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Artist Statement While I do not bother myself with discussions of netopia, I am optimistic with regard to contemporary art that our intentions are to update and revise. To cut, paste and edit. To become transgressive 'mixers' of contemporary 'culture'. I like to use the term DJ in an expansive sense of the word inclusive of all media e.g., images, sounds, text and even further and fully: water, air and sex. There has been much talk lately of a new art movement, art for the internet and/or net specific works. I have traveled naively searching for this movement only to re-discover DADA. I enjoy DADA. I enjoy mostly standing on the shoulders of giants. However, I long for that which culls the information acquired by our predecessors and then employs it so as to create 'new' information. New information that not only moves beyond DADA but, also moves beyond our current time and cultural placement(s). I like to think of this type of information not as information at all but instead as indecipherable transmissions. These transmissions are sent from the future and are overwhelming in energy and presence. By this I mean events that provoke a participant at the psychic level as does experience, memory, nostalgia or the presentiment of one's future. Subversion to the totalitarianism of language i.e., the jargon of multi-linked sites, mirrored mockery-type sites, multiple net identities and other 'clever' gestures of many web-works will find their definitive resolve in trend and commerce. These approaches to net art are timely and predictable and will soon take their place in a ever expanding and incorporated lexicon called Postmodernia. It is 1998 and Pan-Capitalism effectively and cohesively utilizes artists as seedlings for an even more profitable future. Possibly many net artists strive for nothing more than proper placement, acknowledgment and understanding in a structure they represent and that in turn so easily can represent them. If this is the case so be it. I do not wish to project a hateful critique of recent net art work by many energetic and capable artists successfully networking toward their own brand of entrepreneurial genius. This text is intended as a callout. Subversion must continue to exist though I am not sure it is still called subversion. Moreover, there is a way to transmit from the future in presence alone non-withstanding form, language or the burden of abstraction and its insistence on process. The web works I have created thus far I acknowledge as research and are at best marginal in achieving the ends I speak of here. I am currently attempting new solutions and / or transmissions. I have and hope to continue creating a series of movements or rather moments the best of which I am sure have not and will never be documented or diminished through article.
from Rhizome list |
Artist Biography Cary Peppermint is a varied media artist who lives and works in New York. He holds an MFA in Art Media Studies from Syracuse University. His works include Scotland's first purely online performance "The Mashed Potato Supper" and "Conductor Number One", an interactive installation and online work conceived as part of the PORT exhibition of digital cultures and most recently exhibited in ISEA ’97. Peppermint's latest project involves a series of online "exposures"; impromtu online performances in various virtual domains using public chat rooms, CU-SEEME and in Real Audio. From "Late 1996" http://www.dreamscape.com/ capepper/xxx/late.html I was carefully cultivated in a trailer park. I remember all things, even if these things have never or not yet occurred. The year I awoke was nineteen seventy three. I stood in the kitchen and addressed my mother as Gloria. "Gloria", I said, "I am going to levitate now." This story would have little significance today, if in fact my feet had remained planted, but this was not the case. To Gloria's disbelief, my body rose far above the nauseous yellow flower print of cracked linoleum. With my back against the ceiling, arms and legs outstretched, I then saw the future, interspersed with the blurred, imitation wood grain paneling of my formative years. The trailer home in which my bones extended was located beside a highway. My formative years were spent standing within the confines of a chain link fence. The fence was constructed to prevent my disassociation with the flesh beneath the wheels of a vehicle in route to destination(s) then unknown. Synchronous with my early victories of cognizance was the underlying supposition that my life beyond the front yard was directly dependent upon the speed to which I travel. Inside the chain link fence was a death that is much more devastating than the cool sedative of inexistence; this particular death burns the living for each day they stand still and neglect or otherwise suppress their potential for movement. My movements have been erratic and clumsy resulting in mild geographical displacement. These movements are crude and inefficient by virtue of the skin and bones. These movements render extraneous designs or rather obstacles which my mind can quickly transgress and transcend...
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