very open to helping us test TBT and has also offered us extremely important insights into what the real conditions on the ground and what problems immigrants are facing. We recommend that if folks have funds to donate to these groups – please do. They were very wary of us at first – but they have now become much more supportive – especially because of the work that Brett Stalbaum and his partner, artist Paula Poole, have done in with them beyond TBT.

On the rhetorical end of the gesture much of the work that we do at b.a.n.g. lab is to start our research as a politics of rehearsal, a rehearsal of politics, as part of our art practice – to create an aesthetic of minor-signals and lower-frequencies…”like physics, aesthetics is a science whose primary object is signals, the physical materiality of signs….”– to quote from a recent tweet by Jussi Parikka. To manifest a type of science of the oppressed or engineering of the oppressed that imagines creating speculations that automatically, conceptually, begin to disturb not only the lines of thinking that criss-cross not only our bodies, but the ecologies of the Americas, and certainly the globe. And, so it becomes necessary to create these speculative disturbances that can allow one to think about another possibility, another impossibility, that these systems both manifest and, at the same time, call for an “anti-anti-utopian” potentiality, so that the engineering of the oppressed, the science of the oppressed, is about rehearsing the fictions that will then become realities. Our work in one sense is simply a gesture of “plagiarism”—a cutting and pasting of what is already an assemblage or a system that exists because immigrants are crossing multiple spaces around the world and GPS is everywhere in our cloudy global Empire.  And so TBT itself is an attempt to create the multiple layers that manifest the social frictions, the speculative fictions, the rehearsal of politics, and of a counter-machine aesthetics—a machine of difference that can only really be performed by more than the multitude, if you will, to interrupt what Mary Pat Brady calls the U.S/Mexico border, “a state-sponsored aesthetic project.” We can see how these speculative gestures do create social responses on a global scale.

Lawrence Bird: TBT doesn’t just provide a map and way of locating oneself, it offers directions to various support services – where to find water, medical help. How are such safe sites managed and their position made public without making them vulnerable to border patrols? Are there any ethical issues involved here?

Ricardo Dominguez: The water cache sites are already well known by the U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security and anyone else who cares to take a trip along the Anza-Borrego desert in Southern California – in fact they have large flags signaling their locations. So TBT at this point is only doing one thing – offering the location of these known and established water caches – as a last-mile safety tool and nothing more. The cell phones we are using are not robust enough for anything else – now as more cheap high-end phones come on the market TBT will be able to offer more on multiple levels. So the ethical questions about TBT on the U.S. side of the border are not as complicated as those on the Mexico side of the border: these are questions about how TBT would interact with the coyote networks, would it be just one more material burden to those crossing, how does the extreme violence of the narco-war shut down the abilities of NGO’s etc., to work on distributing TBT with us – these questions seem much more important in terms of the ethics of the project  – would it do more harm than good? Or is it a gesture that would offer a way out for some immigrants from the violence of these dangerous networks that they have to deal with in order to cross? At this point due to all last year’s issues we have not been able to formally present TBT to the immigrant communities preparing to cross to have a dialogue about these questions – but we are hoping to move forward with these encounters – sans any further investigations.

Lawrence Bird: And how has TBT been taken on the Mexican side – what is it’s perception on the part of Mexican citizens, politicians, media? I’m curious how their reaction compares to the response on the American side, which approached violence.

Ricardo Dominguez: It is difficult for us to access Mexico’s response to TBT in relation to coyote economies or the narco-war on the border – these are zones that we have not attempted to have conversations with or have correspondences with. But EDT 2.0 is concerned about how TBT might function within or alongside these violent enclosures that immigrants have to deal with on multiple levels. We do not want TBT to become an attractor for immigrants who are already targets for these groups. But what we can say is that Mexico’s dominant media and alter-media networks, from Tijuana to Chiapas, have been very responsive and supportive of TBT. One of the first awards TBT received was in 2007 from the new media arts festival Transito_MX, who awarded TBT the “trans-communities award,” and the award was handed to us by a representative of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.  So at this time the response to TBT is both unknown and known. Another concern that we have and that we hope to be able to have a better sense of by the end of the year is how the design works for immigrants, and to what degree do they consider it useful as an art work and “last mile” safety tool – this will be done via workshops with potential immigrants in Tijuana, Mexico. Also one of the core questions we will have, based on all the materials that immigrants leave in the desert while crossing –  the heat and difficulty of crossing call for dropping as much away from the body as possible, from money, to telephone numbers, to pictures of loved ones, etc.  – is one more thing to weigh one down really necessary? These are EDT 2.0’s concerns at this time in relation to the border on the Mexican side.

Lawrence Bird: You mention that what drives border crossers is a hope that amounts to a “hope for the unknown”? Could you elaborate on this? At any level do you see a contradiction between this and the technologies of transparency, like GPS?

Ricardo Dominguez: The radical gesture of transparency was extremely important to EDT 1.0 in relation to Electronic Civil Disobedience as theory and practice and it still is in relation to the general distribution of TBT – who were are, where we are, and why we are doing it. But we are also very interested in the notion of translucency as an aesthetic possibility for TBT that functions to dislocate the readability of GPS (Global Positioning System) and gps (a geo-poetic system) – a minor form of the technology that is no longer bound to the total vision of GPS that is now embedded in almost everything. This translucency functions as a single-bounce GPS that initiates the database of TBT and then shuts off – thus making triangulation impossible – unless the user decided to turn the function on during the crossing. TBT’s gps creates an aesthetic disturbance that dislocates GPS as a transparent device and instead offers a navigational translucency of the “last mile” with hope-as-sustenance as its guiding wave-point.

Lawrence Bird: In Sustenance you refer in passing to Baudrillard’s “desert of the Real”. It’s a compelling way of looking at the border desert where migrants are abandoned in their pursuit of the American fantasy. But adopting a perhaps more humanist attitude, would it be remiss to recall Saint-Exupéry’s words that “Ce qui embellit le desert…c’est qu’il cache un puits quelque part.” / “What makes a desert beautiful is that, somewhere, it hides a well.” Perhaps based on that juxtaposition, how would you place your project in relation to the tension between poetry, activist politics, and humanitarianism?

Ricardo Dominguez: TBT is still in a (gps) process of becoming – it is still shape-shifting and performing itself into potential spaces of use for activists and expanding the frame of dislocative poetics. TBT is border disturbance art that constitutes a waterwitching tool that indeed crosses the desert of the Real, the hard simulations of the border which seek to target and kill. It offers another possibility – with the anti-anti-utopian offer of the desert’s “beauty” that you are keying into the conversation. We imagine that this gesture echoes  practices that fractalize the desert’s geo-aesthetics as: artivism, tactical poetries, hacktivism(s), new media theater, border disturbance art/technologies, augmented realities, speculative cartographies, queer technologies, transnational feminisms and code, digital Zapatismo, dislocative gps, intergalactic performances, [add your own______].

This is a collection of artworks, texts and resources about freedom and openness in the arts, in the age of the Internet. Freedom to collaborate – to use, modify and redistribute ideas, artworks, experiences, media and tools. Openness to the ideas and contributions of others, and new ways of organising and making decisions together. This collection is intended to inspire, inform and enable people to apply peer-to-peer principles for making things and getting organised together. We hope that all art lovers, makers, thinkers, organisers and strategists will find something for them from this set of imaginative, communitarian and dynamic contemporary practices.

View the collection:

Commissioned and hosted by Arts Council England 2011

Mirrored at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives

This collection was produced by Furtherfield, commissioned by Arts Council England for Thinking Digital, in 2011. Curated by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett with additional texts by Charlotte Frost and Rhea Myers.

Face to facebook is the final project in a three part series named “Tha Hacking Monopolism Triology” by the two Italian artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico. It was launched on the 2nd February 2011, with a mixed media installation at the Transmediale festival in Berlin, and a press release announcing a new dating website called lovely-faces.com.

The set-up for the ‘Face to facebook’ project was to steal 1 million facebook profiles and re-contextualize them on a custom made dating website (lovely-faces.com). The data collected from the profiles was only information available publicly on the internet, like the users name and profile picture. No facebook account was needed to access it. The 1 million facebook profile pictures were then checked for images that were usable in a dating webstie context. The remaining 250,000 profile pictures were then fed through various face recognition filters to assign an assumed personality to the subjects and a new profile was created ready for the dating website. Once published on lovely-faces.com, interested pursuers could get in contact with the people behind the original facebook profiles through facebook messages.

On the 10th February, 8 days after its launch, the dating website lovely-faces.com was shut down. This was following a cease and decease letter from Facebook[1]. Back in 1999, the net artist Heath Bunting was also subject to a cease and decease letter, that time from American Express. The letter sent to Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico in 2011 (as PDF) can be seen here, and the letter sent to Heath Bunting in 1999 is published here.

This project, and the ripples it left on the media water, highlights an ambiguous relationship many have with facebook. Many people sign up, upload a smiling profile picture of themselves and declare personal details to the large corporation that is Facebook without concern. Not until these identities and personal images were scavenged and then reused, the ownership and potential audience of this personal data is questioned. As the artists state themselves: “The final step is to be aware that almost everything posted online can have a different life if simply recontextualized. “

“The process is always illustrated in a diagram that shows the main directions and processes under which the software has been developed. We found a significant conceptual hole in all of these corporate systems and we used it to expose the fragility of their omnipotent commercial and marketing strategies. In fact all these corporations established a monopoly in their respective sectors (Google, search engine; Amazon, book selling; Facebook, social media), but despite that their self-protective strategies are not infallible. And we have been successful in demonstrating this.”

Web 2.0 Suicide machine (http://suicidemachine.org/) is another project which deals with your online identity. It allows you to automatically delete all your social network profiles and it simplifies the process – according to their website 8.5h quick then a manual deletion. Incidentially, the facebook is not one of the profiles subject to deletion in the suicide machine anymore, following another cease and decease letter: http://suicidemachine.org/download/Web_2.0_Suicide_Machine.pdf.

Since the lovely-faces.com dating website is still closed down, the project now (September 2011) consists of: documentation of the process used to acquire the facebook profiles; documentation of the global mass media hack performance, in the form of news broadcasts, magazine articles and blog post referring to the project; legal correspondence between the lawyers of the artists and Facebook; a mixed media installation; a touring lecture given by the authors. The latter two being re-performed and installed in various venues around Europe and beyond. The former are all available on the website face-to-facebook.net

The ever changing nature of this project therefore makes it a great example of a piece of contemporary art of variable nature, one which is in constant flux and is formed by the cultural, networked and physical landscape surrounding it. It does not only challenge the ownership of your online identity, it is also a nuisance for a mainstream contemporary art market based on institutional preservation and commercial commodification. These disruptions may also be linked. On the one hand there is an action to copy a system collecting and commodfying people and then use them as assets in one’s art expression and experience. “In all the three projects, the theft is not used to generate money at all, or for personal economic advantage, but only to twist the stolen data or knowledge against the respective corporations.” And then on the other hand, it is an art project which is not straightforward to see what the remaining artefacts actually are, whilst defying the process of being added to traditional art collections.

Other Info:

The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy. Face to Facebook is the third work in a series that began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir. http://www.face-to-facebook.net/hacking-monopolism-trilogy.php

Elin Ahlberg is studying Art and Visual culture at the University of the West of England in Bristol. She has been living in the UK, and Bristol, since her move from Sweden in 2006. As an artist, she works in a variety of mediums and produces work which aims to both amuse and provoke. Her practice and research is informed by quasi-anthropological observations and an interest in technology. “One year ago I gave up Facebook for lent. It was quite an interesting experiment and I realised how integrated my life was with the social networking website as I actually felt that I missed out on things.” Ahlberg’s essay Meanings constructed around Facebook can be found here http://elinahlberg.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/essay-meanings-constructed-around-facebook-2011/

Emilie Giles interviews artist Mary Flanagan about Tiltfactor’s latest social game, Pox: Save the People. http://www.tiltfactor.org/pox

Emilie Giles: Can you give an introduction to POX: Save the People, and why Tiltfactor was keen to produce a game which explored issues around immunisation?

Mary Flanagan: POX: Save the People is a 1-4 player board game that takes on the public health issue of disease spread. We developed the game after wishing to pursue some public health issues and having prototypes games on cholera and HIV awareness at the lab. A local, and quite open, public health group called Mascoma Valley Health Initiative up in the New Hampshire region of the US approached us with the problem of the lack of immunization. At first, a game about getting people immunized seemed like one of the most “un-fun” concepts imaginable. But that sinking feeling of impossibility almost always leads to good ideas later, so I agreed to take the project on. We decided we could make something fun from the topic, and ruled out nothing, from crazed needles to taking the point of view of the disease whose main purpose in life is to spread around.

In our final version of the game, the board is modeled after a community, with the spaces representing people. The game begins with two people being infected with an unnamed disease, and the illness speads. Players try to contain the disease and save lives. There are vulnerable people among the population noted in yellow, and these people — pregnant women, young babies, and those in frail health — cannot be vaccinated.

EG: Schools have the option to download a sample lesson plan which incorporates the game into a science class. Please explain how you feel play can encourage learning in an educational environment.

MF: Play is one of the best ways to learn something — certainly tried and true classrooms such as Montessori method schools use play as a part of the curriculum. In the best scenario, play provides experiment space, where failure is ok. In games related to pedagogy, players can test the rules of the system at hand. POX players, for example, can try to cure all of the people on the board to test if this is a good strategy. They can test out best ways to avoid the spread of a disease. Ultimately, they get to make the meaningful choices from within the game rules. Playing POX while learning about real world diseases makes the phenomena more concrete, and gives the learner agency to think about what he or she might do to solve the problem.

The lesson plan for schools was edited by both trained teachers in US middle schools as well as doctors at Dartmouth’s medical school. Truly, then, the game is produced by a community. We could not have created the game to this level of quality without our partners, friends, and supporters.

EG: In most games, a competitive element is introduced to result in a ‘winner’ and ‘loser’. POX deliberately avoids this convention, encouraging players to work together in order to stop the virus. Why was the game designed for this mode of play?

MF: One of the ethos of Tiltfactor games is cooperative play. We like to make games in which players can use collaborative strategy. We define collaborative strategy games as those in which:

1. Games (or in some situations, components of games) where if one player reaches the lose state, everyone playing also loses;
2. The extent to which players win is positively correlated to the success of other players.

Often the most interesting games do not fit comfortably into stereotypical models of play. And because we make games about less traditional topics — public health, layoffs, GMO crops, and other political and social challenges –it is important that the game model itself reflect that.  In educational scenarios or in community development, games mirror more closely the ways in which people work together to solve problems.  So, the reason that POX is a cooperative game are deeply set in the lab ethos towards problem solving — we can only solve problems together.
 
EG: You are working on a digital version of the game for the iPad. What was your rational for approaching the topic through both a digital and physical platform and do you think these result in a different type of engagement?

MF: Yes — we’re also creating an iPad version and have an online version to launch as well. It is fascinating to make multiplatform games like this– we are a small lab so we’re doing most everything ourselves, including packaging, promotion, and research.

The differences between the platforms for the game are so dramatic,  we’ve decided to conduct a study with the same game and different platforms, because watching people play the same game, the same rules, on a different platform clearly results in an different play experience. It is clear to me that very different things are going on, and I want to back up claims with data. For example, players play much faster if the game is computer based via an online game or the iPad. Players seem to like pressing buttons fast. In the board game, for example, observation shows us that players pick up pieces and discuss the moves with the other players, considering this option and that. The game piece actually becomes a kind of thinking object, I don’t know for sure, but it is very different. The speed up in time with a computer-based game appears to cut down conversation and meaningful dialogue that we’ve recorded in our last study on the board game. So, this is something that as games makers we’d really like to understand better, and share with others.

As an artist, I’m known to make media art and works that engage with play and game culture. In the laboratory context, I love developing and researching games with my team. I have amazing people to work with: Sukdith Punjasthitkul is my project manager who has a background in underground Asian culture, public health, and tennis; Zara Downs is a graphic designer and rural hipster who loves biology; Max Seidman is my accomplished undergraduate engineering student who has racked up several games in his time at the lab, and he loves wearing vests. Matt Cloyd is working with me, a recent graduate who is involved in sustainability issues in communities. Erika Murillo is a new student team member obsessed with social issues and animation. The list goes on. Part of the mission of what we do is to help the next generation who care about social issues have the tools to push what we do now, further.

EG: Your point about how you’ve found players to engage more in dialogue when involved in a board game is very interesting. Non digital games such as board games and pervasive urban games have become more popular over the past few years; do you think players are desiring a more socially interactive experience?

MF: Board games are enjoying a renaissance, it is true. First, because I think people really like playing together in a physical space. Perhaps the new technologies — Wii and Kinect — remind people of that. Perhaps they played recently at a family gathering and remembered how much fun they are. It is impossible to say. Second, there are some really well-designed games out there right now, and available in many countries (in part, due to online purchase power), that are certainly worth playing. People do really like playing with each other in physical space, and they still enjoy watching sports in person. Technology can help facilitate this as with mobile games and pervasive games, but it is not a requirement for a good game.  I think different kinds of conversations may happen over board games as compared to digital games, but this is something that needs some data behind it. So, we’ll be doing a study on these nuances in my lab very soon.

EG: Looking at Huizinga’s idea of ‘the magic circle’, there is a clear boundary between play and non-play. What were the challenges in designing a game which straddles this boundary, on one hand trying to entice participants through play and interaction, and on the other attempting to create real life social change?

MF: Emilie, this is the riding question for all of game design engaged with social issues, and behind all of the debates on how gamification can incite real behavioural and social change. You’ve hit the nail on the head! There are many forms of play, some which stay within the game in a nice neat package, like our board game, and some that bleed over into real life, such as ARGs. But one should not be fooled into thinking that this means that the former is useless for education and social change, and the latter is obviously better at it. We are about to release our pilot study on the learning in the game, and the results are surprising, showing that learning transfers out of the game as players can apply concepts in the game to new topics. We’re careful researchers. As artists, and as people critical of flippant comments about games and change, we don’t take research lightly. We don’t, for example, cite major gains on attitudinal change and make assumptions on long term behavioural change from a 40-minute game play session. That would be bad science. So we scale our questions accordingly, and in fact, are still surprised and pleased by the effect the game has. I’ll update you on the specifics when the paper is published this autumn!

The deeper issues on the limits of how games can incentivise real behavioural and social change can get rather dark. How Pavlovian do we want to be in influencing people? Even those in social change arenas have to pause and think. Education and influence for good is what we strive for. Designers and companies can only go so far before we have something much more sinister at hand. This is why our team’s work on the Values at Play project (http://www.valuesatplay.org) remains relevant.

Featured image: Installation Speed. Public Space Exhibition Plattform Bohnenstrasse in Bremen September 2006. Aram Bartholl.

Pole Position, Outrun, F1 Racer and Need for Speed are some of the countless racing games that have attracted artists to explore a world of speed and burning rubber. In 2004 Cory Arcangel hacked the old Japanese Famicom driving game F1 Racer and removed, in the same way as he did in Super Mario Clouds, cars and other objects so that the only thing that remained of the game was the road and the landscape rushing toward the viewer.

Hacking and modifying videogames is one artistic approach, another approach in Game Art is to transfer virtual objects into real objects. The Swedish artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby in an exhibition called Objects of virtual desire (2005), introduced virtual objects from players in Second Life. The object was then reproduced as physical art as limited edition in an exhibition, exploring immaterial production in a virtual world and how this can be transferred into an economy of material production. “Objects of Virtual Desire exploits the augmented value of immaterial objects to create and market tangible products, thereby reversing the process and highlighting the materiality of the immaterial.” Goldin & Senneby.

In a similar way both Aram Bartholl and Brody Condon have used virtual objects from Speed racing games. In Speed (2006) Bartholl made a 1:1 scale sign with red flashing arrows and placed the sign at a street in Bohnenstrasse in Bremen. The model to the arrows had he found in the game Need for Speed Underground NFSU where the red blinking signs leads the player on the right track. Condon on the other hand made an exact replica of a Lamborghini Countach from 1985, a model that he found in the game Need for Speed. The big different was that the car was made of plastic branches and there was only the outline of a car, in a 3D program you would say it was the wireframe of a car. What Bartholl and Condons does is that they investigates and problematizes the borderline between the virtual world and the reality by moving virtual and real objects between these two worlds. Worlds that today are more and more integrated and harder to distinguish.

The Dutch artists Marieke Verbiesen is also mixing elements from the virtual and real world in her work Pole Positon. Pole position was a racing game released in 1982 by Namco and was one of the first games to use the rear-view racer format, where the player’s view is behind and above the vehicle. In her installation the background in the game created by a realtime recording of a miniature landscape in perspective. Visitors can interfere in the landscape and be a part of the game by passing by the camera filming the landscape.

The ultimate combination of real and virtual game play is found in Garnet Hertzs work OutRun. Outrun was a game that was created by Sega 1986. Some arcade versions of the game were presented in a red sit down cabinet that looked like a car. Garnet Hertz has used this cabinet version as a model for his work and made a red real car where the front window is replaced with an aracde cabinet. With help of augmented reality the road ahead of you is an 8-bit video game, so at the same time you are playing the game you are driving down the road.

                             OutRun – Garnet Hertz. Images/video: http://www.conceptlab.com/outrun

“where game simulations strive to be increasingly realistic (usually focused on graphics), this system pursues “real” driving through the game. Additionally, playing off the game-like experience one can have driving with an automobile navigation system, OutRun explores the consequences of using only a computer model of the world as a navigation tool for driving.” Hertz

One thing that you could not blame racing games for is air pollution. In the installation “Colorless, odorless and tasteless” from 2011 this is exactly what you can blame Eva and Franco Mattes for.

They modified an old Pole Position game and installed a real engine in the arcade cabinet. When the player is driving the virtual car on the screen the room is filled with carbon monoxide from the real engine. So the risk is not only that you run out of coins but you are also gassed.

More of Mathias’s reviews on Furtherfield & bio : http://www.furtherfield.org/user/mathias-jansson

Featured image: Remixthebook Cover

“For us, art is not an end in itself … but it is an
opportunity for the true perception and criticism
of the times we live in.” Hugo Ball.

The challenge in trying to review a book like Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook, is the feeling you can only do justice to the text by doing the same with your review. The apparent simplicity coupled with the multifarious outcomes are intoxicating. You could be mistaken for believing that every possible remix would produce fresh and exciting outcomes. The key of course, is to have good source material in the first place. Also, to have developed a keen eye for what blends and meshes together and what doesn’t. Even the most disparate work requires judgment and prior awareness. Remixthebook asks us to consider the idea of remixology as part of the work of modern artists. The tone and style of the book is a blend of ideas, voices and thoughts with a myriad of concepts, which attempts be the very embodiment of the ideas it espouses.

Amerika explores various precedents for the remixological concept and draws on some known practitioners from the past: amongst them, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. He explores existing ideas and welds them into his own armoury. Their ideas considered as part of his own creative practice, brought back to the now with new life, in our contemporary networked culture.

Other than just being a systematic breakdown of the different types of remixing and their potential outputs (or artifacts, as they might be better known in an art critical framework?) Amerika considers the pathways and theoretical underpinnings of remix culture. Having taken this beyond his own practice of the written word and web-based projects, he considers his recent and ongoing VJ work. Blending and collage-making with images during live music performances suggests some of the instinctive, instantaneous ideas that come out of a lifetime’s collecting, collating and absorbing of diverse imagery, words and cultural concepts. It’s within this process that he believes more novel outcomes can arise, against the constant flux of media creation and dissemination. It is the ‘becoming’ of the media artist that is revealed in the live remixing performance.

Reflecting on this process of cultural assimilation Mark Amerika, situates remixology within a wider creative output and theoretical framework. This involves a cross hybrid of everyday, mainstream references with high art and ‘high’ theory, all written in his at once complex and convoluted, yet easily read and enjoyable writing style. But like remixology, what looks simple is the result of deep reading and heavy conceptual thinking. This isn’t to say that you won’t have trouble decoding the writing and getting to the heart of his thinking, but it helps if you spend time with the text and allow the rhythms and structures to become second nature to you. Close reading allows the text to fall into place. For example, consider the following extract from the section eros intensification:

Here is where we enter the realm of
what I have been calling intersubjective jamming
which is different than the idea of a Networked Author
or Collaborative Groupthink Mentality that preys
on the lifestyles of the Source Material Rich
and seemingly forever Almost Famous.

It is worth remembering that Mark Amerika is a creative writer first and foremost. He uses theory as a palette from which to draw out ideas and situations for further reflection and to help give some context to the point he is trying to make. The text of remixthebook is an example of his creative practice in action, as much as it is a personal reflection on his attempts to develop a thought process for it. Theory becomes entwined in critical reflection and creative output. You don’t necessarily come to remixthebook for philosophical answers and hard academic points of view, instead you ride the maelstrom of thoughts and conceptualizing to gain a better handle on a way of considering artistic practice.

The website of the book (probably a ubiquitous extra for any media art-related publication these days) follows a natural path of inclusion and invites artists to take sections of the book and remix them according to their own aesthetic and remixological preferences. While some of the work brings in extra visuals and places itself in a flowing context of media streams, allowing different work to become part of the project, Rick Silva’s The Isarithm sources Amerika’s Sentences on Remixology 1.0 and explodes them out of the screen and into a layered and playful vortex of shapes and lines.

Will Leurs uses some captured footage taken directly off the tv screen for A Pixel and Glitch Hotel Room and combines it with some source material supplied by Amerika from several ‘lectures’ he has supplied. These lectures appear within several other contributors work as well. The point of some of these remixes and the varied forms they take (the collection includes some purely audio work) is that, as well as being interesting works themselves, they are exemplars and guides to even further potentials of the remixological principle.

Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook at times may leave you looking beyond it to the appendix or for any footnotes that would fill out spaces or help make conceptual leaps for you. That isn’t the point of the book. The idea is to take the book as a starting point and expand on your own creative process.  Possibly the best approach is to literally cut-up the book and try some experimentation of your own, Brion Gysin style. Flex the covers back and pull out the pages. Through destruction and reconfiguration, the book might be bent to your will and become something that you can use. Perhaps the sight of a ripped and destroyed book would strike horror into some authors. I can’t help thinking that Mark Amerika would take great joy in the image and say that he’d planned it all along.

Other Info Related to Remixthebook & Remixing Culture:

The remixthebook.com website
http://www.remixthebook.com

The remixthebook Blog
http://www.remixthebook.com/theblog

Remixology by OpenMedia.ca – a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization working to advance and support an open and innovative communications system in Canada.
http://openmedia.ca/remixology

Society of the Spectale (A Digital Remix)
By Mark Amerika On August 16, 2011.
http://www.remixthebook.com/society-of-the-spectale-a-digital-remix

REMIXTAPE 2.0 //
Remixology is a music blog based in Paris (France) devoted to remixes friendly music.
http://remixology.tumblr.com/

REFF- Remix the world! Reinvent reality! exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery between 25 February and 26 March 2011. http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibitions/reff-remix-world-reinvent-reality

Visitorsstudio – an online place for real-time, multi-user mixing, remixing, collaborative creation, many to many dialogue and networked performance and play.
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/x.html

Brion Gysin. Essays & Stories, Interviews, Excerpts & Publications
http://briongysin.com

The first interview with Jake Harries, took place on one of Furtherfield’s Radio broadcasts on Resonance FM, earlier this March 2011. Fascinated by the historical context that came out of the radio discussion, we asked Jake for a second interview, this time it took place via email.

Jake Harries has been making music in Sheffield since the 1980s and is a sound artist, musician/producer, composer and field recordist with a strong interest in media art and the practical use of Open Source audio-visual software. He was a member of electronic funk band Chakk which is best known for building Sheffield’s first large recording studio, FON Studios, in the mid 1980s. He is currently one of “freestyle techno” trio Heights of Abraham and The Apt Gets, a band which uses guitars and only Open Source software on recycled computers to create songs from spam emails. He is Digital Arts Programme Manager at open access media lab, Access Space, and the current curator of the LOSS Linux Open Source Sound a website dedicated to music made with FLOSS.

Marc Garrett: Lets talk a bit about your own history first. You were in a band in the 80s called Chakk, could you tell us a bit about that?

Jake Harries: Chakk was based in Sheffield during the mid 80s and we are best known for building a heavily used facility, FON Studio, Sheffield’s first large commercial recording studio. Chakk made “industrial funk” music, a mix of funk base lines and drums with influences ranging from punk to soul to free jazz and electronica. Our music was aimed squarely at the dance floor. We believed that technology, in this case the recording studio, was the most important instrument a band could have both creatively and financially.

MG: So, you are part of the electro music history of Sheffield with bands like Cabaret Voltaire & The Human League in the late 70s – 80s?

JH: Yes, but the band itself didn’t have too much commercial success, a couple of indie chart top 10s and a couple of low 50s in the main UK chart, so few people remember us now. People are more likely to remember FON Studio.

Recently a documentary has been made, called The Beat Is Law, about Sheffield music at that time, so perhaps there will be a bit more interest in the band.

MG: Open Source software is freely downloadable from the Internet for free and Linux is the most widely used Open Source operating system. How long have you been using Linux operating systems and Open Source?

JH: I had heard of Linux before, of course, but I came across music applications which were developed only for Linux in 2002-3 while searching for new software tools. These intrigued me sufficiently to install the operating system on a pc which I had fixed where I was working at the time.

MG: Do you feel that artists, techies and others are choosing Free and Open Source resources for reasons which connect with ethical and environmental issues and concerns?

JH: Well, I’d like to integrate into this answer the general themes of openness and transparency. FLOSS is akin to an encyclopedia of how to make things in the software realm because all the code is available for anyone to download and develop; closed, proprietary software is like a “sealed box” which it is illegal to prise open.

But it goes a bit deeper than that: in the world we are living in now the “sealed box” is increasingly becoming the mode of choice for all kinds of products, most of which, because they are designed to be superseded, have built in obsolescence. When something goes wrong with a product, you are unable to fix it yourself because you can’t get inside it, and even if you could you can’t find out how to fix it. If it is out of warranty, either you pay a lot of money to get it fixed or you throw it away; then you buy a new one! (Which is what the market wants you to do…)

So, it feels very much as if we are surrounded by technology we are not encouraged to understand and products with a limited life span: the obvious environmental concern is, “what happens to my ‘sealed box’ when I throw it away?”

Using a Linux operating system can increase the useful life of a computer by several years, and perhaps, if you can hack into them, other products too. So it is great if both hardware and software are open.

We also know that sharing knowledge is generally considered to be a good thing as it allows people to build on what has already been discovered. Being able to give the people in workshops the software they have been learning to use because it is FLOSS, rather than them having to pay several hundred pounds because it is only available on a commercial license, is great and often the idea of this kind of freedom takes a while for people to get used to if they’ve not come across it before.

MG: Why is it important as a creative practitioner to be using Open Source?

JH: Well, personally, I have realised that what I’m interested in is freedom, not just as a hypothetical, but the practical reality, finding out how to achieve some of it and if it is possible to sustain it. Free & Open Source operating systems and software are one way of stepping out side of the constant pressures of the commercial market places which dominate our culture.

We tried this in Chakk in the 80s with FON Studio, attempting not only to personally own the means of producing our music, the studio (allowing us to be outside the corporate system of production), but also to be able to explore our creativity in the way we wanted to. In the case of Chakk it didn’t work out. We had, rather cheekily, persuaded a giant corporate (MCA Records, owned by Universal) to bank roll it all and they found ways of scuppering our plan by making our product conform to their idea of the market place: transforming it into something “radio friendly” and bland, taking the energy and urgency out of the music. We were quite a politicised band and that energy was essential to our musical integrity.

However, when MCA dropped us we had a recording studio which could help nurture new music without too much external pressure, and this led to records produced there by local acts fulfilling their potential and going into the charts.

I think it is important for artists to have certain freedoms, to have ownership over the means with which they create their work. The fact that FLOSS allows you the user the potential of customising the tools you use and to distribute them freely via the web or other means is quite profound. And one of the real benefits of using FLOSS as a creative practitioner are the use of open standards and formats.

MG: OK, let’s move onto your own band: The Apt Gets. Now, since The Human League & Cabaret Voltaire, a whole generation has experienced the arrival of the Internet. Your group seems to reflect this aspect of contemporary, networked culture – a kind of Open Source rock band. Could you tell us about this band The Apt Gets, how you all got started and why?

JH: It began with workshops I was leading for musicians on FLOSS audio tools in 2007. The idea of an “open source rock band” came up – at the time we didn’t think there was one so a couple of the workshoppers and myself formed one. The Internet was the main source of inspiration really: we used recycled computers with Linux we’d downloaded, as well as guitars and vocals. I’m interested in re-purposing junk as raw material for creative processes and decided to re-use some of my spam emails as lyrics. We all hate spam, but re-contextualising it like this is fun, as is introducing a song by saying, “Here’s a classic Nigerian email asking for your bank details”. The themes of spam emails are generally things like greed & money, status & sex appeal as well as “meds”, so there’s more to them than you might think.

MG: Now, I personally know why, but others who are not as familiar with Linux and Open Source Operating systems, will not immediately know this. The naming of your band’s name – it’s specific to installing software. Could you tell us more about that?

JH: On a Debian Linux based operating system one can install software from the internet using an application called apt. One could type apt-get install the-name-of-the-software into the command line and apt will get the software from what is called a repository on the Internet, where the software is stored for download. We thought that if you called someone an Apt Get it could be interpreted as an insult meaning something like, clever bastard. So, that’s why we named the band The Apt Gets.

MG: How long has your research project with FLOSS been going?

JH: The research project started in 2007. Ever since I began to use FLOSS I’ve been interested in the practical realities of using it, particularly as an every day set of tools, as an ordinary computer user would use it: for instance, when I do work on the arts programme at Access Space I don’t use anything else. So, it made sense to discover how a number of non-Linux using musicians would find using FLOSS audio tools – if I was being an advocate for FLOSS I ought to look at it from the new user’s angle and discover how far they could go and what kind of time scale they need.

MG: And the web site address is?

JH: http://audiotools.lowtech.org

MG: How easy is it for someone with little or no experience of Open Source software and Linux based operating systems to install it?

JH: It is quite easy nowadays. A Linux distribution like Ubuntu has an easy to follow installer which allows you to create a dual boot if you want it, that is, keeping your Windows system as well so you have the choice of both.

MG: At Access Space in Sheffield, you are curator and researcher of LOSS (Linux Open Source Sound) a website dedicated to music made with FLOSS – which is basically LOSS with the letter ‘F’ added, meaning ‘Free Linux Open Source Sound’ – FLOSS!

JH: Yeah! Free is the word! It is a repository for music made with FLOSS tools and released under a Creative Commons license. You can freely download and upload tracks. Initially it was based around two projects, a physical CD issued in 2006 curated by Ed Carter, and LOSS Livecode, a mini conference and gig curated by Alex McLean and Jim Prevett based around the international livecoding community. The website is at http://loss.access-space.org.

MG: What is Access Space and what is different about them as a group?

JH: Access Space is an open access media lab, based in central Sheffield. It uses reused and donated computer technology to provide Internet access and Open Source creative tools, free of charge, five days a week. It started in 2000 and has become the longest running free Internet project in the UK.

We recycle computers, put on art exhibitions, creative workshops and sonic art events. We’re currently developing a DIY Lab, modelled on MIT’s FabLab or fabrication laboratory. This will be an interface between the physical and digital domains where new kinds of creative activity can be developed.

MG: What operating systems would you suggest to newbies coming to Linux for the first time?

JH: Ubuntu or its derivative, Linux Mint, are both very user friendly for everyday use. For audio try Ubuntu Studio, 64 Studio or Pure:dyne.

MG: And regarding yourself, what are you using?

JH: I have set up eight Ubuntu Studio pcs for use in audio and video workshops at Access Space; and I use Pure:dyne live DVDs if I’m out and demonstrating on other people’s pcs. For everyday use, again Ubuntu Studio with a few additional applications like OpenOffice.

MG: Thank you for a fascinating conversation.

JH: It was a pleasure…

Extra info:

Open Access All Areas: an Interview with James Wallbank about Access Space by Charlotte Frost
http://www.metamute.org/en/Open-Access-All-Areas

Ubuntu Studio 11.04 release.
http://ubuntustudio.org/

64 Studio Ltd. produces bespoke GNU/Linux distributions which are compatible with official Debian and Ubuntu releases. http://www.64studio.com/

Puredyne is the USB-bootable GNU/Linux operating system for creative multimedia.
http://puredyne.org/

Pure:dyne Discussion, interview by Marc Garrett & Netbehaviour list Community 2008.
http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/puredyne-discussion-netbehaviour

“You Are Now the Electronic Man” are the words that appear before even opening the website for The Electronic Man, a project initiated by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico of Art is Open Source (AOS) and FakePress. And by becoming part of The Electronic Man, sharing your emotions as they become linked through QR Codes and help to build the frame of The Electronic Man, you are participating in a real time global performance.

This real time global performance relates to conceptual experiments by AOS and FakePress, in remixing reality and creating new sensual experiences with technology. The email interview took place after their recent exhibition at Furtherfield’s gallery in London, called REFF – REMIX THE WORLD! REINVENT REALITY!, which happened during February, March 2011, and during their current project The Electronic Man. We discuss AOS’s ideas and intentions, regarding their activities of performance and use of technology, and their methods of engagement with anthropology and biology.

Start of Interview:

Renee : The Electronic Man is quite an ambitious project. What inspired you to begin building the Electronic Man?
 
Salvator and Oriana: The Electronic Man is actually a very simple project (if quite a difficult one in terms of “making it happen”) as it is a direct poetic interpretation of a theory by Marshall McLuhan that goes by the same name. We decided to take the famous statement by Marshall McLuhan quite literally and transform it into something that is really happening in the world: “Electronic man like pre-literate man, ablates or outers the whole man. His information environment is his own central nervous system.”

What we wanted to do was to make our statement for the centennial of McLuhan’s birth, but to avoid the form of the “conference presentation” for it, and to show in a powerful way how the ideas expressed by McLuhan are really taking place in the world which we experience every day. So we decided to produce a performance, a global performance.

With the wonderful support of Derrick de Kerckhove, and of the MediaDuemila magazine (and the Associazione Amici di Media Duemila and the Osservatorio Tuttimedia, and the Department of Communication and Social Research of Rome’s University “La Sapienza”, who were organizing the official event for the centennial in Rome, under the fundamental guidance of Maria Pia Rossignaud) we were able to make it happen and everyone involved was really happy to include this experience in the official celebrations.

Renee Carmichael: I find the methodology behind this project really interesting. From what I understand it’s about going beyond the analogue vs. digital debate and really going in between and just experiencing and experimenting. Do you think this methodology is important to use in today’s world? How and why might this be so?

Salvatore and Oriana: We are living in a really complex scenario, complex, fast and ever changing. Digital technologies and networks are starting to pervade our analogue reality, transforming it and opening up entirely new possibilities. There are forms of (digital) interaction that are starting to be widely accessible from physical space. These forms of interaction are really peculiar as they allow for a transformation of (physical) reality, making it interactive, reinventing it, remixing it, and adding content to it. The world itself becomes a performance and a very specific form of performance: involving remixes, mashups, recontextualizations and reenactments as its main practices. This has drastic effects, not only as our reality multiplies and reshapes, but also attitudes, perceptions, skills, knowledge and approaches of the people involved change. In this process methodologies, practices and theories remix as well, bringing forth various possible scenarios, in which collaboration practices emerge as the only viable way to perform significant actions.

So, in this scenario, “life, the world and everything” is turning into a multipliable, performative environment in which the only way to, actually, perform in a significant way is to collaborate across cultures, skills, theories and methodologies. This brings forth a change to our sensorial environment, meaning that when ubiquitous technologies are involved, we instantly gain new senses, new sensorialities and sensibilities. Just like with the mobile phone, when it doesn’t catch the network, we move, naturally and without thinking about it, to a place that has better network coverage, in a way that is neurologically similar to the way in which we move our hand away from fire when we feel the heat: it is a real sensibility, an additional sense.

Mixing these two aspects (the forming of a multilayered, collaborative, read-write reality, and the emergence of these new senses), describes a situation that is almost exactly the one presented in the question: experimentation, as in performance and as in science, this new science that traverses disciplines, theories and approaches; and experience, meaning you are actually able to build a new experience of the world that is sensorial and, most important of all, writable.

This is also a good description of the shape that the term “conflict” is assuming: a continuous process of movement and traversal, in which you transform a part of reality (as in augmented reality) adding new meaning and imaginaries to it, in a performative action that unites activism, art, science, design and communication, and that transforms and is transformed really fast, at the pace of the evolution of technologies and networks.

Renee: I read that this project can help us experience and reflect on our place in the world through the external. Do you think the relationship between the individual and the external takes a new shape throughout this project? How might it be understood in the larger ideas and theories of the Electronic Man?  
 
Salvatore and Oriana: The Electronic Man is about the observation and exemplification of something that is already happening in the world. It speaks about interconnection and our renewed perception of space, time, body and relationships. Technologies helped us reshape these concepts completely. We are never in a single place now; we are everywhere, anytime and with lots of people all at the same time, using multiple identities, both voluntarily (mobile phones, ubiquitous networks..) and involuntarily (CCTV, social networks spying on us..). So all these definitions change radically: private and public space, gender, relationship, message, privacy, work and free time. We wanted to make this change explicit. In this change: public and private completely restructure! This is also why we decided to use the “emotional” dimension as a narrative: emotions are thought to be a private, intimate part of our lives, but now they are the object of public observation through what we do in the digital realms, for the new forms of economies that are developing, focusing on attention, reputation, awareness and more.

Renee: Although the Electronic Man allows us to experience sensually, it still creates finite points of data through the connections between a place and an emotion. What do you think is the relationship between the sensual impact of the project and the data it produces? How does the data fit into the idea of creating a new ‘global digital sense of our bodies’?
 
Salvatore and Oriana: This is a very complicated question! We chose this approach as a starting point. We are using a classification of emotions which is very basic (designed by Plutchik in 1980) it works really well across different languages (we are currently using 29 languages for our performances, to address as much of the world as possible). But this point that is described in the question (freeing the modalities of data, augmenting the degrees of freedom which we can express) is one of the focal points for expansion in the next steps. There are solutions and approaches which we are finding suitable to confront these issues with, and they are all related to adding degrees of freedom in what you “release to the public”: transforming artworks into free frameworks for expression that can be freely used by people. This transformation from artwork to framework is something that is happening all over, and it has to do with P2P culture and free software. This is why we release all the software and hardware (and methodologies) we use in our performances under free licenses: because the next step of each performance is made by the people taking the tools in their own hands and creating their own forms of expression and action, their own additional layers of the world.

Renee: In a related note, this new form of being that the Electronic Man creates cannot be completely separated from the world and systems it exists in already. It seems that the questions that often arise around this project are in terms of how it can be used within other appropriations. How do you see the future of this project in terms of the various appropriations that it may have and in terms of your own intentions for the project?

Salvatore and Oriana: As we said: we’re always in beta version. These processes are nomadic, temporary, and unstable. Ideas, software tools, concepts, hardware, practices and approaches are in a continuous state of remix: each time we speak to anyone, or even as we’re writing this, the performance changes and upgrades to the next version. For example we can look at the recent augmented reality interventions that have been taking place all over the world and, just a few days ago at the Venice Biennale: there has been a very fertile discussion building up during the last two years, on the idea that these technologies allow you to “squat” reality, and add new meanings and new degrees of freedom to it. This is why we created a project called Squatting Supermarkets a couple of years ago. This discussion is producing actions: appropriations, performances, re-usage of terms, words, sentences, new forms of activism, and new forms of art. We’re really happy that this is taking place, and we see all this as a wider form of performance in which everyone interested can be involved.                                                                              

Renee: I can’t help but see a relationship between The Electronic Man and a sort of modern day Frankenstein. Would you like to comment on this relationship?

Salvatore and Oriana: We will answer this question using an answer that our dear friend prof. Massimo Canevacci gave to a question during a TV show in Italy: “This is a wonderful question, and I am deeply convinced that western cultures produced these really heavy mythologies around Frankenstein, the Golem, and arriving to a movie, a very nice one, like Blade Runner, taken from a novel by Philip Dick.

I am certain that this system, this dualism between technology and body, between organic and inorganic, between nature and culture, is finally over, in a liberating way. There are researches in which the concept of cyborg constitutes a perspective that is capable of liberating enormous possibilities. Therefore our bodies become progressively more entangled with technology all over literature, technology, anthropology, and biology.

Thus I sincerely hope that this enormous mythology, this terrifying myth of the Frankenstein, will finally end, once and for all, and will peacefully retire; and that new forms of cyborg will emerge and free themselves, to produce new free forms of expression.

Renee: Finally, any further issues, ideas, thoughts you would like to add?

Salvatore and Oriana: Yes!

The Electronic Man is a global performance! And it becomes useful if lots of people participate (and, by the way, participate by doing even simple things such as attaching some of the Electronic Man stickers around and sending us a picture, and you’ll find yourself and your work advertised whenever we exhibit the work: for example at the MACRO museum in Rome there is a full wall dedicated to the people that are helping us out, including their bios, pictures and links) But, most of all, it becomes useful if lots of people actively grab technologies, methodologies and concepts and actively build their own performative world, possibly sharing the results with everyone else.

So we strongly invite everyone out there to request the software, (it will be published on our sites as soon as we have some time to prepare a proper sharing mechanism, but you all can have it before that by simply asking) and to imagine other disruptive ways of using technologies to create free, accessible, inclusive spaces for communication and expression.

We will support you all in that as much as we can.

The Electronic Man at ADD Festival, MACRO Testaccio, Rome contemporary art museum, view video on Youtube.

Featured image: Walled out and hammered by Marc Garrett

A young guy in his early Twenties becomes curious about the world of the arts. He decides to do what others would do in these circumstances: he picks up a few arts magazines from a local newsstand and browses their content looking for the latest trends. However, he increasingly becomes frustrated with the amount of advertisements that fill these magazines, that appear to prevail over any sustained discussion on the arts. He dislikes the way art looks more like a big commercial circus than the honest display of creative talent. He grows disaffected with the patronizing tones of editors and so-called authorities in the field.

He decides to denounce this publicly by creating an online fake of Flash Art online, the current leading contemporary art magazine in Italy, choosing the telling URL of ashartonline.com (as opposed to flashartonline.com), and filling it with his own content. Following the magazine’s distribution (for a fee) of a publication that claims to contain the contacts of over 30000 galleries and curators (the Arts Diary), he decides to compile his own list of 3300 artists and art dealers contacts searchable online and to make it available for download (for free) to anyone. Noticing the patronizing tone and the rude replies that Flashart director, Giancarlo Politi, dispenses to whomever objects to his artistic and editorial choices, he creates a forum (letters to the Director, part 2) that encourages disgruntled artists and critics to voice their discontents. The website grows and receives a considerable number of hits. Not enough for being properly considered mainstream, but still a pesky doppelgänger and a welcome critique of Flash Art. The success that this modest détournement enjoyed during the six months of its existence showed that Luca Lo Coco, the young creator of ashartonline definitely had a point.

At this point the story sounds a lot like many other stories of netartists and netactivists who have directed their criticism towards institutions and corporations, or towards other fellow artists and arts databases, by cloning, hacking, spoofing, and mocking websites to short-circuit the usually lethargic and cynical flow of information that characterizes institutionalized outlets. Countless groups and collectives like the Yes Men, 0100101110101101.org, and later Ubermorgen, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, to different degrees, have practiced and supported this and similar tactics for years. Posing as WTO representatives or Spokespeople of major corporations, The Yes Men have made the fake as their main tactic since the mid-nineties to draw attention to the shady practices that organizations such as the GATT and WTO were conducting under the nose of unaware and apathetic individuals; operating within the independent art world and often turning their attacks towards this very domain, the 0100101110101101.org have perfected the practice of forgery of logos, artists and artworks to unveil the laziness of an art establishment more interested in the popularity of the artist signing the artwork than in the quality of the artwork itself, more focused on ways to sell art rather than honestly evaluating it, more preoccupied with establishing powerful networks with other equally powerful art critics and dealers rather than actually doing some genuine research. Inspired by Andy Warhol, Dadaism and the avant-garde and empowered by the technical potentials of digital media, the pranks and actions of these artists and media practitioners have become well-known among anyone interested in media activism and artivism, or among anyone who finds at least some cursory interest in media creativity.

Given the precedents, Luca Lo Coco’s take on Flashartonline is not an exception. Ashartonline was a website that exploited the spoof against the formulaic and uninspired direction of the arts publishing in Italy and the condescending attitude of a bunch of self-elected gate-keepers of the arts. In a typical situation however, maybe this site would have been remembered as one among many actions, a grain of sand in a desert. Maybe, the website would have enjoyed some short-lived popularity among a relatively limited supporters, but as it often happens in these circumstances, it would have likely been ignored by the director and the magazine it was criticizing, or just forced to shut down. In the end, Ashartonline was a clever website, but it was also fairly innocuous, barely scratching the surface of the colossal enterprise it was targeting.

Disregard, or pretending nothing has happened, has always been the most effective reaction of a targeted institution against spoofs, parodies and fakes. Unsurprisingly, when the Yes Men appeared on BBC posing as Union Carbide reps announcing that the company was ready to take responsibility for the Bhopal disaster on its twentieth anniversary, the real reps retracted the announcement but then didn’t bother going after the pranksters, behaving as if the episode hadn’t even occurred. They knew that starting a legal action would have drawn too much negative attention to the company and given free publicity to the Yes Men [1]. When the 0100101.org recently revealed that an installation of a cat in a cage [2] had not been executed by art star Maurizio Cattellan but had been created by the duo themselves, no fuss was made and no legal charges were issued. Instead, a simple disclaimer was issued [3]. The piece, as the artists themselves explained, went “back to the Internet,” from which the idea (and the picture of the cat) had originally emerged.

However, for reasons that we all fail to understand, the story of ashartonline took quite a different direction. Luca Lo Coco found himself at the center of a vicious attack initiated by the director of Flash Art Giancarlo Politi himself: not only was the website shut down, a surprising, but not totally unexpected outcome, but a judicial case which lasted for over three years ensued. Politi, it turned out, sued Lo Coco for infringement of intellectual property and other counts of damage for a total amount of 200,000 Euros. Even the judge didn’t find Ashartonline damaging enough to justify the absurd indemnity. However, he admitted, the website could have been the cause of a certain confusion (meaning that it had achieved his goal, a small consolation for Lo Coco). Thus, Lo Coco was given a deadline to pay a much smaller, yet still unaffordable fee of around Euro 7,000, a mix of legal fees and other bureaucratic expenses. When he did not produce the money, officers showed up at his door to confiscate his furniture.

Now, some might contend that Politi, might not responsible for the cruel epilogue of this story, an extraordinary and strangely efficient move by the justice system, especially considering that the whole story takes place in Italy. Apparently, it was Politi who insisted that the confiscation went ahead as quickly as possible. This last bit adds even more outrage to this already absurd story, whose unfolding has already catalyzed a number of incendiary discussions on various Italian-based listservs and arts magazines [4]. In fact, to add insult to injury, the value of the furniture confiscated from Lo Coco falls short the amount he owes Politi. One wonders whether this is the end of the story or we should expect more surprises.

What makes this ordeal especially controversial and absurd is not the style Lo Coco used to splash his criticism on a website. It is the exaggerated reaction of the director  of a respectable arts magazine who should have known better, but went all the way against an individual who was no particular threat to the publishing giant and who had no way to seek protection against his ire. At least a couple of reasons should have prevented Politi from keeping going at Lo Coco: first, if the precedents set by the egregious examples of 01001.org and the Yes Men may teach us anything, no counterattack has ever turned out to be the best reaction against spoofs and satires; second, as most of these examples have been recognized as forms of creative activism or as arts interventions, they should have been known to an arts publisher who claims to be knowledgeable on the emerging and most recent contemporary arts. Why this ridiculously ruthless reaction? Did Politi really fear (mistakenly) that Lo Coco website could constitute a threat to his magazine and its readership? Why didn’t he stop once he had obtained to have the website obfuscated? Did he think that letting a lone challenger have his way would have unleashed a whole horde of jackals just waiting for the right opportunity to disrupt his undisturbed realm? Was this an exemplar punishment?

Lo Coco, with his young age and, at the time Politi pressed charges, with a limited experience of the arts world as well as a almost non-existent network of allies to consult for mentorship and advice, was a really easy, too easy target. Thus, this action appears to be a rather gratuitous show off of power (both symbolic and material) towards someone who was virtually defenseless. Even more disturbing is the ludicrous amount of money that was asked from Lo Coco for the so-called damages caused to Flash Art. Politi’s move to silence (and of course defeat) Lo Coco using financial superiority is a trend that actually reveals the director’s personal view of where power resides, confirming exactly what Lo Coco wished to demonstrate with his website: power in the arts business is not measured on the basis of some cultural, or intellectual value and skills, but on money. 

Second, Politi’s exaggerated reaction appeared to become gradually an act of intimidation directed to the whole independent arts community rather than a personal affair between him and Lo Coco. The latter, on the other hand, was the perfect scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb that would serve to re-affirm loudly and ostensively the power of BIG ART, authority, hierarchy, and institutions against the younger, subversive, independent emerging arts. The message sounds loud and clear: see what happens when you dare criticizing the powerful and dare not playing by the rules established by the Artsworld? This sounded like a warning to all young and independent artists, just in case they have the temptation in the future to challenge the existing power dynamics hierarchies. Had art star Maurizio Cattellan created something similar to Lo Coco’s, asks journalist Helga Marsala in an article dedicated to the episode, “…what would have happened? Clearly, no accusation, no lawsuit. On the contrary, Politi would have even dedicated a magazine cover to this work [5]”

Ultimately, what happened might have been a source of great (financial) discomfort to Lo Coco. He probably would have never thought that such dispute would be taken this far. However, the circumstances of this episode unleashed a great deal of solidarity and sympathy towards Lo Coco-David fighting against the taxidermized and conventional Politi-Goliath. Many individuals offered to get the voice out or to write notes and articles about this outrageous episode. This means that there exists a –somehow—unified network out there ready to take action when such crises ensue. In the long run then, this unexpected cohesion might cause more discomfort to Politi. He thought he would just get away with annihilating his enemy. However, if Lo Coco really bothered him, suing him might have just been the wrong move. In fact, If he had done his homework he would have probably known what happens when you try to defeat your adversary in this way: you might inadvertently create more publicity for him. This story has already given Lo Coco much more visibility and respect than he would have gotten, had he not being sued and humiliated in this way. In other words, this story has already put his name among those subversive artists who have no problem challenging the system. In addition, the same sudden emergency that cost Lo Coco his furniture and that initiated the just mentioned encouraging wave of support, also caused a great deal of thinking and brainstorming on how to react (creatively, of course) against Politi and other’s bold attack. Thus, we should all thank Politi for having given us an idea for future critical (and humorous) actions against his magazine and his arrogant attitude, as well as for having reinvigorated and definitely strengthened our network.  

An Interview with Julian Oliver By Taina Bucher.

I met the Berlin-based media artist and programmer Julian Oliver in Toronto as part of the Subtle Technologies festival, where he taught a workshop on the Network as Material. The aim of the workshop reflects Oliver’s artistic and pedagogical philosophy nicely; to not only make people aware of the hidden technical infrastructures of everyday life but to also provide people with tools to interrogate these constructed and governed public spaces.

Julian Oliver, born in New Zealand (anyone who has seen him give a talk will know not to mistake him for an Australian) is not only an extremely well versed programmer but is increasingly as equally knowledgeable with computer hardware. His background is as diverse as the places he has lived and the journeys it has taken him on. Julian started out with architecture but became increasingly interested in electronic art after working as Stelarc’s assistant on ‘Ping Body’, Auckland,1996. He moved on to Melbourne, Australia, and worked as guest researcher at a Virtual Reality center. Later he established the artistic game-development collective Select Parks and in 2003 left for Gotland to work at the Interactive Institute of Sweden’s game lab. He then moved on to Madrid where he had extensive involvement with the Media Lab Prado.  Several countries, projects and residencies later, he made Berlin his preferred base, setting up a studio there with colleagues. Julian is also an outspoken advocate of free software and thinks of his artistic practice not so much as art but more in terms of being a ‘critical engineer’, a term that he applies particularly to his collaborations with his studio partner Danja Vasiliev. 

Their latest collaboration called Newstweek, was recently announced as winners of the Golden Nica in the Interactive art category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2011. The project leverages on the network as a medium for rigorous, creative investigation, exploring the intersection between the perceived trustworthiness of mass media and the conditions of networked insecurity.

His artistic practice clearly reflects his hacker and gaming background, playing around and messing with routers, capturing data from open wireless networks, visually augmenting commercial billboards in the cityscape, sonifying Facebook chats, visualizing protocols and otherwise manipulating networks for artistic purposes. I sat down with Julian on June 1st to talk about his most recent art projects, his reflections on software and digital media arts more generally. The interview was transcribed from a voice recording in a busy cafe to the best of my ability.

Taina Bucher: You started out with architecture and then moved over to games. How did that transition come about?

Julian Oliver: I realized quite early on that I was less interested in buildings than I was in exploring architecture in the context of the language within which it operates. I was more interested in hypothetical architecture. Like impossible structures such as what Buckminster Fuller proposed, and when I ended up working in a virtual reality centre in Melbourne I found that sitting behind a bunch of SGI machines dedicated to rendering virtual experiences, that I no longer really needed to invest in the idea to build something. I was more interested in something more plastic and mutable. The bridge from there to games came about around 1997-1998. Source code from games started to become available and it became apparent to me that it was possible to modify these games to explore an artistic practice, an architectural and sculptural practice really, using the medium of computer games. There were only 4-5 of us in the world working on this and we quickly made contact with each other. I left the VR centre and started an artistic game based modification lab in Melbourne called Select Parks. For about six years we did a whole bunch of projects based on computer games. We also established an online archive of the ever-increasing experiments and artistic investigations into computer game technology under selectparks.net. The archive is still there now.

TB: Was it the same interest in the mutability of the medium that led you to work with software more generally?

JO: I’ve been programming since I was pretty young and I’ve been around computers since I was a boy and working with them, but it was when I started to increase my freedom of movement with the medium of computer games that I became a programmer. I started to learn C, C++ and scripting languages and I quickly became hooked with the mix between technical challenges and rigorous creative exploration. I think the balance of the two still remains in my work.

TB: In one of your academic papers on games you ask the question of how much of the medium, as a raw field of possibilities, really is available to the artist. Well, let me ask you the same question in relation to software given that software always comes with a certain kind of aesthetic expectation.

JO: Definitely. I think it is a bit of a shame that much of what is called digital art is in fact made by using software suits built by large corporations. Macromedia, now the Adobe suite, is almost an infrastructure of the media arts. Painters of 200 years ago would never have accepted this brand attached to their canvas. They would never have accepted that their tools would be designed with such a generic mass audience in mind. I think that while the digital arts are certainly an exciting field there is an unadmitted dependency on a food chain that comes entirely from a corporation. The contemporary artist would then talk about breaking these tools, or you know, misusing them. But who is really holding the power? I think at a certain point for me, this was the reason why I moved entirely into free software. I really wanted to look at software as a core medium itself and I wanted to get at the guts of it. I wanted to have a rigorous personal relationship with technology so that I could bend it to my needs rather than my needs being bent.

TB: How do you picture a genuinely critical media arts practice then, moving away from the Adobe suites of the world?

JO: No, I think it is fine to use Adobe if it satisfies your expectations. However I think that the expectations themselves are already defined by these external corporate market inputs. I think it is really important for digital artists to understand what digits are. They call themselves software artists but they do not really write software or know what it is. By using it their works become symptomatic of a process that they themselves have not defined.

TB: Does this mean we have to know code in order to be critical of code?

JO: Yes. I think you need to speak the language. It is the same thing with other cultural practices; you need to know the basics of how a violin or a guitar works before you can pass a judgement on the player. There is a parallel history to the new media arts that is not written and that’s all of those technical and cultural contributions that artists and technologists make when they are producing a work of new media. There is certainly a very well written history for the work of art in the galleries but there is nothing of the sorts for the fundaments of the technical achievements. I mean we have that with music for instance, with the evolution of the piano, but there are things happening in the new media arts all the time that no one other than the technologists can really appreciate. These are significant contributions that actually shape the way in which media are used in the future. This is certainly the case with the development of a new programming language that a historian might not necessarily notice. A language like Python or a framework like open frameworks has shifted media arts in such an influential way. Most people only see the end product. Understanding just a little in this regard is enough for enriching the history of the field I think.

TB: One could certainly argue that the ‘democratization of code’ with web 2.0 technologies and open APIs potentially lets anyone produce software art?

JO: Yes certainly. Take Processing for instance, anyone can make a digital square if they want. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. What I am interested in is to make people understand what’s behind it. I think we as artists need to describe what we do and part of this is to publish the source code. For me personally this is an obligation. By publishing the source code I am enriching the scene by allowing other people to have an insight into how it works. Take the project that Danja and I have been doing with Newstweek. If we would hide the way it works it would not enrich anything. We’d only be contributing to our own careers. We therefore publish all our code. You can download it now and already be learning how we did it and so together as a whole we move forward.

TB: Is code ever finished?

JO: That’s a really good question. Probably not. Someone could come along and improve what you think is finished. Every problem can be solved in a multitude of different ways. What constitutes being finished for one program might be elegance of expression. For another one it might be its performance. There are different value systems for programmers. Code in an open context, that is published openly, tends to be living or have the opportunity to live and be contributed to.

TB: You mentioned that most people do not know what software is, would you mind elaborating on that?

JO: Software in its simplest form is a group of instructions that work together somewhat contiguously to process data with an intended outcome. Data itself is everything that is not program code and program code itself is instructions written in a human readable language that are compiled into a form that the computer can understand. Computers have their own language; they are interpreters in a sense. You can really understand software as an automation of multitudinous processes to speed up the production of an intended or desirable outcome. Decision-making can occur, so it is not just a one-dimensional procedure. For the user though, software is generally just a skin of metaphors. If you think about it, clicking a picture becomes an initiation of an event and software is made to allow for the clicking of pictures to allow it to start a program. I mean software is many things at the same time, a field of illusions and metaphors.

TB: To what extent can you be taken by surprise by the software as an artistic medium given that it is your instructions?

JO: Well it depends on the scale of the project. Much of the time the software is a field of limitations. Working with software is about finding ways to make these limitations work and move within them. Unless you (of course) do something in Processing and you just want it to make a square then you just want the program to do exactly this. But for more complex projects I’d describe computer programming as a process of self-humiliation. It is about finding out how poor your initial assumptions about your own abilities are, you feel frustration and you need to fight against your own attention deficit disorder. It is a conversation with yourself, self-development ultimately. Secondly, it is a process of breaking down big problems into smaller ones until so much of the smaller problems are solved that the big one is solved too. But first and foremost I think that software development is self-development.

TB: Speaking of self-development. It is interesting to note that you have in a way returned to architecture, the difference being that you are not sculpting the physical space but the immaterial space. Maybe more so than building things one could say that you deconstruct them, take them apart through intervening and disrupting space.

JO: Yeah. Danja and I work together a lot these days and we refer to ourselves less as artists than as critical engineers. We firmly believe that the most transformative language of our time, one that defines whole economies, I mean how we trade, how and what we eat, how we converse with each other, how we move around the world is engineering. Art itself is increasingly diluted in transformative power, it has become more like entertainment than necessarily anything that is intrinsically rigorous. In the early days of the 1920s and 1930s we had interventionists’ strategies that are now known as art but they didn’t call themselves artists at the time. So as I have been saying to myself quite a lot recently it doesn’t matter if I call what I do art, others will do it for me anyway. So I better describe myself as a critical engineer by taking the language of engineering and lifting it out from a strictly utilitarian space and look at it as a language for rich, critical inquiry and really take on that challenge. It is really about taking the language of engineering and blowing it wide open, taking it away from this kind of black box reality, of big companies making stuff for civilians. This is essentially our relationship to technology. The companies and government make technologies upon which we depend and I think as any technology becomes more ubiquitous like smart phones our ignorance increases. With ubiquity comes ignorance and it seems to be a plottable, predictable curve. The idea of being a critical engineer is to intervene at this point and say “No! Stop!”. We need to reflect on what we are working with and how what we depend upon is shaping us. So learning this hard stuff in order to evade the top down superstructure is necessary.

TB: This might be a good transition to talking about Newstweek, a project that precisely seeks to evade the top down superstructure that you mentioned. How did this project that you’ve collaborated on with Danja Vasiliev come about?

JO: We were at the Chaos Computer Club early this year and we put a little plug into the wall where we put a small router inside. Our goal was really simple, to go into the Berlin congress centre with thousands of hackers and put the thing into the wall and see how long it would last without anybody noticing. We expected it would last a few hours but it was there for the entire conference. One could see it from hundreds of meters away but nobody did something about it, so we realized we were onto something. So we wanted to build a device that looks so much like part of the infrastructure that it would appear harmless.

Newstweek: fixing the facts from newstweek on Vimeo.

The second thing was to couple it with a man-in-the-middle attack and to interrogate what we increasingly refer to as a browser-defined reality. Meaning that if it manifests in the browser, it is somehow authentic. It is this idea of going to a major news site, and as long as what one sees comes from this imaginary thing called a server and propagates in your browser, it is somehow trustworthy. We wanted to explore the limits of the impossibility of intervening in an otherwise top-down distribution of news. We wanted to find an on-the-ground way for civilians to intervene with this authority by manipulating the facts. It is really about allowing for a lateral interception of news sources, such as the BBC, the Guardian and CNN.

TB: Did you also record or document people’s reactions to their suddenly altered or tweaked news?

JO: Yeah, we have done this. The thing for us though was merely to provide a platform. People didn’t really believe that Newstweek worked. So we released the how-to saying here is where you buy the hardware, how you open it up, the firmware, the script, and so forth. Only then we had this quiet retrospect where people were going “aha”. What we have changed is their relationship with their environment. It doesn’t matter whether there has been a Newstweek-device in the environment or not. The very fact that they are looking around them and thinking that what is happening in their browser may have been tweaked is the most desirable outcome. This is exactly what happened. Most of the comments are of that nature, saying, “I will never trust the news again”. I mean, even when the attention for the project falls back to the sleepy town of acceptance, I think we can still be very proud of ourselves.

TB: Not just Newstweek, but much of your work is about intervening in public space and exploring the meaning of place. What do these concepts mean to you?

JO: Well I am very interested in the writings of Edward S Casey and the phenomenologist’s Husserl, Mearleau-Ponty and Heidegger of course. One of the great things that has come out of that thought is that Space in itself does not really exist, just as there is no number 2 in the universe. What we have done is to create a concept in order to pre-empt space, to reduce contingency, and in this way so much scientific thought is about reduction of contingency. Space of course is a projection of mathematical constituents to make determinations. Through mathematics and cartography and the like we have seen a growth in trust in the space model rather than the place model. So what I am really interest in, is that rationalization of place has allowed us to live in cities, which have been atomically and economically particularized, privatized. I am interested in how the distinctions between public and private is often extraordinarily blurry. A good example is the fact that a company can pay to put a huge picture outside your apartment during construction for instance yet when it is a millimetre or two away from your wall it no longer belongs to you. Or when you are drilling a hole through your wall in your house at a certain point you are going to hit the neighbours next door. Where does it begin and where does it end? It really shows that territory and place are just constructions. The same goes for wireless technology.

TB: Why is it important to question the ways in which we experience public space?

JO: Well take my work Artvertiser as an example. We have come to accept that our cities are covered in proprietary imagery. So I find it important to question this read-only space much in the line of ad busting and culture jamming. We just did a big streetwise exhibition in Helsinki where artists chose their brands and they made concise commentary simultaneously finding a new way of being in their city.

TB: Place often resides in memory and to a certain extent requires permanence. With Artvertiser it is only a temporary intervention. In the end the proprietary imagery stays. What do you hope people take away from an artwork like the Artvertiser?

JO: True. But again, the most productive outcome is conversation. We have the public coming up and looking again and again, through the binoculars at the modified billboards. We even had security guards getting angry. I mean all we are doing is producing a new experience in the visual cortex. Why would a member of the public like the security guard get angry that we are modifying our own experience voluntarily? It is kind of curious.

“Festival of Ideas For A New City” organized by the New Museum, The Architectural League, The Bowery Poetry Club, C-Lab, Columbia University Center for Architecture, Cooper Union, The Drawing Center, NYU Wagner, PARC Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Swiss Institute blossomed like spring in New York City from May 4 – 8th, setting out to “harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it.”

Keynotes addressing the issues were architect Rem Koolhaas, virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier, and former President of the National University of Columbia, and former Mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mockus. A StreetFest  set up along the Bowery with over 100 local grassroots organizations and small businesses “presenting model practices and products in a unique environment.”  Over 100 projects, events, performances and walking tours expanded on the Festival’s themes.

Rem Koolhaas with OMA and The New Museum showcased CRONOCAOS, an exhibit  examining the growing “empire” of preservation and destruction  and the consequences of how we build, rebuild and remember. What is the role of preservation on the art world? As larger and larger spaces are repurposed for art  from industrial spaces they focus on the “apocalyptic sublime,” mimicking Hollywood and B movies. Oddly enough Koolhaas noted, this increase in preservation closely parallels the rise of Wall Street and tourism.

There were panels on “The Heterogeneous City,” “The Networked City,” “The Reconfigured City,” and “The Sustainable City.” At night  curator Anna Muessig’s Flash:Light Nuit Blanche event included murals along the Bowery, art projections on Nolita and Lower East Side buildings, and music and performances including projects on the facade of the New Museum and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Little Italy. There was also a 3D video installation Civilization reinterpreting Dante’s Diving comedy.

Jaron Lanier’s Keynote address on “The Networked City” at the Great Hall at Cooper Union reiterated many of the themes in his new book, “You Are Not A Gadget.” Not one to follow any set path, Lanier began his talk by playing a Laoitian “Ban Lao” (Ban Bang Sai Kai) bamboo wood pipe. He declared the simple reed flute was one of the first holders of digital information, even older than the abacus, because each reed object and note is turned on and off just like a series of digital 0’s and 1’s. The Ban Lao, traded across the Silk Route was noticed by the Greeks and Romans, and influenced the development of the pipe organ. The pipe organ was automated and turned into a player piano, a programmable loom, and finally became the origins of Charles Babbage’s computer.

Computers have gotten better Lanier explained, processing more and more bits, but humans still have more precise acuity at  the level of quantum physics. They can respond to just one photon. He then veered off topic discussing the first computer scientist Alan Turing who used computers to crack codes during World War II. Persecuted for being gay, he was injected by authorities with female hormones which gave him breasts and made him suicidal.  Just like Snow White, he killed himself by eating a poisoned apple.

He then veered back on track saying using computers as metaphors to the human condition is an irrelevant, outdated metaphor. The brain is not a CPU, and eyes and ears are not USBs. A better metaphor is thinking of the head as a spy submarine performing spy missions. You are constantly moving your head  seeking out data, not passively seeing it. Your visual system is sensitive to minute differences. A musical instrument is an additional instrument to the sensory motor loop that makes perception possible. Can we build digital tools that are as sensitive as we are? This, he noted, was one of the key questions now facing computer scientists.

New technologies are usually developed to become weapons. But many important inventions were first developed for music. Musical bows existed before arrows, and guns developed from the casting of metal bells. Even Hewlett Packard’s first object was a musical synthesizer. Music is a driver with innovation taking place around making sounds.

In order to make his lecture relevant to the “Networked City” theme of the festival, Lanier discussed his favourite thing about New York City, that the same sense of acuity as applied to musical instruments also applies to personal interactions. More diversity means you have more chance of connecting with someone who will change your life. The fates of people in New York are guided by their activities. Its important that the fates concern an extra world of human to human contact.

In such a huge network context people are sensitive to subtle motions in each other, and can identify subconscious communication we don’t really know about. Contrast that to sound networking, where digital music does not give you the subtle minute accuracy of acoustic sound. People who only communicate virtually are spinning their wheels in place. When we connect to each other through digital representations we lose some form of expression.

Lanier proselytized for the necessity of the “head and the heart”, insisted technology needs to bring better jobs to society than the ones they are destroying.  The basic social contract he said was turned back 11 years ago when advertising became the new way to get information. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google was the one who started it.  Because digital technology is cheaper, cheaper just gives this stuff away for advertising. But, when you take the products of people’s hearts and minds, such as their music and literature, and give them away for free this becomes a problem.  When you put effort into a promotion on line  you get the illusion of benefits, but you actually lose relative advantage. This is because the true customers of a social networking site like Facebook is not you, you are actually the product of Facebook.  You are sold and the customer pays to influence events.  This is the difference between overt and covert information with Lanier stating, “The official business of computation is advertising.” At some point though, there is nothing to advertise. If cars can drive themselves, what happens to truck drivers? Or if 3D machines make fabrications they make manufacturing obsolete.

The Japanese are creating elder care robots. We are making ourselves unemployed. The fashion  of making everything free leads us down a path from a city of dreams to a cry of despair. We have to figure out a way to change our relationship to information technology, instead of chasing after users and followers and making more money. Ending his lecture he declared, “We must humanize digital architecture – We must see beyond fads.”  And then he played a little ditty on dual Gypsy flutes.

Featured image: Healing Station. mixed media, interactive installation, size variable. Christy Matson and Jon Brumit, 2009.

The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft.

March 10–June 12, 2011
Decorative Arts Gallery
http://www.mam.org/exhibitions/details/new-materiality.php

For the first half of the 20th century, curator Fo Wilson reminds us, the practice of craft was heralded as a “remedy” to how human values were changed by the Industrial Age. Here the hand-made was given privileged status over the machine-made, and thus craft forms gifted new value through the artisan. In the latter part of the last century, as the world moved from apprenticeship and artisanship to a more intellectual and theoretical-based framework for valuing contemporary art, so too have craft practices and discourses been challenged. This rethinking of craft has accelerated in the last several years, with books like Glenn Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft and Howard Risatti’s A New Theory of Craft (both 2007), both arguing for conceptual rigor and provocative possibilities within craft as a discipline.

The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft, an exhibition that began at the Fuller Craft Museum and is currently up at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) until June 12, follows on and extends current trends in contemporary craft. It engages not only with craft’s reinvigoration as a creative practice and discourse, but with how these have been shaped by, and also transformed, new technologies, new designs, new materials and new ideas. Wilson’s exhibition and events make discussions around Art or Craft, Art or Design, Digital or Hand-made, and Conceptual or not seem, in a word, quaint; she engages with a broad set of materialized ideas that divide and relate across the artistry of craft, the ephemera of technology, and the theoretical frames of post-conceptual art.

The exhibition can perhaps best be summarized through the work of the four exhibiting artists/artist teams that spoke at the “Dialogues on Innovation” panel at the Milwaukee Art Museum on April 16th. Collaborative artists Donald Fortescue and Lawrence LaBianca, for example, spoke to Milwaukee activist and printmaker Nicholas Lampert about their piece, Sounding. This work consists of a huge, custom built cabriole-legged table, which was initially filled with beach rocks and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There it lay, for two months, with a hydrophone to record the ambient sounds of the sea, including the overwhelming swish of waves, the low hum of slow-moving current, and the activity of sea life – the most prominent being the continuous clicks of what must be shrimp in its vicinity. When the artists’ creation reemerged, it brought the bottom of the ocean with it: all the messiness and stink and poetry of the sea – barnacles, rusty parts, plant life, fish scents, mystery and more. It is exhibited with an over sized hornlike funnel, a huge phonograph tied together with zip ties, to amplify the recorded sound.

Sounding, avowedly inspired by Captain Ahab’s hunt for an un-killable whale, acts as a kind of parallel to the ongoing hunt for singular disciplinary focus in craft. The piece dives into the sea, hits “rock bottom,” and looks as if it barely survived; and on its return, we see that Sounding is far from a singular entity. Yes, it is trashed and torn, but it’s also imbued with literal life, entwined with technical innovation, and rich with stories of its journeys. Like the theories and practices behind the current craft movements, it came back more beautiful, more visceral, more sensory, and more technological than it ever was: a new materiality.

You can listen to or download Sounding file here:
http://www.furtherfield.org/audio/Soundings-1.mp3

My discussion with artist Christy Matson revealed an exploratory practice that shifts between digital and hand-made, generative and interactive, and always with an eye towards the implications of each. Soundw(e)ave, her piece on show, is a self-referential textile, where the actual sounds of computerized Jacquard looms were used to create woven compositions. Her noisy sound waves were turned into three patterned pieces of fabric, made by hand-operated, computer-assisted and fully automated (Jacquard) looms, respectively – each weave growing progressively denser with the more advanced technologies used in their production. The piece, says Matson, was a huge turning point in her practice; it pointed her towards a kind of digital craftsmanship, where she was better able to place value on the ideas, materials and skillfulness needed to be an artisan across contemporary digital, craft and art domains.

Soundw(e)ave, generative weaves, triptych (each 34″ x 54″). Christy Matson, 2004.

For example, Matson then began weaving copper wire directly into her fabrics, and, using the magnetic waves our interactions generate and alter, engendered new aural compositions. In other words, her sonic sculpture turns cloth into a Theremin, where movement and hand-waving at the gallery are transformed into the kinds of musical gestures often associated with science-fiction films of the seventies. While Matson’s earlier, sound-generated works were generative and performative on some level, here she moves into real-time interaction, invoking our embodied relations to textiles, craft, technology and language, all in one fell swoop.

healing station, a collaboration with Jon Brumit and quite possibly the most complex of Matson’s installations thus far, sees piezo sensors placed inside of swaths of fabric to pick up the ambient sounds of the room – including gallery-goers, passersby, street sounds, and the minute vibrations in the fabric itself. This lovely noise is then fed back into the space with bass shakers: speakers optimized for sending waves into solid media rather than air. Viewers can literally feel the low hum of presence, absence and movement as the textile, bodies and room speak at and to one another in a perpetual feedback loop of embodied music. The small crowd at the MAM laughed along with Matson when she relayed a story in which her wired-up piece, and its feedback, caused a small fire at one of its showings – quite a performance, indeed.

Tim Tate artfully explained to Milwaukee staple Tom Bamberger that nowadays “craft” is a starting point rather than an end point. I’m paraphrasing here, but he treats craft as an approach, a space of understanding materials, what they’re good at, perhaps their “habits,” and most certainly their implications. Here, narrative, function and the conceptual are always already implicated across technique – whether new or old – and value is derived from a contextual corpus.

Tate’s work is itself a beautifully resolved hodgepodge of hand-blown glass, hi-tech LCD screens, and visceral videos of typewriters and books, all literally tied together with plastic (zip ties again – don’t knock it ‘til you try it!) around a printed circuit board. In Virtual Novelist, for example, miniature monitors display the aforementioned “dead media” tools from behind artefactual casings of glass. Atop are beguiling sculptural homages to each of the gone-but-not-forgotten analog recording devices of yesteryear.

Bamberger is a smart artist with a quick wit, and Tate is similarly not one to spar with unless you have a good grasp of the discourses at hand. In this lively thirty-minute discussion, the two managed to disarm the Art vs Craft debate as both unproductive and long-since over, and open up possibilities for “ornamental aesthetics” in time-based media. Here the implication was that, following Tate’s lead, video objects and installations could place more emphasis on the object and installation – rather than the video – and use each as an equal material that informs and plays off of the other; the video and screen need not be the central focus.

Sonya Clark then told us how she views her practice as a fiber artist as similar to how author Toni Morrison views her own writing practices. In one of her essays (found in several publications, including a collection entitled What Moves at the Margin), the latter tells a story of the Mississippi River, which was laboriously straightened for travel and transport by boat. Every so often, the river floods; but, Morrison goes on, it’s not really flooding. It is remembering. The water is trying to get to where it belongs, to re-member, to embody again. Morrison says writers do the same with their texts; and Clark claims that she remembers through her materials. Originally trained as a fiber artist and now working across found objects, digital art and more, Clark’s practice sees her reclaiming forgotten histories, and giving them greater potency through her processes and media.

Clark discussed this approach with longtime friend and former colleague, UW-Madison Professor Henry J. Drewal – one of the foremost thinkers surrounding African Art. Clark’s brilliant work on the exhibition, a portrait of Madam CJ Walker, is constructed entirely out of small, acrylic and thin toothed, black hair combs. She overlays the combs and removes some of their teeth to make a huge, grayscale, and literally bit-mapped image.

Madam Walker, the first ever female millionaire in America (and African American to boot), made her fortune selling beauty products to black women hoping to straighten their hair – as was the fashion of the time. And so Clark utilizes her combs, with their own memory, narrative and political weight, to construct a lo-resolution digital image. This exceptional work manages to explicitly straddle issues of race, gender, class, memory and materiality on its very tactile surface, and implicitly engage with the contemporary conceptual frames of digital art and data, in its transcoding of the image from one form to another, and craft, in the final material and hand-made form it takes.

Clark finished with the generous idea that, at present, all art work is collaborative in that it fits into broad social and cultural contexts, builds on extant technologies, and is produced, received, and engaged with outside of the individual’s studio. And Drewal concluded by declaring that technology has always been at center of the arts in the form of new techniques. When something comes into the world, he went on, whether technical or formal or as an image, artists take it someplace else. They “turn common objects… into uncommon things, stretching our imagination and the world” along with them.

These are just a handful of the works in The New Materiality, by four of the artists represented in our discussions – not even all the works they contributed, much less those of the other artists, which include Brian Boldon, Shaun Bullens, Lia Cook, E.G. Crichton, Maaike Evers, Wendy Maruyama, Cat Mazza, Nathalie Miebach, Mike Simonian, Susan Working, and Mark Zirpel.

It is a show that, in its entirety, succeeds in stretching our imagination, through its expansion of craft, art and digital forms, and what they individually and collectively mean today.

Other Info:

Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa) is an experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from interactive and immersive environments, mixed reality art and multimedia physical theatre performances, to digital and traditional printmaking, concrete sculpture and slam poetry http://nathanielstern.com.

‘Made Real’, an exhibition by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, the founders of Wikipedia Art. Can be seen at Furtherfield’s Gallery from 27th May 2011 http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibition/made-real

Featured image: Radion at NetAudio London festival 2011.

NetAudio London Festival, 13th – 15th May 2011.
A three day festival that explores music environments in the digital age of networked technologies. http://www.netaudiolondon.org/

Marc Garrett interviews Andi Studer of NetAudio London, about their latest Festival at the Roundhouse and other venues in London, from Friday 13th – 15th May 2011. Showcasing work of artists who use digital and network technologies to explore new boundaries in music and sonic art, their festivals encourage participation in all forms: interactive sound art installations, conferences, workshops, collaborative online broadcasting and headline shows. This year promises to be a special event, headlined by the legendary Nurse With Wound and many more – read on.

Interview:

Marc Garrett: This seems like an amazing festival. Not just because it’s context relates to my own background and Furtherfield’s own connected communities and its history in exploring an engagement of contemporary, networked creativity which was once perhaps, considered to be at the edge of art. But now, it does seem as if a new passion is alive and kicking, representing what exists across the genres of art, technology and social change.

The Netaudio London festival began its life in 2006, why did you chose to set up such a dynamic and involving festival, and who are your influences?

Andi Studer: The first Netaudio London grew out of a general passion for electronic music, combined with the recognition of a booming netlabel scene distributing new music with CC licenses for free download. Culturally it spanned the three fields of club culture, avant-garde music and net-politics. During the research phase, we came across of string of European festival projects with the same scope and decided to align with them, so after Netaudio Berne and Cologne, in 2005, London took it’s turn in 2006. Over 3 days we presented more than forty acts in club as well as gig settings; we hosted cultural discussions, organised a knowledge fair around digital music distribution and premiered an the audio installation by Si_COMM, S.E.T.I and N-Spaces… good old days!

MG: What do you feel is important about the Netaudio festival and how does the current one relate to contemporary culture?

AS: Netaudio aims to play an active role in the ongoing process of exploring how technologies, and particularly the Internet, shape our lives. Within this vast field, we focus our work on sonic culture, music and sound art, but reach out to wider aspects such as politics and protest or collaborative creativity.

Whereas in 2005/06 much of the cultural discussion was driven by an incredible optimism about new communication and distribution channels, this year’s festival may pick up on something best described as ‘cyber realism’. The festival, and particularly the conference,  building on our 2010 research project, presents a strong case for individuals taking action. And in process of so doing, we are interested to explore what emerging digital tools they use to create new sound art/music, as well as in the social and political endeavours related to their creative work.  

MG: Why chose to include those who have a history in net art, critically engaged thinkers invlolved in networked culture, and many who have been and are part of the (new) media art generation?

AS: We recognise a continuation of creative and socially aware work, enabled by network technologies. Including emerging as well as established projects, some dating from well before the WWW time, allows us to show this continuation and hopefully furthers the wider understanding of these different elements/groups. Whilst there are clear differences between them, there are also many overlaps and we hope that the inclusion of as many as possible in the debate and the wider festival allows for an exploration and greater understanding of these overlaps, and differences.

MG: Your festival includes a visiting member from UK Uncut who will be discussing with others at the Conference and Workshops, regarding the proposed theme of ‘politics and protest; creativity and collaboration; digital futures and analogue survivals.’ They have made headline news regarding their activities challenging the government’s ongoing cuts, and have been actively involved across the country targeting corporate tax dodgers and the banks who caused the financial crisis.

Do you think that UK Uncut’s own perceptions and its activism reflect the festival audience’s general interests and feelings on the matter, across the board?

AS: The participation of UK Uncut is confirmed, but the speaker is to be announced. Whilst some festival audience members may be sympathetic with UK Uncut’s perceptions and activism, others may not. Similarly, whilst members of the festival programming board may have sympathies with UK Uncut’s cause, the festival as such does not necessarily share the same cause with UK Uncut. The reason for inviting UK Uncut was their very successful work as a technology savvy protest movement, as well as their exploration of new forms of protest, particularly sit-ins involving poetry readings and the singing of songs. We are interested to find out more about how they use technology and music/sound in their cause. Presented in a panel with Jeremy Gilbert, Mark Fisher and Anthony Iles, we hope to show how their work sits within the incredible role music had and continues to have in social, political and economic protest. 

MG: Nurse With Wound is headlining the festival and they are legendary in the underground music scene. Spanning a career of 30 years plus, under the curatorial guide of Stapleton who has seen NWW collaborate with a highly respected troop of free thinkers including David Tibet (Current 93), William Bennett (Whitehouse) and Andrew McKenzie (Hafler Trio). Many artists who have been working with technology and similar experimental genres, are influenced by those of industrial and avant garde music scene, such as Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Virgin Prunes, This Heat and NWW, so it seems fitting to have them in the festival, with their peers and of course, an equally interesting selection of younger sound artists and musical explorers.

It may say seem like the perfect decision now, but how did you come to the idea of asking Nurse With Wound and what are the links with the other aspects of the festival?

AS: To have Nurse With Wound headlining our festival is a dream come true. Their achievements in anarchic, experimental, DIY, post-industrial music is unparalleled, and it is possible to find many of their approaches in the current new music produced by emerging musicians. This is something we hope to draw on in the rest of the festival.

At KOKO we will also present a newly commissioned live collaboration between Bruce Gilbert (ex-Wire) and Mika Vainio (ex-Pan Sonic). This opportunity to present new work came about though the direct continuation of an ongoing enquiry into collaborative creativity, as featured on one of the three conference panels. This is definitely also a strong theme in the work of Radian, the opening act at KOKO.

I’d urge anyone who is coming to see NWW at KOKO, to join us at the Roundhouse for the afternoon programme, particularly the conference, but also with the Open Platform stage, we hope to showcase some glimpses of the NWW legacy.

It may be worth mentioning the broadcast strand of the festival here too. Enabled by the Roundhouse Studio facilities and with creative input from Ed Baxter of Resonance104.4fm we are able to feed the festival back to the online domain for the first time. Throughout the afternoon of the 15th May, we will present a live web-zine, thereby leading an enquiry into the future of broadcasting. As part of this we will present three new pieces of work by the commissioned artists: Stefan Blomeier, VHS HEAD, and Liliane Lijn, the latter presenting an online adaptation of her Power Game project.

MG: This interesting development warrants investigation, not only because there is an an influx of new interest from a much larger informed and adventurous audience across the board but also because it represents an obvious, cultural dynamic at work. Reflecting a ‘real’ contemporary interest for something different to happen, beyond the remit of normative, art world restraints and its usual, hermetically sealed approaches. We will definitely be there ourselves. To experience what promises to be an engaging and critical conference, but also to explore and enjoy the other varied live events and projects.

Extra Information:

The Conference – will bring together theorists, practitioners, activists and academics to address a challenging set of themes in 21st-century culture, featuring speakers including Matthew Herbert and Cecelia Wee: politics and protest; creativity and collaboration; digital futures and analogue survivals.
http://www.netaudiolondon.org/2011/strand/conference

Sound Art – In partnership with Call&  Response Netaudio presents an event of 8-channel immersive audio-works. The dynamic and varied explorations of the nine prolific artists brought together by Call&  Response highlights the vibrant and diverse field of contemporary sound art. Also there’s the Sonic Maze, an immersive series of sound art installations set in the Roundhouse Studios. http://www.netaudiolondon.org/2011/strand/sound-art

Broadcast – Using the format of a live webzine, Netaudio Broadcast will explore the future of broadcasting with a series of video and radio features. Netaudio Broadcast is co-curated with Ed Baxter of Resonance104.4fm. http://www.netaudiolondon.org/2011/strand/broadcast

Live Music – Starting at cafe OTO on 13th with Robert Piotrowicz (http://www.myspace.com/robertpiotrowicz) and Valerio Tricoli, continuing at Apiary with the runsounds hosted late night event; and the main live show of the festival, a rare live appearance from Steve Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_with_Wound), a special commission performance by Bruce Gilbert (ex-Wire) and Mika Vainio (ex-Pan Sonic) and Radian.

The 2011 Netaudio London festival supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by the Austrian Cultural Forum London. It is presented in partnership with The Wire, ResonanceFM and Last.fm and supported by the Roundhouse and many more.

“Does Lara Croft Wear Fake Polygons?” that was the question Anne-Marie Schleiner (http://www.opensorcery.net) asked in a gender analysis essay of the popular videogame Tomb Raider published year 2000 in the Switch magazine.

The videogame Tomb Raider was released by Core Design in 1996 and the heroine a British archaeologist named Lara Croft did not only  have big guns but also big breasts. In a couple of years she became a well known character not only in the games world but also for the general public when she entered the silvercreen, played by Angelina Jolie. You could say that Lara Croft is the Mona Lisa of the game world, beautiful, mysterious and well known for a large audience outside the games world.

In her essay Anne-Marie Schleiner mentions the famous Nuderaider patch, a game add-on that strips Lara Croft’s clothing so you could play her naked.

The artist Robert Nideffer’s Nuderaider patch made in 1999 consisted of three-parts:

1) an appropriated website where he repurposed the existing commercial site

2) a spoofed mail-server that re-routed messages submit to Lara Croft fan club website to the Director of development at Eidos UK as if it were coming from the Director of Marketing in the US branch

3) a patched version of the Nude Raider patch, which placed police blotter style bar codes across Lara’s private parts (and gave her a goatee as a Duchampian homage), thwarting the game player’s expectation of seeing her polygonal private parts.

“This shows the male dominancy within the game world by having a female lead appearing like a super model. By presenting her naked, it makes the game seem satirical just pushing the creators’ ideas a little further.” Nideffer [2]

In 1919 the artist Marcel Duchamp used a cheap postcard-sized reproduction of Leonardo da Vincis famous painting Mona Lisa on which he drew a moustache and a goatee, in the same way Nideffer later did with Lara Croft. Duchamp called his work L.H.O.O.Q a titled that pronounced in French should be “Elle a chaud au cul”, which translated to English means “She has a hot ass”.

Eidos sent cease and desist letters to the owners of nuderaider.com who were hosting the Nude Raider patch, enforcing their copyright of Tomb Raider.[3]

In the machinima “She Puppet” from 2001, the American artist Peggy Aswesh also investigates the gender and cultural identities of Lara Croft by mixing scenes from the Tomb Raider game. Aswesh describes Croft as a virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, perhaps boy-doll would be a better description since most of the player of the early Tomb Raider games were men or boys. In her essay Schleiner makes the observation that Lara Croft is a “well-trained techno-puppet created by and for the male gaze.” It’s obvious that the videogame Tomb Raider has played a major role in stirring up emotions with its out of date and suspect attitude towards women. But Lara Croft has not only been a subject for critically engaged, artistic gender discussions.

The artists Marieke Verbiesen has created the game Tombraider 0.1 in which she flattened the 3D game into a 2D-world and borrowed aesthetic from the early game consoles. In the new game you could also find references to classic computer gaming experiences such as the stuck “loading” screen, bad language translations and space-invader attacks. It is not unusually that artist create copies of videogames, with 3D hyperrealism graphic, in a retro old-fashioned style.

Another way to do this is to use pixel-graphic. That is exactly what Arno Coenen, Rob Coenen and, Rene Bosma did when they re-created he 3D game character into a 2D experience with a touch of pixel-feeling. The project Output: 62.500 materialized pixels, used 62.500 pieces to create a floor mosaic measuring 5,25 x 5,25 meters of the videogame icon Lara Croft. The mosaic has been exhibited at different places in Amsterdam and Kiasma at the Alien Intelligence exhibition in 2000.

So fake polygons or not, it looks like Lara Croft has not only made an impression in the history of videogames but also in the history of art.

Extra References:

Tombraider 0.1 – Single-player game installation based on the famous 3d game Tombraider, starring the female fightingmachine Lara Croft. http://www.marieke.nu/tombraider01/eng/

MUTATION.FEM. Anne-Marie Schleiner “An Underworld Game Patch Router to Female Monsters, Frag Queens and Bobs whose first name is Betty” http://www.opensorcery.net/mutation/

Featured image: Nightingale’s Playground Chapter Selection

Andy Campbell is a UK writer who has been experimenting with new media fiction since the 1990s, when he started creating stories on floppy disc for the Commodore Amiga. By 2000, when I first came across him, he was working mainly in Flash and self-publishing the results on a website called “Digital Fiction”. He has continued to produce one or two pieces of work per year ever since, latterly on a site called “Dreaming Methods”. His output is invariably enigmatic, complex, densely-textured, dark in tone and technically highly-accomplished; and he has gradually established himself, certainly amongst his peers, as one of the leading exponents of the digital fiction form.

His most recent work is also his biggest and most ambitious to date. Entitled Nightingale’s Playground, it consists of four interlinked parts: a click-and-read interactive story; a 3D “game”, which involves exploring a dark flat; a virtual exercise-book, the pages of which can be turned by dragging them across the screen with your mouse; and an ebook text narrative, written in short fragments.

The story, put simply, goes like this. In “Consensus Trance” (the click-and-read interactive section), the adult Carl has just broken up with his girlfriend. The one item he carries away from the breakup is an old red vanity case belonging to his Gran, with whom he used to live when he was a boy. The case contains bits of talismanic bric-a-brac dating back to Carl’s schooldays. Partly because the contents of the case have jogged his memories, Carl attends a school reunion in the hope of catching up with his best schoolfriend, Alex Nightingale. But Alex isn’t there – and furthermore nobody else can remember him. Carl remembers that Alex disappeared unaccountably while he was still at school. He begins to wonder whether Alex actually existed at all, or whether he imagined him; but at the same time he starts to feel as if “ordinary life” might be the illusion, and Alex might have disappeared because he somehow managed to get through to a further reality. He goes back to revisit the flat where Alex used to live.

“Consensus Trance II” picks up from inside the flat’s front door. It takes the form of a 3D “game”, in which we must walk through the passages and rooms of a half-dark flat, discovering fragments of white text as we go, and unlocking extra sections of the flat once a certain number of texts have been discovered. The text-fragments reprise parts of the story which can be found elsewhere, but they also develop the theme that Alex may have disappeared because he managed to get beyond the illusion of everyday life, along with a suggestion that Carl and Alex may be figments of one another’s imagination (many of the text-fragments have Alex’s name in them at one moment and Carl’s at the next), and a third idea that Carl may not be able to remember what happened to Alex because it was something so terrible that he blocked it out of his mind. In the last room of the flat, which has to be unlocked by discovering and “walking through” all the text-fragments elsewhere, this suggestion becomes more concrete: Alex may have tested out his own theories about reality by drinking something poisonous, and therefore he may have disappeared because he killed himself. The process of exploring the half-dark flat thus becomes a metaphor for Carl’s exploration of his own repressed memories, and the fragmentary revelation which awaits us in the last room represents the moment in which he rediscovers his personal nightmare.

The third part of the story, “The Fieldwork Book”, is an old exercise book of Alex’s – or rather a virtual exercise book, apparently recently dug-up, complete with soil-stains, scribbly handwriting, comments in blue from the teacher, doodles, bits of leaf stuck to the pages with sellotape, and woodlice running around on the front cover. It contains the beginnings of a school project about nature – “A dead tree may look lifeless, but actually it’s teeming with activity…” – along with notes from Alex to Carl – “Worthington has paired me up with this mad girl called Joanne. She smokes and stinks but I quite like her.” – and a lot of press cuttings and comments about a computer-game called The Sentinel. All of this makes more sense once the other parts of “Nightingale’s Playground” have been visited, particularly the ebook, which gives a lot of background information about both the Fieldwork Book itself and the Sentinel.

One thing we learn from the ebook section of the story is that The Fieldwork Book is a kind of changeling. Carl buried his science exercise book in the back garden behind his gran’s flat, at Alex’s suggestion, as a way of making it look more grubby and out-of-doors, and thus suggesting to the science teacher that it had been used intensively in the development of the nature project. However, when he dug it up again after Alex’s disappearance, what he discovered was not his own exercise-book but one belonging to Alex.

Another thing we learn is that The Sentinel, to which the Fieldwork Book makes numerous references, is an old Commodore computer-game with which Alex was obsessed. It had 10,000 levels, all based on the same principle: that players had to approach an object called The Sentinel across mountainous terrain without being observed. If they were detected the game would be over. Carl never managed to get very far but Alex managed to get to level 9,999 – and in fact one possible explanation for his disappearance is that it may have had something to do with him reaching level 10,000. He and Carl also played their own outdoor version of The Sentinel, in which Carl would have to stand still while Alex attempted to creep up on him undetected. A copy of The Sentinel is one of the items of bric-a-brac which Carl the adult discovers in his Gran’s old red vanity case.

The ebook also gives some more information about the vanity case itself. When Carl retrieves the Fieldwork Book and finds it to be Alex’s version rather than his own, he hides it in his Gran’s sideboard, and whilst hiding it he discovers something else in there – the red vanity case. The story doesn’t actually tell us in so many words that he looks inside the case, but we gather he must have done, because later on he has a conversation with his Gran, who is telling him that the contents of the case are private and he mustn’t look in there again:

“But what’s that red case? What are those papers?”

“They’re nothing,” she said insistently. “They’re from a long time ago, they don’t make any sense and they’re private love, they’re just private.”

The papers may have something to do with Alex’s death. On the other hand, they may be connected with Carl’s mother, since this is one of the few times in the story when she gets a mention:

…[Gran said] there were things in the world, happenings, that she didn’t understand, and neither would I, and neither would anyone else, and sometimes it was best to just leave them alone.

“Like we leave Mum alone,” I murmured. She didn’t answer that, and looked a little hurt, so I whispered “sorry” and she started talking to me again…

These hints are never developed further.

Nightingale’s Playground is not without its shortcomings. Its most obvious structural weakness is that its four different sections are in four different formats, each with its own distinctive “look” in terms of graphic design, and each needing to be viewed and interacted with in a different way. This is asking a lot of any readers and viewers who are unfamiliar with new media, although it’s actually less of a problem than might be supposed. Once the initial leap of faith has been made the cross-references between the four sections soon start to pull the story together into a surprisingly cohesive single structure. All the same, the fact that two parts are designed to be viewed online, whereas the other two parts are designed to be downloaded onto your own computer (or ereader) does make it a little bit inconvenient to shuttle backwards and forwards between one section and another if you want to examine the story in detail.
 

A more serious flaw is the fact that the Fieldwork Book doesn’t actually add very much to our sense of what’s going on. Pretty much all the information it contains (about the Sentinel, and Alex’s view of reality) can be garnered from the other sections, and although reading the Fieldwork Book gives us a slightly stronger sense of Alex’s personality and voice, the material in it begins to seem rather like padding on repeated viewing. There is a similar problem with the red vanity case, which is built up into something of great importance both in the point-and-click narrative section of the story and the ebook. When we actually get to see what’s inside the vanity case, halfway through the point-and-click section, the contents turn out to be rather disappointing.

Campbell does tend to talk up the importance of events and symbolic objects in his stories, rather than leave them to speak for themselves, which can sometimes backfire and lead to a sense of anticlimax. His prose-style can be overblown, a trait which is probably at its most noticeable in the “game” section of the story, where white texts either hang in the air or in some cases appear on the walls of the darkened flat. Some of these texts are particularly sonorous and doomy:

Where were we? Who were we? How much control did we have over the rain coming down, the hideous blank backdrop we were cut and pasted and glued against?

You were onto it, like you were onto something that meant all of this was wrong, some kind of mad illusion; that there was a staggering, amazing psychedelic hope going on that I desperately, weepingly wanted to understand.

I get the feeling everything changed then, like you said words to me that didn’t exist; a language that spoke the impossible; couldn’t be absorbed by the normal brain. Did you even invent some new words? Pierce a new crack in the fabric of what was going on in our limited, messed up world?

“The hideous blank backgrop”; “mad illusion”; “staggering, amazing psychedelic hope”; “desperately, weepingly wanted to understand”; “pierce a new crack in the fabric of what was going on” – the harder these phrases try to impress us, the less they succeed. The trouble is that there isn’t enough concrete observation or information here to convince us that the big emotive adjectives are justified. They seem to be flapping around in a vaccuum.

On the other hand, the ebook section of Nightingale’s Playground contains some of Campbell’s tightest and most effective writing:

Science was my best lesson because Alex was in it – science without Alex was a shitty prospect. I didn’t like any of the other kids in the class, I didn’t like the teacher, I didn’t like doing experiments or doing any work. Science for me was about swapping computer game cassettes under the table, scribbling rude shapes on Alex’s excercise book, whispering about whether the teachers were really aliens trying to brainwash us or whether the entire school was some kind of hologram that folded up and disappeared after the bell for hometime.

This is both convincing about the boredom of being a schoolkid in a dull lesson, and suggestive in terms of the story’s wider themes – the idea that “the entire school was some kind of hologram” clearly links to the alternative-reality theme. The ebook as a whole is written in short punchy sections jumbled into a non-linear sequence, shuttling us backwards and forwards through a term of so or Carl’s school memories, and unfolding (without ever fully explaining) the story of Alex’s disappearance. It works as a stand-alone, but it also works as the glue which holds the entire structure of Nightingale’s Playground together.
 

It should also be said that although the flat-exploring section of the story is sometimes overwritten, it is also the most thoroughly immersive of all four parts, and the one where Campbell’s characteristic approach to new media fiction comes into its own most strongly. He has always been at pains not to place his text in front of his images, or beneath them or to one side, like labels on tanks at the zoo or explanatory plaques next to pictures in a gallery; instead he puts his words inside his graphical environments, sometimes hidden or partially-hidden inside them, so that we have to explore to read. This avoids the danger of us regarding the texts as more important than the images. It pulls us in, and it makes his work inherently immersive and interactive.

This characteristic technique is taken a step further in the flat-exploring section of Nightingale’s Playground (which was built with gaming software called Coppercube 2.0), because here the three-dimensional space is deeper, more mazelike and more thoroughly-articulated than Campbell’s customary Flash environments. There is a sinister audio track which changes incrementally as we move from one part of the flat to another, enhancing our sense of three-dimensionality (the audio dimension of Campbell’s environments should not be overlooked in any of his work). The atmosphere is claustrophobic and scary. When you manage to find the right number of texts to unlock an extra section of the flat, there is a loud door-latch click which makes you jump even if you’re expecting it. When you get to the last room of the flat – the one where Carl is starting to get fragmentary recall of Alex’s possible suicide – the space is suddenly bigger, the predominant colour is red, there are items of furniture floating in the middle of the air, the far wall is decorated with a massive staring eye (an icon from the Sentinel game), the text-fragments tend to slide around in front of you as you approach them instead of staying still, and the whole effect is genuinely climactic and nightmarish. There can be no doubt that at moments like this Nightingale’s Playground is an extremely effective piece of new meda fiction.

It’s interesting to note how closely the climax of this flat-exploring sequence resembles Grandma’s house in Tale of Tales’ horror-game The Path. Campbell is an admirer of Tale of Tales’ work, but he hadn’t seen The Path prior to the completion of Nightingale’s Playground. All the same, the parallels are striking: the feeling of combined claustrophobia and disorientation, the sinister red-and-black colouring, the way the reader/viewer is barraged with suggestive fragments, and the way this technique is used to suggest flashbacks. There is a strong sexual theme in The Path which is not present in Nightingale’s Playground, but otherwise it’s difficult to escape the feeling that both Campbell and Tale of Tales have seized upon the exploration of a mazelike game-space as a metaphor for an inner journey, and have developed the metaphor in very similar ways.

Readers who are familiar with Campbell’s earlier work will recognise a number of the themes and motifs employed in Nightingale’s Playground. The Fieldwork Book, for example, is designed in very much the same way as an earlier virtual exercise book from a story called “The Scrapbook”; collections of fragmentary jottings, or old half-corrupted electronic files, can also be found in “Fractured”, “Floppy” and “The Incomplete”; the feverish boy being looked after by his Gran, with his mother either absent or not interested, is a familiar figure from “Dim O’Gauble”; the schoolfriend who introduces the first-person narrator to an apocalyptic secret is an echo of “Capped”; and a gloomy flat which must be explored for clues to the story’s central mystery can also be found in “The Flat”.
 

But these narrative strategies in turn suggest certain deeper patterns on which much of Campbell’s work seems to be built. His abiding interest in hints and fragments, for example, is admittedly suited to the nonlinear style of new media literature, but it also serves to suggest that Campbell’s central characters are often living in a reality with two layers: the “ordinary” everyday world which is mean, dull, shoddy and constricting, but relatively safe; and an inner or underlying reality which can only be glimpsed rather than viewed as a whole, possibly because it is so dangerous and frightening – a reality which emerges fitfully via dreams, games, imaginings and doodles.

It also frequently the case in Campbell’s work that the constricted dullness of the “ordinary” world is associated with adult life and adult sensibilities, whereas the “inner” reality is associated with childhood. Thus, in Nightingale’s Playground, the adult narrator starts to rediscover his “real” self when he breaks up with his girlfriend and rediscovers his memories of his best friend Alex. In a way, this could be seen as a Romantic or Wordsworthian view of the relationship between childhood and adulthood: as children we are much more in touch both with our imaginations and our inner selves, and therefore much more aware of the true nature of things, while as adults we become more absorbed in “getting and spending”, and therefore spiritually dull. Campbell is certainly no sentimentalist about childhood – in fact his stories are full of instances of kids being nasty to each other – and it should also be noted that the imaginative insights of the children in his stories may be shared or partially shared by more elderly figures such as the Gran in Nightingale’s Playground, another Gran in Dim O’Gauble, and the dying old man in Last Dream. It may be that these old people share the visionary capabilities of the young by virtue of their closeness to death – there are strong hints in the ebook section of Nightingale’s Playground that Carl’s Nan is about to die of lung cancer.

Perhaps a better literary antecedent for Cambell’s obsessive and visionary kids is the figure of Roland from Alan Garner’s Elidor – another hypersensitive and super-visionary outsider whose insight and talents serve to isolate him both from the mundane world of the Manchester suburb where he lives, and from the other members of his own family who would rather have safe, dull lives than dangerous, eccentric and magical ones. Of course Roland is an outsider-figure who can easily be identified with Alan Garner himself; and in the same way, Alex Nightingale can easily be identified with Campbell. The refusal of these visionary characters to settle for mere ordinary life can be interpreted as an oblique declaration of intent from the artists who created them. But there are other messages here too. The whole structure of Nightingale’s Playground is telling us something about the nature of the world we live in. Did Alex Nightingale actually disappear into an alternative reality, or did he commit suicide? Did Carl imagine Alex, did Alex imagine Carl, or did they both somehow imagine each other? Is the Sentinel just a computer-game or the key to something deeper? What was in the red vanity case when Carl first discovered it? What is the secret his Gran is so anxious to keep hidden? The fact that all of these issues are left hanging, and that the whole pattern of the story is therefore deliberately-unresolved, ambiguous, is a message in itself. Life isn’t clear-cut: it isn’t about answers: it’s about questions.

Nightingale’s Playground has its shortcomings, but it builds Campbell’s open-ended style of narrative into a more ambitious and absorbing structure – and explores some of his characteristic themes with greater maturity and depth – than anything he has produced before.

This review is co-published by The Hyperliterature Exchange and Furtherfield.org.

Featured image: Landscape by Antoinette J. Citizen (2008-2010)

The Italian plumber Mario appeared for the first time in 1981 as a character in the videogame Donkey Kong, created by the famous Japanese game developer Shigeru Miyamoto. Two years later, Mario became the main character of his own game, and his fame grew exponentially. Approximately 200 different videogames have been produced where Mario has the lead role. In contemporary art Mario is also a popular personality and Cory Arcangel is the artist who has done the most famous works based on the videogame.

Super Mario Cloud is probably the most famous of Archangels’ Mario works. It was created in 2002 and was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial 2004. In Super Mario Cloud Arcangel has hacked and changed an old Nintenedo game cartridge so that the only thing that remains of the original game are the little white fluffy clouds that slowly scrolls by on the clear blue sky. Since Arcangel has taken away all of the game elements and interaction you can refer to it as an anti-game. You can also interpret the work as a renewal and a commentary on the art historical genre cloud painting that became popular during the 1800s, when the science of cloud formations and their appearance emerged. 

Super Mario Movie is a 15 minute video which Arcangel did together with Paper Rad in 2005. Again, this is a hacked cartridge of a Nintendo, and in the opening scene, you can read the following text:

“As a video game grows old its content and internal logic deteriorate. For a character caught in this breakdown problems affect every area of life.”

For Mario, it means that when his world grows older its graphic content and logic breaks down until he finds himself trapped in a nightmare where he falls head over heels down the screen in a changing fragmented world of psychedelic colours in which, among other things, a giant Mario head pops up. What Arcangel describes is the natural degradation process that eventually affects all physical storage devices from floppy disks, CDs to hard drives. When the stored information is getting corrupt by age it results in misreading with strange and illogical effects on the screen. It’s not just we human that are having problems when our cells and DNA are getting corrupt by age, even game characters could experience strange behaviors and diseases when their data ages.

Video: Naptime by Cori Arcangel (2002)

In the video Naptime (2002) we find Mario sleeping in his bed and above him is a dream cloud that consist of a psychedelic stream of characters and colours – the same effect which you can experience when you try to run old games that have become damaged or are using a computer with a broken graphic card. Just like in Super Mario Movie it seems like a nightmare is chasing Mario in Naptime. It is a world of corrupt code and information in which the game logic has broken down, a world that behaves as if it was infected by a nasty computer virus.

Video: SuperMario Sleeping by Miltos Manetas (1987)

The artist Miltos Manetas has also created a video with a sleeping Mario. In the three-minute long film Super Mario Sleeping (1987) we see how Mario gets tired and lies down and sleeps in the grass. Just as in Arcangel artwork the video is describing an anti-game. All the interactivity and stress in the game are removed and instead we experience a calm and meditative atmosphere. Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) comes to my mind. What is it that distinguishes a human from an android or a character in a video game? Can characters in computer games dream and, in that case, what are they dreaming of when we are not playing them?

It is now not only the character Mario who is interesting for artists, but also the objects in the game. The Australian artist Antoinette J. Citizen created in 2008 the interactive installation Super Mario Brothers Level 1-1 in which she transformed an art gallery into a Super Mario game. She painted the walls with different levels of the game and installed interactive boxes with question marks and bricks. The visitor could touched the boxes which then produced different sounds from the game. Citizen’s works are, like many other Game Art works, an example of how artists transfer the virtual game world into the real exhibition space.

Mario is probably the most famous character in the videogame world. The question is if he is not as famous as Jesus? The Polish artist Kordian Lewandowski plays with the idea in the work Game Over. He has created a copy of Michelangelo’s famous Pieta sculpture but instead of a dying Christ in the arms of the Virgin Mary, we see Mario lying lifeless in the arms of Princess Peach. It seems that videogames with their own iconology and stories about the constant struggle between good and evil, in some degree, have taken over the role of religion when it comes to creating references and cultural contexts for people.

Links:

http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/supermarioclouds/
http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/supermariomovie/
http://www.artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=25370
http://www.supermariosleeping.com/
http://antoinettejcitizen.com/works/landscape/
http://wielkiartysta.pl/content/index.html

The four day event at the Showroom collated a series of practitioners, artists, theorists and historians, to examine, test and explore ideas stemming from cybernetics and information theory and more specifically the idea of feedback.

Described as an ‘experimental cross-disciplinary research project’, Signal : Noise was a fusion of talks, lectures, performances, screenings and debates that made diverse contemporary evaluations of the legacy of cybernetics using an inter-disciplinary approach. It tackled subjects as seemingly diverse as economic theory; urbanism and the arrival of the motor car in London; game theory; linguistics; media-performance art from the 1970’s; and the problematic legacies of the recent UK arts funding system on artists – all viewed using the concepts and terminologies of cybernetics and systems.

Signal : Noise, in part, played out like a small conference, mainly set in The Showroom Gallery space with one wall covered with a network diagram drawing by Stephen Willats, and fly posted theoretical systems diagrams from his recently re-published 1973 book, or maybe manual, ‘The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour’.

This visual reference served as a backdrop to the proceedings and served as an on going reminder that despite the deep theoretical and historical base being presented and discussed in its many forms, Signal : Noise was ultimately attempting to re ignite debates, and help reset the ideas of cybernetics and systems into a contemporary context of practical application. Willats’ book describes his process as an ‘investigation by the artist into the processes, procedures and models’ of the ‘Art Environment’ using ‘cybernetics as a research tool’.

The first night introductory presentations by Charlie Gere and Steve Rushton provided an overview of many ideas explored throughout the weekend. Artist and writer Steve Rushton on ‘How Media Masters Reality’ used an array of examples, from conceptual and media architecture group Ant Farm using pioneering ideas of investigating media feedback, through to the 500 millions votes (!) on US TV programme American Idol; the latter an example of how contemporary applications of media feedback loops are now often conceptually embedded into the core of television productions, and in turn, are now part of the audiences expectations and involvement.

Ant Farm’s 1975 work ‘The Eternal Frame’, screened later during the weekend, along with Gary Hill’s Why Do Things Always Get in a Muddle (Come on Petunia), based on Gregory Bateson’s Metalogues.

Ant Farm’s 1975 work ‘The Eternal Frame’, screened later during the weekend, was their carefully staged, somewhat trashy live ‘re enactment’ of the 8mm film footage of the Kennedy assassination, complete with a drag version of Jackie Kennedy and sunglass wearing suited security. This film sequence is familiar today, but in 1975 it had yet to reach the public domain.  Working to a tightly choreographed moment derived from a bootleg of the 29 seconds of 8mm film, Ant Farm’s grotesque mimicry of the assassination was performed as an ongoing loop, complete with car driving around the block (interestingly, the random people watching in the street in 1975 took photographs like they were at a theme park).

Despite being conceived in the mid ‘70s media environment of portable video and cassettes, the documentation of Ant Farm’s performance resonated with something surprisingly familiar and contemporary in our era of the internet, social media and rolling 24 hour news, and what Rushton termed our “society of self performance”.

Rushton’s historical threads from the origins of Cybernetics and to the Whole Earth Catalogue and the WELL served as a excellent base for the oncoming proceedings of the weekend, and showed that the arrival of the contemporary mass information network in the form of the internet, has habituated it’s millions of users into a kind of cybernetic practice based on input, observation, control, intervention, response, feedback, and adaptation but without necessarily using or being aware of its lexicon.

Nearby, in the Cockpit Theatre, was ‘Closed Circuit’ a performative work by Rod Dickinson (along with Rushton), which consisted of two actors staged and dressed, in a precise duplication of a set for political announcements; wooden lecterns, curtained background, complete with an array of flags – but all carefully neutralized by the removal of logos and national flags identities into plain white.

What followed was a series of political speeches utilizing the familiar language and tone of grandeur and crisis, delivered by the actors in the style of a world leader address.  What they delivered, was a carefully sequenced remixed script derived from political speeches over the past 50 years; Margaret Thatcher; Richard Nixon; Ronald Reagan; Tony Blair; Yasser Arafat and others. All the details from each specific event they were referring to had been carefully edited out. The only way to differentiate one world leader, country or event from another, were the large projected auto cues for the actors, situated behind the audience at the rear of the theatre. Each one gave the full scrolling speech text and also the year and original context for each leaders’ delivery. Looking towards the stage, it sounded like a single coherent speech, but eluding any specific meaning, isolating the language of threat and authoritarian political control, leaving us just the husk of political presentation and the transparency of the format itself.

Ideas explored in Stephen Willats’ network drawing were expanded further during his talk in the final morning session of Signal : Noise, where he gave a refreshing clarion call to abandon ‘last century thinking’ during his prescient and timely discussion. His seminal works have persistently and methodically challenged the process, structure and meaning of art making and display. Willats made his earliest system diagrams in the late 1950’s, and was the first artist to make the artwork itself a map of communication. But maybe it is this century, rather than our last, that will connect with his provocations to the hierarchical, highly codified, object obsessed ‘Art Environment’, as he terms it, to see that ‘object based thinking is still a hangover from last century attitudes’.

Willats was an early reference for emerging net art and media art in the mid 90’s, with artists then clutching for any art historical roots that gave the field of networked and computer based practice some practical grounding.

This in-conversation with Emily Pethick surveyed his own personal development and immersion in Cybernetics in its differing stages, a short history lesson, moving from Norbert Weiner to Gregory Bateson and Gordon Pask, but always resolutely en route to the practical issues in the present and what Willats defines as the artist as an ‘instigator of transformation’.

In parallel to Willats, was a presentation and discussion hosted by Emma Smith and Sophie Hope which began to interrogate the legacy of a the New Labour arts commissioning process. It discussed how the criteria for successful funding was intrinsically linked to a social agenda, audience and location set by government policy.  Discussions followed about how the arts commissioning process may turn out to have skewed a generation of artists practice, as they slowly lost control of their own output, became tagged with being an ‘artist facilitator’, and began conceiving works to fit in with the criteria of funding bodies, with each funder slowly extending their own prospective reaches. All this supported by an immense drive to build ‘Cultural Industries’ into mechanisms for regeneration.

Seeing this placed against Willats, whose ongoing practice could initially seem in tune with the past decades cultural policies and its overtly prescribed socially engaged agenda, in fact served to show how contrasting, distinct and rich his rigourous thoughtful approach is by comparison.

All this made for a timely discussion. With the approaching withdrawal and decimation of arts funding in the UK, Signal : Noise could prove to be a prescient event. With presentations, workshops and panels by Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister, Charlie Gere, Matthew Fuller, Marina Vishmidt and others, the interdisciplinary approach of Signal : Noise worked well despite its fairly dense timetable.

Using the gallery as a discursive space, with theorists and writers set within context of practice, is a good base for the next event in this on going series. What it maybe didn’t allow for, which is easily rectified, is a more unpredictable agenda, and more intervention by the ‘audience’. The whole event could function more as a real feedback working system, an adaptable structure that potentially allows for input from its participants (both presenters and audience) letting things move in unexpected directions both on line and offline, leaving a physicalised network as a residue after the event. With the decision to include food and beer in the ticket price (great dumplings, fresh vegetables and miso soup), there is potential here to expand this type of event even further.

With the on coming cultural landscape in the UK moving into un-chartered territory, it is potentially events like Signal : Noise which might begin to unearth and test new ideas and ignite debate within a less rigid format than a ‘curated’ show. In the future this type of event may even re-claim the word ‘radicalise’ from its current narrow, negative media usage, and re-purpose it for artists who decide to reject art market values, in favour of a exploring new ways of working within the emerging (and significantly less funded) ‘Art Environment’.

Extra info & links:

Signal : Noise. The project was led by Steve Rushton, Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), Marina Vishmidt, Rod Dickinson and Emily Pethick. http://www.theshowroom.org/research.html?id=161&mi=254

The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour. 1973. Stephen Willats. http://www.occasionalpapers.org/?page_id=825

Closed Circuit, Rod Dickinson in collaboration with Steve Rushton.
http://www.roddickinson.net/pages/closedcircuit/project-synopsis.php

Dr Charlie Gere. Reader in New Media Research. Department: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/charlie-gere

ANT FARM. ART/ARCHTECTURE/MEDIA [1968-1978]. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/lord/AntFarm.html

The Eternal Frame by T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm: Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Jody Procter. 1975, 23:50 min, b&w and color, sound. http://arttorrents.blogspot.com/2008/02/ant-farm-eternal-frame-1976.html

Emma Smith. Social practice that is both research and production based and responds to site-specific issues. http://www.emma-smith.com/www.emma-smith.com/Homeindex.ext.html

Sophie Hope’s work inspects the uncertain relationships between art and society. http://www.welcomebb.org.uk/aboutSophie.html

Featured image: Games/03 Paul Sermon, Peace Games, © der Künstler 2008.

Das Spiel und Seine Grenzen: Passagen des Spiels II ed. Mathias Fuchs and Ernst Strouhal, (Springer Verlag, 2010), German language only.

Fuchs, Mathias; Strouhal, Ernst (Hrsg.)
1st Edition., 2010, 272 S. 16 Abb., Softcover
ISBN: 978-3-7091-0084-4
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Mathias Fuchs is considered to be one of the first artists to explore the combination of videogames and art. Today he is a senior lecture at Salford University in England and a leading researcher on Game Art and ludic interfaces. Social and political context in videogames and how they affect our society has been a major topic in Fuch’s research. Last year he published, together with Ernst Strouhal, an anthology of videogames and its borders and how this genre is changing and influencing society. The background to the anthology was an exhibition held at Kunsthalle Wien in 2008 about art and politics in videogames.

It has been 60 years since Johan Huizinga’s now classic book Homo Ludens, the playing human, was published. Games are no longer just entertainment; it’s a major industry that is affecting our society in every aspect. In the foreword Fuchs states that the main issue for the 15 essays in the anthology is how games have changed and affected our society both politically and socially since they crossed over from the realms of entertainment into everyday experience.

Today we can find many different genres in videogames, such as serious games and persuasive games, that discuss current issues, news and social problems, artistic games which address existential and aesthetic aspects, and so on. The gaming community has grown enormously and created on-line worlds with strong virtual economics, attached real world economics. In her essay Daphne Dragona says “The virtual environments of our times therefore can be seen as social institutions with social, political and economic values resembling those of real life.”

In a similar way Tapio Mäkelä’s essay about locative games describes how the gamescene has entered the real world in the form of cos-players and social gameplays where videogames as Pacman are performed in the city streets or games as “/Noderunner/, where participants run to find open WiFi Networks, take a photo of themselves at the location and send the info via e-mail to the project’s website.” This begins to close the gap between networks and everyday experience through the practice of social gaming. The game as object is less of an obvious conclusion now that technology enables us to explore ourselves within networked, gaming contexts and mobile technologies.

The borders between game and reality have now become even more blurred and integrated, especially if we consider how technology itself also crosses over into administrational activites which have already been traditional elements of controlling, processing parts of our lives. One example is how authorities around the world are supervising these new socio-economics, such as collecting taxes from virtual incomes by using similar tools and networks. There are many questions about how games will continue to affect and change our society in the future and the anthology takes an interesting and comprehensive look into what games have to offer and what could be potential threats to our future societies.

Today games are serious business. It is not impossible that in the future a bankruptcy of an on-line gameworld could shake the real world and create an economic depression. On the other hand, could on-line game economies bring prosperity and create new jobs, an economic boom in ways we have not witnessed before? If games move into a new period of changing social experience in even more connected ways than before, then we need to understand what the consequences of these are and how to navigate through this shifting terrain. One thing is for sure, it was a long time ago that games were just entertainment.

http://www.springer.com/new+%26+forthcoming+titles+%28default%29/book/978-3-7091-0084-4

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Space Invaders

Tomohiro Nishikado’s classic videogame Space Invaders from 1978 can be seen as a metaphor for the Cold War and the fears for an approaching nuclear war. An extraterrestrial army are marching rhythmic and increasingly closer to Earth. Only a lone cannon stands between the intergalactic monsters and the total annihilation of mankind. The lonely hero struggling against evil is a theme that we recognise from myths, films and books. Space Invaders with its clear and pedagogical symbolic language has inspired several contemporary artists to describe the eternal struggle between good and evil in our time.

In the British artists Thomson & Craighead version Triggerhapppy the enemy aliens are replaced with quotes taken from the French philosopher Michael Foucault’s essay “What is an author?” “Triggerhappy” is a work that explores the relationship between hyper-text, author and reader. What is a writer, or rather, who is the artist when we are dealing with interactive art in the form of a videogame? Is it Tomohiro Nishikado who created the original game or is it Thomson & Craighead that have modified the game or the player that are playing the game or maybe the computer that creates and interprets the text (the code) that make the game appear on the screen?

After the 11th of September the world suddenly saw a new major enemy, international terrorism. In a modernized version of “Space Invaders”, the artist Douglas Edric Stanely located the scenario in the game to the Twin Towers in New York, which was destroyed during the terrorist attack on 11th September 2001. In Stanley’s version titled the invaders, you have to fight against the hostile aliens before they completely destroy the two towers. The classic struggle between good and evil continues, the game concept is the same as in the original but the scenario and the metaphoric meaning of the aliens has changed.

The struggle between good and evil can also be found in other areas of our society, for example in class and gender struggle. In the South African photojournalist Nadine Hutton’s version Skirt-Invaders the main character in the game is Jacob Zuma, South African president since 2009. Zuma has been quite controversial because he is a polygamist and has expressed his doubt about the dangers of AIDS. In the game Zuma you have to shoot down a never-ending stream of virgins from the Zulu tribe. Will the president succeed to shoot down any threatening scandals before they land on the ground? Hutton’s work is an example how a well-known videogame can be used for political purposes and be both entertaining and still very critically at the same time.

The term mash-up, which is frequently used today, could be described as a form of digital collage. Ryan Sneider has created mash-ups by combining images from various sources, in this case photographs from Life magazine’s archives and videogames. The photomontage Duck Hunt / Space Invader shows a bird hunter with a dog, but it is not birds the hunter aims for, instead it is the famous monsters from the “Space Invaders”. Those who played videogames in the 70 – and 80’s will probably remember the game “Duck Hunt”, where you could shoot ducks that flew up out of the reeds and your faithful dog then ran to fetch them. Sneider has combined the two game ideas, one composed of a photo of a true hunter with a dog and the second of digital graphics from the videogame “Space Invaders”. The work discusses the boundaries between the real and digital world. What will happen when these two worlds become more integrated and the borders are increasingly blurred?

Finally we have to mention the artist, who personifies the game, the French street artist who hides behind the pseudonym Space Invader. His main art project consists of invading various cities around the world and putting up small mosaics of characters from videogames as “Space Invader”. For each successful invasion, he collects points, and the whole art project is described on his website as a reality game. Like other forms of street art “Space Invader” is an ongoing battle about the public space. With help of popular culture Space Invader tries to infiltrate the commercial forces that almost have total monopoly on the imagery that appears in our public spaces. The aliens, in form of small mosaics, become a force that can not be defeated when they are spreading all over the world. A important part of the game “Space Invaders” is that you cannot win, you can certainly come to the high score list, but you can never defeat the aliens, they are instead coming in faster and faster each time they are shot down. It’s obviously a dystopian world view we meet in the videogame, but if we look at it from the artist Space Invaders point of view, it’s rather something positive. The art is a force that will not be stopped. The invasion has just begun and the struggle between good and evil continues…

Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Pong. Part 1 by Mathias Jansson.
Videogame appropriation in contemporary art: Tetris. Part 2 by Mathias Jansson.

In the second part of classic videogames that have inspired contemporary artists, we take a closer look at a game that the Cubists probably would have worshiped. Tetris was created in 1984 and then released officially in 1985 by the Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov. In Tetris you have to move and rotate seven different combinations of blocks as they fall into a well. The blocks are called tetrominos and are made of four squares. The goal is to fit the different geometric shapes so that as little empty space as possible remains in the bottom of the well. Tetris is a puzzle game for people who like compact living, and who see it as a sport to pack economically to the holiday.

In contemporary art you can find three main approaches how artists have used Tetris. The Swedish artist Michael Johansson is a good example of the first approach. He has used the basic idea of Tetris to stack objects with different colors and shape. Johansson works with site-specific installations, in which he collects and stacks objects from the near surroundings in perfect symmetry with no spaces. The installations are called Tetris, which is fitting since they are strongly reminiscent of the game.

“For me creating works by stacking and organizing ordinary objects is very much about putting things we all recognize from a certain situation into a new context, and by this altering their meaning. And I think for me the most fascinating thing with the Tetris-effect is the fusion of two different worlds, that something you recognize from the world of the videogame merges into the real life as well, and makes you step out from your daily routine and look at things in a different way.” says Johansson in an interview at Gamescenes.org

Like many other classical videogames, Tetris has been used a lot in public spaces as in graffiti, mosaics and posters on facades and in subways etc. In Sydney, Australia, artists Ella Barclay, Adrianne Tasker, Ben Backhouse and Kelly Robson in 2008 at an exhibition at Gaffa Gallery created an installation where they placed giant illuminated Tetris Blocks in a narrow alley. It looked exactly as if the blocks had fallen from the sky, but the alley had been too narrow so the blocks were stuck halfway down.

The second approach is to move Tetris out from the exhibition room into public spaces and sometimes also create interactive and social art. The artist group Blinkenlights, who are known for transforming large skyscrapers into interactive screens, on various occasions making it possible for the passing public by to play Pong or Tetris on a skyscraper using a mobile phone. In 2002 they made the installation Arcade, which turned one of the skyscrapers in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris to a giant screen showing various animations, where a passersby could also play arcade games like Tetris.

The artist group Lummo (Carles Gutierrez, Javier Lloret, Mar Canet & JordiPuig) created in Madrid in early 2010, a Tetris game in which four people have to cooperate to play it. The first step for the participations was to create the Tetris blocks and after that they had to work together to place on right position in the well which was projected on a wall. In Both cases, Blinkenlights and Lummo are creating public meeting places with social interaction where the videogame is used as an interface.

The third approach is changing the game itself and creates new versions of the game which discuss the game idea. The artist group version [url=http://www.tetris1d.org/]1d Tetris[/url], is a one-dimensional Tetris where the blocks consist of four vertical squares falling into a well that is just one block wide. Since the blocks always fill the well the players do not have to do anything to score points. The basic idea of the falling blocks still remains in the game, but in a one-dimensional world there is no longer any difficulty, the game is reduced to a very monotonous and predictable puzzle game.

In First Person Tetris the artist David Kraftsow combines the perspective from the popular first person shooter genre (used in war and action games) with the ordinary puzzle game. In Kraftsows variant you see the game from a first person perspective so when you spin the blocks, it is not the individual blocks that are spinning around but instead the whole screen. Just by using a new perspective in the game has Kraftsow created a whole new experience of Tetris. Mauro Ceolin, who has spent many years focusing on the modern emblems on the Internet. In works such as RGBTetris and RGBInvaders he replaces the game’s graphics with contemporary icons and logos. In RGBTetris the blocks that fall down the well are exchanged with logos from Camel, McDonalds, Nike and Mercedes.

The most interesting and most independent among the playable Tetris versions that I have found are made by the Swedish artist Ida Roden. In Composition Grid she has combined her interest in drawing with Tetris. The player can play a game and in the same time create a unique drawing by rotating and changing one of the 216 different creatures that Roden has created, with the Tetris blocks as model. The player can then choose to print out their own game plan with the artist’s signature, and in that way have a unique work of art in there possession.

Tetris, this two-dimensional version of Rubik’s Cube, seems to create a lot of room for artistic experimentation. It just needs some simple changes, or new perspectives, to create a new and interesting interpretations of the game.

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

Some of these new Tetris games can be found at these addresses:
www.rgbproject.com/RGBtetris/RGBtetris.swf
www.tetris1d.org
www.firstpersontetris.com
www.idaroden.com/composition.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between July 27th and August 29th, 2010, the eleventh edition of the FILE festival is taking place in Sao Paulo (Brazil), at several locations along the popular Paulista Avenue. After a decade of existence, this veteran festival, which spreads over several cities in Brazil (including Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre) as well as other international locations, has introduced for the first time its own award: the FILE PRIX LUX. With a total amount of approximately 120,000 euros, distributed in three categories, the prize is unprecedented in the continent and has received, on this first edition, 1,235 registrations from 44 countries.

Yet this award is not the only remarkable aspect of this year’s festival, which stands out for being particularly accessible to the general public. On the one hand, the exhibitions, performances and workshops as well as the symposium have no entrance fees, and therefore there have been many visitors, most of all young people who line up every day to experience the interactive installations at the FIESP-Ruth Cardoso Cultural Centre. On the other hand, the festival organizers, Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto, have developed this year a project that takes digital art to the Paulista Avenue by placing several interactive artworks at different locations in the public space. Finally, even the FILE PRIX LUX has been open to the interaction with the public by introducing a popular vote category and an online voting system which was accessible between May and June. This openness sets a good example of how media art festivals can engage the general public to approach this somewhat ignored form of art.

FILE PRIX LUX

In general terms, the award categories at media art festivals have been subject to change as the creative uses of technology evolved during the last decades. The FILE PRIX LUX has the advantage of being created at a time in which it can be relatively safe to set up a few broad categories that cover most of the forms of combining art and technology. Only three categories have been established: Interactive Art (which usually refers to objects and installations that respond to inputs from the viewer/s), Digital Language (related to the festival’s title and which embraces any artwork that deals with language, narrative, code or text in a generative or interactive manner) and Electronic Sonority (the category assigned to any artwork in which the production or manipulation of sound is a key element). These three categories prove to be comprehensive, as shown by the diversity of the projects distinguished with a prize or an honorary mention: immersive interactive installations, musical performances, urban interventions, bioart pieces, a collectively created machinima movie and even an iPhone app are among this year’s FILE PRIX LUX awardees.

In the Interactive Art category, the winners are Ernesto Klar for Relational Lights (1st prize) and Kurt Henschläger for Zee (2nd prize). Both present immersive environments in which light and space are key elements, although the interaction is totally different. Klar’s work invites the viewer to interact with two projected geometric drawings inspired by the work of Lygia Clark. In a hazy dark room, the viewer sees two T-shaped projections of white light on the ground, which form a three-dimensional space which reacts to the visitor’s presence. The interaction is playful and really beautiful in its simplicity, whilst also limited in time: after a few minutes, the projections suddenly stop reacting to the user’s movements and reconfigure themselves in a new shape. This abrupt interruption is consciously introduced by the artist in order to remind the viewer that the artwork has a life of its own. In contrast, Henschläger’s Zee takes place mostly in the mind of an audience exposed to an overdose of audiovisual stimuli in a foggy room. Continuing the experience of his acclaimed performance FEED, this time the artist allows the viewer to walk around the space and have a more meditative sensory experience.

The Electronic Sonority category has brought together several outstanding works, among which Jaime E. Oliver’s Silent Percussion Project and TERMINALBEACH’s Heartchamber Orchestra have been distinguished with the 1st and 2nd prize, respectively. In both projects the human body is incorporated in a novel form in the creation of music, the sound being produced, moreover, not simply by direct inputs but by complex interactions in a constant flow of data. Oliver’s instruments convert the shapes created by the performer’s hands into streams of data that generate, in turn, different sounds. These sounds are not always the same, as could be the case in a traditional instrument, but are changed by the variables established in previous interactions. Thus, Oliver does not simply create a new form of interacting with an instrument but rather a new form of creating music. In a similar way, the [i]Heartchamber Orchestra[/i] project developed by TERMINALBEACH (Erich Berger and Peter Votava) explores a form of creating music based on a feedback loop in which the performers are writing and following the score at the same time. As the artists state, in their project “the music literally comes from the heart”: a network of 12 independent sensors record the heartbeats of the musicians in an orchestra and sends the data to a software that generates a musical score in real time. The musicians play the score as it is displayed on the laptops in front of them, while their heartbeats set the notes in a continuous cycle in which music and performer constantly influence each other.

Digital Language is certainly the broadest category of this FILE PRIX LUX, its awardees being quite dissimilar in the formats they use and the objectives of their respective projects. The organizers define this category as including “all research and experiments in the ambit of the multiple disciplines that use digital media”, and the winners exemplify how diverse these disciplines can be. The 1st prize winner, Tardigotchi by the artists collective SWAMP (Douglas Easterly, Matt Kenyon and Tiago Rorke) is a bioart project that sets a critical comparison between artificial and real life. A nicely designed, steam punk-inspired device hosts, on the one hand, a tardigrade, a microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length, along with a robot arm that injects a substance that feeds the creature and a heating lamp that provides warmth. On the other hand, a digital display shows the virtual avatar of this tardigrade, with which the user can interact. Humorously referencing the popular Tamagotchi toy, the artists create a link between the avatar and the real creature: when the user presses the button to feed the avatar, the device inserts real food in the environment of the tardigrade; when an email is sent to the digital creature, a heating lamp gives warmth to the microorganism. Thus, interacting with the virtual pet has consequences in a real living being. This brings our attention into what we can consider alive and how we emotionally attach to artificial creatures while at the same time we undervalue the existence of other living beings. On a different approach, the 2nd prize winner, Hi! A Real Human Interface, by the collective Multitouch Barcelona (Dani Armengol, Roger Pujol, Xavier Vilar and Pol Pla), proposes a more human relationship with technology. A video presents the concept developed by this interaction design group of a different GUI in which a real person is displayed as impersonating the computer. Common interface elements are replaced by handmade physical objects which remind the aesthetics of a video by Michel Gondry. The result is a playful form of interaction in which simple operations such as checking email or upgrading the operating system are shown as actions carried on with real objects by a person inside a box. The proposal is engaging and certainly sets a departure from the old desktop concept, yet it remains unsure to what extend this type of interaction can be applied in a real operating system.

Exhibitions, performances and symposium

The works that obtained a Vesper statuette (symbol of the FILE PRIX LUX award) along with the also outstanding Honorary Mentions are exhibited at the FIESP-Ruth Cardoso Cultural Centre in a group show that also includes FILE Media Art, a selection of more than 70 works that can be accessed on several computers, as well as a selection of videogames and machinima films. The exhibition is thus richer in content than it would seem at first sight, as the space is divided in numerous sections that conceal several installations which demand (as usual) almost total obscurity. The artworks are well presented, although at times the sound from one installation invades the others, and there are no wall labels that inform the viewer about the concept of the piece or the way to interact with it. The latter, much-discussed issue is quite important, since the info-trainers cannot explain the artworks to every visitor, and quite often this entails that some people may not interact with the pieces or worse, start smashing buttons or interfering projections blindly in the hope of modifying them. Despite this fact, the exhibition has proven to be very successful during the first week of the festival, with a steady flow of visitors who showed a profound interest in the artworks.

A part of the exhibition is devoted to the FILE MACHINIMA section, curated by Fernanda Alburquerque, who selected over 40 works. Among these is the award winner in the Popular Vote category, War of Internet Addiction, by Corndog and the Oil Tiger Machinima Team from China, a 64-minute movie collectively created by players in the MMORPG War of Warcraft. More than mere entertainment, this film has been created as a form of protest against the Chinese authorities’ attempt to control the access and commercial benefits derived from the WoW game, which is extremely popular in the country. The film has had 10 million views since January 2010 and despite being available only in Chinese, it has been the favorite work of those who participated in the online voting system of the FILE PRIX LUX. Besides this feature film, other short films explore the possibilities of building narratives in virtual environments such as Second Life and videogames such as Half Life 2, Eve Online or Shadow of the Colossus.

In addition to the main exhibition, the FIESP Cultural Centre hosts a series of performances and screenings. Under the title Hypersonica, the festival presented a series of digital music performances, among which where the two winners of the FILE PRIX LUX in the Electronic Sonority category. FILE DOCUMENTA, curated by Eric Marke, offers in its 5th edition a selection of “rare and new” documentary films, among which Andreas Johnsen’s Good Copy Bad Copy, an interesting exploration of the conflicts between remix artists and copyright owners, or Robert Baca’s Welcome to Macintosh, which records the first years of the history of Apple Computers.

The symposium, hosted by the Instituto Cervantes in Sao Paulo, gathered several experts and artists who presented their explorations in the theory and practice of media art. Among the most interesting contributions were the presentation of Prof. Espen Aarseth on  the aesthetics of ludo-narrative software, and the colloquy of South American digital art, in which Raquel Renno (Brazil), Jorge Hernandez, Ricardo Vega (Chile) and Vicky Messi (Argentina) discussed the current developments in the media art scene in the South Cone.

Interactive Art and the City

Alongside the FILE PRIX LUX, the most outstanding feature of the present edition of the festival is FILE PAI (Paulista Avenida Interactiva), which takes several interactive artworks to the public spaces in the Paulista Avenue. Interactive art offers the possibility of bringing art to the public space in a more efficient and dynamic form than what is usually known as “public art”. As Ricardo Barreto states: “the public environment is not something empty, aseptic and dead, as is the old white cube; on the contrary, it is an environment teeming with life, with multiple interests and multiple behaviors”. Interactive art integrates itself into this environment and is much more apt to relate to a public that is now willing to take an active role. The organizers of the FILE festival have distributed twelve interactive artworks along the Paulista Avenue, at subway stations, inside shopping malls, and even in a bus. The selected artworks include, among others, videogames such as Patrick Smith’s Windosill or the celebrated games of That Game Company, Flower and Flow; VR/Urban’s SMSlingshot, an urban intervention project that allows users to write a message in a custom-made slingshot that incorporates a screen and a keyboard and then send the message to a wall, where it is displayed as a virtual graffiti; Karolina Sobecka’s Sniff, an interactive projection in which a virtual dog reacts to the presence of passersby; the installations of Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti Piso and Infinito ao Cubo, which attracted a large number of people, and the sound piece Omnibusonia Paulista by Vanderlei Lucentini, which is played in a bus as it moves along the avenue, interacting with several points in the itinerary and thus generating a new set of sounds in every trip. These works reveal the possibilities of integrating interactive art in the public space, to the point that, as Ricardo Barreto indicates, “the new paradigm of public art will be the interactive city”. The busy Paulista Avenue is certainly a good location for the creation of an emerging, interactive city.

There is no periphery

In this 11th edition, the FILE festival has achieved a state of maturity. The FILE PRIX LUX, FILE PAI and an estimated 25,000 visitors to date support its claim of being the largest festival of its kind in Latin America, and a steady event that places Brazil in the map of the international digital art scene. In a tightly interconnected world, each region is a node: there isn’t a center and a periphery anymore, there are no colonies. FILE exemplifies how a region can become a powerful node in this network by promoting the most recent developments in art and technology, avoiding obsolete distinctions between North and South and becoming a point of development for the future stages of our digital culture.

‘Living’ is the result of a six month residency at the V&A by Christian Kerrigan – from January to June 2010 – and it is part of The 200 Year Continuum. The 200 Year Continuum is the title of a project by the same artist that explores the relationship between nature and technology.  Interestingly ‘Living’ was exhibited in the same space where it was created: in the digital studio of the V&A. This was a small room with dim light and crowded with rarities. It felt like one was penetrating the secretive and magical space of experimentation of some sort of mad professor.

Once in the space my gaze wandered around a series of oddities. On the right, a table full of raw materials; in the middle of the room, a fish tank with algae floating in high pH waters; on a wall, a real time video projection showing the evolution of the algae; on a different wall, a slide projection showing some drawings; in some shelves, notebooks with notes by the artist; above the sink, chemical products piled up on a shelf; and on each and every window a semi-transparent drawing. No explanations, no titles, nothing. It’s you and the objects. Luckily Christian Kerrigan was always about, meeting visitors and discussing the work.    We started looking at the materials on the table. Christian told us those were unprocessed rocks and crystals that he used as the starting point for his drawings. He scanned pieces of amber, moss, fiber glass, volcanic rock or resin and produced a model using 3D software. Then he manipulated that model to create his drawings and printed them on semitransparent paper. He eventually placed them on the windows of the space. This routine allowed him to explore the different stages of a process that makes real matter and virtual space intermingled. It is a practice that explores where the process of creation begins, and what it does to reality. ”The drawings, he tells us, become extensions of the physical material which I started with.” Although we have become accustomed to discuss the hybridity of our nature-culture, the way Christian carefully interwove materialities and virtualities was very evocative. The fact that the drawings were placed on the windows gave yet another layer of complexity to the mixture. The colours of the printings morphed natural light into a hybrid light turning the atmosphere of the room into a creative and ongoing process.

Next I wondered about that mysterious fish tank in the middle of the room where algae lived (and died) in high pH waters: Encased Nature. Apparently the algae reacted to the elevated pH creating a protective coat that eventually killed them. At the bottom of the tank: a graveyard of coated dead algae showed the consequences. I instantly loved the idea. Again an experiment about the hybridity of natural and controlled habitats. I thought it was a particularly dystopic illustration of the environment we inhabit where control works on the conditions of the environment, dictating the way reality unfolds. This is an emerging tendency in our most-discussed societies of control, what has come to be called soft control. And we could take it even further, and see it as a great illustration of today’s climate of fear. In such a habitat, the threat has become virtual and all-pervasive, it has become poisonous in itself, just like high pH. The nightmare of security measures that this artificially produced environment justifies links quite well to the ‘lethal-protective’ coat. What this allegory leaves out, though, is the power of imagination! The capacity of conditions to be turned around, the potential for intervention and deviation from the pre-programmed chain of (re)actions.   The idea of projecting a live video recording on the wall was to intensify the experience and highlight the importance of mediation. As Christian argued, we are now more used to experience nature through a lens than to experience its presence. However, the quality of the footage seemed to work against the intentions of the artist and rather than intensifying the experience of that enclosed nature, it tended to obscure it. The particular texture that the webcam gave to the recordings turned that hybrid habitat almost into an abstract movie.   On a different corner there was another video projection made out of a series of drawings. Interestingly they had been created using a ‘living technology’ and recorded at a nano-scale. For Living Drawing, the artist had collaborated with Martin Hanczyc from the Department of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Southern Denmark. They had manipulated some protocells that inhabited chemical gradients and reacted to ultraviolet light. When UV light was applied to the fiberglass where these protocells ‘lived’ their motion left traces of colour that were recorded. This technique, although still in its early stages, allowed the artist to ”explore the spontaneous event of drawing by using organic systems”, he told us.   Kerrigan’s rather cryptic exhibition proved to be an inspiring and very personal exploration of the blurring between nature and culture in its absolute physicality. Paying particular attention to the materiality of the creative process, from the composition of the materials used, to the chemistry of the drawing process or to the laws of electromagnetism that inform light in its interaction with his work, his methodologies show a passion for unfolding reality in its many scales. His work is that of someone who’s starting to explore rather than someone who’s making an assertion; it is tentative rather than conclusive, it is interesting for its questions rather than its answers. However, even if sometimes vague, it is at points pleasingly dark and sometimes inspiringly intense.

Introduction:

As media attention wanes, the impact of British Petroleum’s Deep Horizon, off-shore drilling disaster continues to unfold. Artists worldwide respond to this new ecological catastrophe in a group show organized by Transnational Temps, an arts collective exploring the interstices of art, ecology and technology. For Andy Deck, one of the founding members of Transnational Temps and the curator of the show, “After a decidedly unsuccessful round of climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico frames this exhibition of Earth Art for the 21st Century.”

Now hidden from view by BP’s media campaigns and other de facto censoring actions, the images of oil-covered birds struggling to breathe and fly, oil and dispersant-coated fish, dolphins and whales washing up dead while most sink to the ocean floor, have all but vanished. Partially filling the void are the artists showing here who are recreating topographies: mapping the course of a deadly shadow over our shores and waters; and reinterpreting the sea, its rising levels and largesse, before the vicissitudes of man and nature. Transnational Temps.

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Spill >> Forward by Transnational Temps describes itself as an Online Exhibition. It is a website containing images and other media on the theme of oil spills. Some of the images were shown at the MediaNoche gallery from July 30th – November 19th, 2010, with works added or removed so it isn’t just an online catalogue of a meatspace show.

The front page of the site warns that you’ll need a browser that supports HTML5 video and audio, and states that you can view it using patent-free media codecs. From a Free Software and Free Culture point of view this is excellent, your ability to view the art is not restricted by anyone else’s technological or legal machinations. This is also good from an artistic point of view. The software used to view the art can be run and maintained by anyone, making it more accessible, exhibitable and archivable. But this freedom doesn’t extend into the work itself. some of the art uses proprietary software, and none is under a free Creative Commons licence.

The image on the front page, or possibly the image exhibited at the entrance to the exhibition, is not advanced HTML5 video or canvas tag animation but an animated GIF. A Muybridge-ish series of still images of a pelican in flight flickers rapidly up and down as it descends behind an iridescent oil slick that solarizes the bottom half of the image. It’s an effective image in itself, a visually and net.art-historically literate statement that also serves to set the stage for the rest of the show.

This is clearly a politically motivated exhibition, with the theme of the exhibited art centred on a specific historical event (the Deepwater Horizon disaster). Oil spill and petrol station imagery dominates . The resulting art varies from cooly ironic asethetics (Ubermorgen), photo and video journalism (Guillermo Hermosilla Cruzat, S.Slavick & Andrew E.Johnson, Chris Dascher, Adrian Madrid), agitprop (Eric Benson, Geoffrey Michael Krawczyk, Alyce Santoro, Russ Ritell, Terri Garland, Patrick Mathieu), photography(Jessica Eik, Sabina Anton Cardenal), painting(Jessie Mann), collage(Ume Remembers), performance art(Graham Bell), interactive multimedia (Gavin Baily, Tom Corby, Jonathan Mackenzie, Chris Basmajian, Matusa Barros, Mark Cooley), augmented reality (Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking) and drawing (Cristine Osuna Migueles, Adrienne Klein, Jesus Andres, Sereal Designers) to video and audio art (Irad Lee, Luke Munn, Gene Gort, Tim Geers, Gratuitous Art Films, Alex George, Collette Broeders, Fred Adam and Veronica Perales, Virginia Gonzalez, Henry Gwiazda, Maria-Gracia Donoso, Jeremy Newman).

This is a lot to take in but the diversity of the work is a strength rather than a weakness, building a broad and visceral response to the Deepwater disaster. Verbal responses to the disaster from politicians seem unconvincingly nationalistic and corporate in comparison. It might seem hypocritical for artists to criticise the source of the energy that feeds us and allows us to make new media art. But we are trapped in that system, and we must be free to criticise it.

Politically inspired artworks have a difficult history, tending to be either bad politics or bad art. The art in Spill >> Forward is excellent, though. Some has a more direct message than others. Again the diversity of the exhibition plays a positive role here. The immediacy of the agitprop images doesn’t need art historical baggage to be effective, but that immediacy provides a social context for the more contemplative or abstract works. The more contemplative or abstract works don’t hammer home a simple political message but they provide an aesthetic context for the more direct images. They work very well together.

Some of the pieces in the show are clearly illustrations or recordings of work, some are electronic media that can be played on a computer, some are clearly designed to be experienced specifically through a computer system. If you removed the political theme of the show it would still be a visually (and audially) and conceptually rich cross-section of contemporary art. I was going to write “digital art” there but the show includes painting, drawing, performance, and other analogue or offline media recorded digitally for presentation online. The celestial jukebox is hungry.

If I had to pick out just a few pieces from the show I’d say that I was struck by the sounds of Luke Munn’s Deepwater Suite, by the visuals of Ubermorgen’s DEEPHORIZON, by the monochrome images and text of Terri Garland’s photography, by the video mash-up of Colette Broeders’ Breathe and by the critical camp of Graham Bell’s Radical Ecology. I think my favourite is Mark Skwarek and Joseph Hocking’s “The Leak in Your Home Town”, an iPhone app that uses the BP logo as an Augmented Reality marker to super-impose a 3D animation of the Deepwater leak over live video of your local BP petrol station. It is art that could only be made now, technologically, aesthetically and socially.

The aesthetic and conceptual competence of the artistic responses to the environmental and human crises of the oil spills in Spill >> Forward make the case for art still being a relevant and capable answer to society’s need to make sense of unfolding events. Art can still provide a much-needed space for reflection, and Spill >> Forward creates just such a space in a very contemporary way.

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

Hedva Eltanani

HTTP Gallery is pleased to host LAB4 by Hedva Eltanani, an exploration of communication between two places using streaming media and web applications. It is another step in a series of LABs that explore digital technology and audience interaction. It is part of Heltanani’s research on digital performance and the way it affects audience experience.

LAB4 is a game that challenges the audience to bend the boundaries of space, interaction and intimacy. The two locations, HTTP Gallery in London and The Poly Centre in Falmouth, are linked via live-feed technology, using webcams and web applications. Eltanani will lead a series of activities, such as ‘truth or dare’, which challenges elements of group dynamics and technology – the aim is to engage the two audiences and help participants bond within each group.

How intimate will it go? The participants are invited to deepen the connection by keeping their community active using web applications.

BE PART OF THE EVENT IN LONDON

Doors open at 8:30pm

More info and documentation :
http://arthubfalmouth.blogspot.com/
http://vs4rslab.wordpress.com/

Featured image: People watching and being watched across virtual space

Alejo Duque, Kathrin Guenter, Graham Harwood, Martin Howse, Petr Kazil, Jonathan Kemp, Martin Kuentz, Tom McCarthy, Christian Nold, Nick Papadimitriou (tbc), John Rogers (tbc), Karen Russo, Gordan Savicic, Suzanne Treister, Danja Vasiliev, Ryan Jordan

http://psychogeophysics.org/

Playing Hard: Urban Art Games of Summer 2010.

Not long ago, urban games were a kind of novelty. Some grew out of the street performance tradition of live theater. Some came from gamers who were involved in tabletop RPG and wanted to experiment with live reenactment. Others were produced by media artists as a way of experimenting with new technologies like GPS and text messaging. But along with these approaches to play, and at times learning from their carefree attitude towards entertainment, there grew another tradition of the urban game, a tradition of using the city focusing on exploration, and as a specific kind of critique. At its worst, the artist produced street game replicates of hollow self-promotion, through corporate, sponsored seasonal festivals. But just as experimental art can involve an analysis of mainstream art, the urban game can embody a palatable critique of the routines of city systems, including the deadening routines of metropolitan life and some of the large scale mechanisms of corporate capitalism.

These kinds of games echo the spirit of the Situationist International, which called on artists to create alternate experiences through the construction of situations, psychogeography, and the use of play as a form of critical thinking. Urban games can also remind us of Hakim Bey and his idea of a Temporary Autonomous Zone by using goals, rules, and play with the creation of the ‘magic circle’, a world inside a world, as a method of directing public imagination towards an alternative presence, a way of acting and existing as an independent community within a larger, more repressive reality, even if only momentarily. Urban games also continue the Fluxus idea of the ‘happening’, a participatory media form in which audiences support artists, moving beyond the role of observers of performance to become collaborators in events. With the urban games season about to begin, this review takes a look at how several groups, either consciously or at times not so consciously, have interpreted these traditions for summer 2010.

In New York, the much loved Come Out and Play Festival will run from June 4th through June 6th, with events scattered throughout the city borough of Brooklyn. Games include playground mods, GPS exploits, extreme sports, narrative quests, and massively multiplayer scavenger hunts. The festival hosts about forty game designers from around the world and about two thousand people will attend. Executive producer Greg Trefry says COaP strives to be entertaining and is not so much concerned with philosophy as it is with place: “Where the festival is located each year is actually really important to us. We look for interesting parts of the city to experiment on and use as the stage for the festival. So we’ve played everywhere from big anonymous urban areas like Times Square to now more family oriented locales like Park Slope.”

Still, the designers of COaP seem to have a way of engulfing serious issues with comedy and encouraging people reclaim neglected parts of the city by giving them a second look. Along these lines, Atmosphere Industries of Toronto will present Gentrification, a game that picks up on Brooklyn’s ongoing housing conflicts by asking players to assume the roles of real estate developers or neighborhood locals while collecting properties and gentrifying neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Gnarwhal Studios of Baltimore will sponsor ‘Humans vs. Zombies’, a modification of the playground game tag that introduces large groups of strangers to one another by sending players out into the city as the walking dead.. It’s hard to sit in a park, completely shut off from everyone around you, during a two hundred person simulation of a zombie attack. Also part of COaP, New York’s Crux Club will confront community fears of toxic contamination through their game ‘It Lurks in Gowanus’, a hide-and-seek mod that asks participants to track down a creature who has ominously escaped from legendary pollution of the neighborhood’s Gowanus Canal.

Although he agrees that all urban game events take some kind of cue from historical antecedents like the Situationist International or Fluxus, producer Trefry resists making a formal connection between these movements and COaP. Instead, he says, the main concern was and continues to be community building, getting people together in a surprising way and in an unexpected space: “At its heart, the festival is about running around outside and having fun with your friends. It sounds silly, but that’s such an amazing thing to experience.” This goal of community building has caused COaP to inspire other urban games festivals, including the Hide & Seek Festival in London and the igFest in Bristol, and the Steel City Games Fest in Pittsburgh. The organized versus the random, or the juxtaposition of the carefully designed structure of a game with the largely unstructured, seemingly arbitrary activity of ordinary public space continues to be a common interest among COaP design groups, which are likely to include engineers, academics, and urban planners alongside artists and actors.

In San Francisco, the artists of SFZero cite Situationism and Fluxus as fundamental to their practice. The SFZero collective was founded by Ian Kizu-Blair, Sam Lavigne, and Sean Mahan in January 2006. Initially, the group used something like a Fluxus process of writing instructions for happening-like events that teams of other players acted out. Soon, these collaborations became the basis for both an online community and real world urban games network that now include over five thousand players. Through the SFZero website, participants initiate events by challenging other participants to ‘Eat a food that frightens you’, or ‘Go to a street corner of your choosing and wait for something fantastic to happen.’ SFZero seems to agree with classic Situationist objectives. A good game shifts awareness, Kizu-Blair says, changing the city for the people who play: ‘Oftentimes the players report that they have a completely different experience of the urban environment as a result of playing and go to places in their city where they have never been before. There is a cinematic quality whereby players live out experiences that normally exist only in spy movies – chases down dark alleys, chance meetings, etc.’ Typical SFZero tasks range from exploring overlooked locations in the city to taking a chance on meeting new people.

As fantastic as some of these instructions sound, and as important as the Internet is to SFZero’s success, Kizu-Blair says it is essential that some productions have a real world component: ‘As people become disenchanted with eight plus hours per day of screen time, they are increasingly gravitating towards hybrid activities that bridge the space between the virtual imaginary and the physical real world. These activities blend the safety and simple pleasure of screens with the risk, tension and excitement of physical interaction. More and more, members of our society will seek to escape from escapism towards an ethics of action, to escape from movies to real experiences. They will find that they have little idea how to have real experiences after their time in the imaginary. SFZero is the transition. ‘SFZero offers both real-world excitement and eternal return to the screen, to re-live, re-experience and re-imagine your engagement with reality.’

Recently, Kizu-Blair, Lavigne, and Mahan have begun staging riskier, more elaborate game events like ‘Journey To the End Of Night’, in which runners try to make it through six checkpoints on foot or by public transportation, while avoiding capture by chasers. An early version of Journey actually opened the 2006 season of Come Out and Play. This July, the veteran SFZero player Lincoln will stage a further production of Journey in Los Angeles.

This summer, SFZero will present The Wanderers Union, a game that is loosely based on a French style of self-supported long-distance cycling called randonneuring. To perform Wanderers Union, players get a set amount of time to travel on foot and by public transportation through a series of zones. The idea is to create a single holistic experience of a urban area. The journey intends to juxtapose city spaces in ways that reveal meanings that might otherwise remain unobserved. Players who complete all of the events will progress from an initial four hour wandering to a final twenty-four hour wandering. By using play as a means of gaining understanding, participants will hopefully gain a small degree of mastery over urban space. Kizu-Blair says: ‘It’s like a video game – you level up and gain powers – but you have the added satisfaction of doing something real, and you can include anyone in the experience.’

Back on the East coast, the New York based artist’s collective Opt-In found that what started as a thesis project for an experimental film class unexpectedly became a series of multimedia events that now includes filmmakers, fine artists, dancers, performers, and musicians. Titled ‘ZeroDay Exploits’, these evenings are the work of Bryn Jackson, Sarah Lerner, and Nathaniel Barker, who says the group has adapted the Fluxus concept of “happening” to the 21st century: ‘We create immersive environments in which strangers and friends can form new communities around a project, an idea, or a simple good time. We bring people from all walks of life together by promoting open dialogue and the creative expression of public discourse through a vast array of mediums and the use of public space.’

Past themes for the Opt-In exploits have included faith and technology. This July, the group plans to explore the idea of “home” by inviting guest artists and guests to contribute items and materials that evoke a sensation of home. The goal of this event is to create a sense of rootedness in New York, a city of perpetual resettlement. Another major goal for Opt-In is the deconstruction of the digital experience through live performance. According to Barker: ‘Our focus has always been on participation, so our events offer multiple means for encouraging visitors to get their hands dirty including music, secret actors to stimulate conversation, inclusive performances, and free art materials for spontaneous art creation.’

Also related to Fluxus, but in a gesture that seems more directed towards the Brazilian director Augusto Boal, a group calling themselves Invisible Playground Berlin, uses the urban game as a kind of political visualization. Founded by the artist known as Sebastian Quack Sebastian, this group’s interests lie at the intersection of theater and digital gaming. In ‘F Be I, See I A’, Invisible Playground re-enacted peer-to-peer communication as a giant game of urban capture the flag. Later, in Space Station Escape, the group simulated the release of an alien virus inside a phantom space station supposedly docked underground beneath Alexanderplatz.

Sebastian views missions and rule sets as ‘experience systems’, Games are a kind of participatory appropriation, an interrogative code that is placed over or enacted within an existing urban mechanism. In other words, if you want to get people to think more critically about the way immigration works in your city, you’d design a game that plays with the existing locations, activities, and mechanisms of immigration. In this way, Invisible Playground intends to put forward what otherwise goes unnoticed, tolerated, or is even passively accepted. Sebastian is careful to structure his rule sets in ways that highlight the power structures that arise between groups of players, between players and their environments, or between players and organizers. According to the Schwellenland site: ‘Players must work together and against each other. Over SMS and email you are guided to appointments and arrive at places where you were barred from entry until now. The game asks you to decipher who is legal, who is questionable, who can be trusted, who will trust you, who observes you, what should be ignored, what is critical. You are accompanied by a coach and by referees who left the usual national borders behind long ago and are now in Vienna as refugees without papers. These specialists can help you to master the challenges of being from a developing country. But they have also power to turn on you if you make too many errors.’

Finally, with a practice based in both New York and in Brazil, Adriana Varella is one of the artists behind the AnarkoArtLab, a collective of new-media, visual, dancers and genre benders in residence at the Living Theatre. Each month, Anarko creates a multimedia event that runs as part lab, part performance. This summer, the group plans to become mobile and to bring the Lab to different situations and neighborhoods. ‘We are searching,’ Varella says ‘for a last trace of that most ephemeral and elusive state where only a dusty dystopian haunting may yet remain. ‘Of course,’ Varella says, ‘all of them, Dada, the Situationists, Fluxus they are all our ancestors.’

Meat Space and the World Inside the Machine

Introduction:

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

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

Start of Interview:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DV: Thank you, nice chatting…

—
danja vasiliev
http://k0a1a.net

Other Information:

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

To read Part 1 of this article visit this link:
http://www.furtherfield.org/articles/trajectories-how-reconcile-careerist-mentality-our-impending-doom-part-24

A Rude Awakening

What is curious about the neoliberal project that kick-started in the year of my birth, is that, from the politics of the preceding decade, it appeared history could have taken a very different course. 1972 marked the publication of The Limits to Growth – a study commissioned by the humanitarian think-tank the Club of Rome to estimate the planet’s reserves of natural resources, “including topsoil, fresh water, minerals, forests and oceans” – questioning for the first time what might be the consequences of “another 100 years of exponential growth” (M. Fowkes & R. Fowkes 2009, p.670). The findings of the study were so significant that they are cited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes as a revelation for the future of humanity on a par with Copernicus’s discovery of Heliocentrism: putting our lives on planet earth sharply into perspective. Essentially the report gave us all the information we needed to know: that the way of life modernity had accustomed us to, was not sustainable. The whole system on which our modern liberal democracies were structured was supported by a myth of continual and infinite progress (Kingsnorth & Hine 2009, p.3) and a universal belief that the future will always be better than the past – that it is always within our capable hands to control our destinies.

Rather than take heed of this advice and look for alternative ways of structuring our societies, what actually began towards the end of the seventies, continuing right up to the present day, was the opposite: a complete and utter acceleration of our production and consumption. Post- The Limits to Growth our lives were allowed to continue in a fashion now no longer based on scientific facts, but on fantasy:

“What this… illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market… The relationship between capitalism an eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.” (Fisher 2009, pp.18-9)

We were allowed to continue because we repressed this truth. Our ‘denial’ was constituted by what Freud described as our inability to hear the things which did not fit easily with the way we envisaged ourselves in the world (Kingsnorth & Hine 2009, p.9). We simply blocked out any hint of a hitch or obstacle to our career trajectories and carried-on regardless. Neoliberalism achieved this ‘state of mind’ purposefully – by pacifying us with the things we thought we wanted, that would make us happy, whilst removing the possibility for resistance. The “drive towards atomistic individualisation” (Fisher 2009, p.37) captured in Margaret Thatcher’s dictum “There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women” (M. Thatcher n.d.), plunged us further into our internal solipsistic worlds; from where it became almost impossible to fully empathise with others, to acknowledge the wider consequences of our actions, to see beyond the fantasy – to believe that ‘an alternative’ might be possible. We lost our political ‘agency’ as our liberal democracies became governments-as-administration (Zizek 2009b); appealing to our burgeoning “individual ideals” (Strawson 2008) – to “short-termism” (Brown 2009) – rather than the bigger picture and a realistic long-term plan.

In his recent book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Zizek describes the strategies the neoliberal policy makers employed to continue to maintain this state of denial well into the twenty-first century, explaining how the negative side effects of the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 had been countered by a push on cheap loans to stimulate the housing market. This had simply allowed the US to “continue dreaming” (Zizek 2009a, p.20) for that little bit longer; essentially just prolonging the global crisis until a later date: until now.

Now or Never

“It’s useless to wait – for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of civilisation.” (The Invisible Committee 2009, p.96)

The significance of this point in history cannot be underestimated. The hiatus caused by this latest epic crisis of capital should have given all of us opportunity for self-reflection. The connections between capitalism and environmental catastrophe have once again been starkly illuminated and so too has our own complicity in, and responsibility for, both. As the many climate scientists and campaigners have been telling us, we now only have one decade left – until 2020 – to stabilise and begin to reduce our rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions or we will be unable to avoid hitting the “dreaded two degrees” (Armstrong 2009b) – the tipping point at which we trigger runaway climate change and a rapid irreversible and uncontrollable descent into a new world of which the visions of The Road are not too much of an exaggeration.

Even mainstream politicians hungry for votes are forced to admit that “the age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity” (Cameron 2009). It does seem “useless to wait” (The Invisible Committee 2009, p.96). Now provides the opportunity to radically rethink the way we live, not just in practical terms, but in the way our minds perceive of ourselves in the future; of what we are working ‘towards’. We need to reverse our very ontological foundations so that we become capable of comprehending the opposite of progress – of approaching life in a world where deflation becomes the norm and where rationing is “inevitable” (Fisher 2009, p.80).

As artists – the producers of the non-essential – this rethink seems all the more vital and all the more urgent. It is now our ‘responsibility’ to redefine our roles within this new world, within the “collapse of civilisation” (The Invisible Committee 2009, p.96). As we approach the inevitable challenges of the forthcoming century we can no longer be immune to ethics – we must begin to question what practical function our work can have. And, if we decide that we can still persist in our roles as artists, then we must begin to generate new ways of finding “intrinsic motivation” when our traditional motivational structures of striving towards ‘goals’ such as “recognition and fame” (Abbing 2002, p.82); of creating a ‘legacy’ for ourselves in the future, no longer seem viable.

It is typical in periods of crisis (and opportunity) such as this to look to the past for guidance. Retrospective critique (as used to ‘set the scene’ for this essay) helps us to understand the causes of our current predicament in terms of a greater historical trajectory, to help us make sense of our own lives biographically. The real challenge, however, is in developing the suggestions, ideas and solutions that are essential to help us move on. The proceeding sections of this essay turn to two manifestos from 2009 which attempt just this: Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century by Rasheed Araeen and Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. The intention is to draw together their recurring ideas in order to formulate a ‘plan of action’ which may constitute our ‘new moral code’, and then to examine how some of these ideas are already being put into practice, not just by some artists, but by other more radical elements of society.

Atomised Art World

In September 2009, the international journal of “critical perspectives on contemporary art and culture” Third Text dedicated an entire issue to contemplating a vision of the future of art, in which Araeen’s manifesto is published. In the preface, Araeen and his co-editor Richard Appignanesi give their own diagnosis of the predicament of artists “now as we face a legacy of failures in modern history that endangers the future prospects of humanity” (Araeen & Appignanesi 2009, p.500). Their suggestion is that we have reached a cynical and solipsistic impasse which it is essential to overcome:

“… the very concept of art will have to liberate itself from the two historical limits of containment and legitimisation. One is containment in the artist’s own narcissist ego; the other is art’s dependence for its legitimisation as art on the institutions that facilitate and promote art only as reified commodities placed in museum and marketplace showcases.” (Araeen & Appignanesi 2009, p.500)

Ego and individualism have always gone hand-in-hand with the relatively autonomous role the artist has historically enjoyed within society, however, it appears that these characteristics have only been exacerbated in recent years. Neoliberal ideology has led to a “convergence of artistic and entrepreneurial values” (J. Thatcher 2009, p.5) – flexible, creative and autonomous modes of operating have been co-opted by the business world, just as ‘the careerist mentality’ has been inherited by artists. Recent mainstream television programmes such as School of Saatchi (Priddle 2009) and Goldsmiths: But is it Art? (Kerr 2010), which pit artists’ egos and entrepreneurial skills against one another, show the extent to which these attitudes have become the norm.

The super-competitive environment of the ‘atomised art world’ engenders a survival instinct in artists which causes us, knowingly or not, to make our sole objective the expansion of our curricula vitae. The emphasis is on the development of a “narrative” – on forming a “brand identity” (Prince 2010, p.10), because this presents itself as the most efficient means to the desired ends of “recognition and fame” (Abbing 2002, p.82). Trapped in a perpetual attempt to impress art world institutions, artists inevitably end up feeding them with the art that they think they want rather than stopping to question exactly what they are producing and why.

In a pre-neoliberal world, choosing the role of artist was seen as an alternative to the mainstream: a point of resistance, a political statement even (Walker 2002) – art offered a potential strategy of “opposition to capitalism” (J. Thatcher 2009, p.6). Now as a small component part in this means / end cycle – art – simply acts an instrument to serve the “career ambitions of self-centred artists” – its “significant critical and social function” (Araeen 2009, p.680) disabled in the process. But, at this particular point in our history, art’s power in “subverting the dominant hegemony” (Mouffe 2007) – in creating an ‘alternative knowledge’ – may be its only redeemable function.

Free Our Minds

Araeen’s call for art to be liberated from “containment and legitimisation” (Araeen & Appignanesi 2009, p.500) foresees the unprecedented power he believes our ideas could have if completely detached from capitalism:

“It is in fact artistic imagination, not art objects, which, once freed from the self-destructive narcissist ego, can enter this life and not only offer it salvation but put it on the path to a better future.” (Araeen 2009, p.683)

He goes as far as to suggest that artists should “abandon their studios” and “stop making objects” (Araeen 2009, p.684). He urges us to reconfigure our roles to such an extent that our creative skills are put to use in conceptualising real-life practical projects, such as creating solar-powered desalination plants, which simultaneously address the two imminent global challenges of energy and freshwater shortages. Art should renounce its “freedom from function which constitutes its autonomy” (Prince 2009, p.7), leave the world of the ‘non-essential’ and begin to offer us with ‘practical solutions’ to real life problems.

Outside the Bubble

Whereas Araeen’s manifesto (inline with the desperate pleas of environmental campaigns such as 10:10) gives a sense that something can be done to avert ‘our impending doom’. There is, however, another concurrent school of thought which encourages us to embrace our fate. Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto was published in 2009 by writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, as a vision of the future of literature in the new form of “uncivilised art” (Kingsnorth & Hine 2009, p.13). It takes the pessimism of beliefs such as those of James Lovelock: that humans are too stupid to prevent climate change (Hickman 2010, p.12) and challenges us to invert these to become a positive creative force:

“We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.” (Kingsnorth & Hine 2009, p.19)

The key is in developing a sense of objectivity about the systems in which we are enmeshed. We are invited to “stand outside the human bubble”, to “tug our attention away from ourselves and to turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds”: essentially to put “civilisation – and us – into perspective” (Kingsnorth & Hine 2009, p.13).

Once we are able to shift our attitude from that of hubris to that of humility, it becomes easier to accept that resources are indeed finite; civilisations do collapse and that species, including our own, become extinct. With this finitude as a certainty, the petty squabbling of the art world and the insignificance of the ‘goals’ we have been striving towards become evident. We can be liberated from our career plans; from the careful crafting of our own personal legacies and can refocus our attentions on the immediacy of the present (Bey 1994), for it is perhaps here where we should learn to find meaning and happiness.

To read Part 3 of this article visit this link: http://www.furtherfield.org/articles/trajectories-how-reconcile-careerist-mentality-our-impending-doom-part-34
 

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References:

Abbing, H., 2002. Why Are Artists Poor?: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Araeen, R., 2009. Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Third Text, 23(5), 679-84.

Araeen, R. & Appignanesi, R., 2009. Art: A Vision of the Future. Third Text, 23(5), 499-502.

Armstrong, F., 2009a. Franny Armstrong: If you’re not fighting climate change or improving the world, then you’re wasting your life. The Guardian, 8.

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