First published on the occasion of the onlnine exhibition
Beyond Interface
http://www.yproductions.com/beyondinterface/
for Museums and the Web
April 22, 1998
http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/beyond_interface/index.html
s t e v e . d i e t z b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e :
net art and Art on the Net II
Net art. The name is equivocal. A good name. It leaves open all the questions and asks them anyway. Is this an art form, a new genre? An anthology of valued activity conducted in a particular arena defined by display on a computer monitor? The kind of net activity made by a special class of people--artists--whose works are exhibited primarily in what is called "the art world"--ARTISTS' NET ACTIVITY? An inspection of the names in the online catalogue gives the easy and not quite sufficient answer that it is this last we are considering, ARTISTS' NET ACTIVITY. But is this a class apart? Artists have been making net pieces for scarcely ten years--if we disregard one or two flimsy hacker jobs and Ivan Sutherland's 1962 "Sketchpad"--and net activity has been a fact of gallery life for barely 5 years Yet we've already had group exhibitions, panels, symposia, magazine issues devoted to this phenomenon, for the very good reasons that more and more artists are using the net and some of the best work being done in the art world is being done on the net. Which is why a discourse has already arisen to greet it. Actually two discourses: one, a kind of enthusiastic welcoming prose peppered with fragments of communication theory and McLuhanesque media talk; the other, a rather nervous attempt to locate the "unique properties of the medium." Discourse 1 could be called "cyberscat" [!] and Discourse 2, because it engages the issues that pass for "formalism" in the art world, could be called "the formalist rap." [emphasized words substitutions]
--David Antin*
David Antin's seminal essay about video is instructive for several reasons. Most obviously, the way that "net" or "net activity" can be so cleanly substituted for "video"--more than 25 years after the essay first appeared--should give us some pause in our revolutionary fervor.
Video has become, as John Baldessari once predicted, like a pencil.
--David A. Ross
Besides Antin's cyberscat and formalist rap Discourses, another thread to follow would be that of the net (or video) as merely another tool. In the post-studio art world, what matters is not so much which media an artist uses, but what she does with them. And there can be little doubt that the Net will increasingly find its way into site-based, art installations. But what is most instructive about Antin's essay is not so much his defense of video art per se as his exploration of "the Other Thing---television." "Television haunts all exhibitions of video art," he wrote. By and large, the "distinctive features" of video that Antin argues for are not from the formalist/essentialist camp or the utopian revolution camp or even the just-another-flinty-arrowhead-for-the-quiver camp. They are defined in relation to the overwhelming "presence" of the boob tube. Is there a similar defining presence that can help formulate the distinctive features of net art? What haunts net art?
Spy vs. Spy: net art and net.art
Net.art can in no way be considered a systematic doctrine; it does, however, constitute a school.
--Vuk Cosic
The term net.art for instance for many of the practioners is a joke and a
fake. Somehow it has been taken seriously though.
--Heath Bunting
I don't really have an opinion about the name game and in the end probably agree with Josephine Bosma who wrote: "I like the term net.art, especially because of that little dot in it."
--Robert Adrian
It is important to acknowledge at the outset that b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e occurs in an incredibly rich context around net art that has grown up at least since Vuk Cosic organized an exhibition at the Net.art per se conference in 1996. Recently, ZKP4 was published, an online publication "filter" of nettime discussion list archives. It includes extensive articles and discussion about net.art and is by far the best entry into this topic.
Nevertheless, while acknowledging that there is no systematic "net dot art" doctrine and that any notion of a "school" is mitigated by the reach and flux of the Net, there are many artists creating Net-specific art who are not particularly associated with net.art. More to the point, the "net art" of b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e ' s subtitle is neither congruent with or in opposition to net.art. Many net.artists are represented in the exhibition as are many others. For the purposes of this exhibition, "net art" is the more generic term we use to identify work for which the network is a necessary and sufficient condition, and "net.art" is the term we use to in association with the artists more or less self-identified with it.
Necessary and Sufficient
b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e ' s approach to what constitutes net art can perhaps be best defined as "exploratory." In the call for submissions, I wrote "b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e is an online exhibition of juried and curated net art projects for which the Net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/experiencing/participating.
As might be expected with a term like "necessary," we quickly ran into the fact that much of the work we were interested in could be run off a local set up. You could, in theory, mail disks of these programs to anyone that wanted them, instead of delivering the work via the Net. We could have gone on like this for a long time.
Instead, we combined a modified Duchampian philosophy--it's net art if the artist intends it to be--with an end-user perspective--no matter how integral the Net was to the project, if a network connection alone wasn't sufficient to [insert your definition of an art experience here], then it didn't make it. The prime regret with this latter condition is that it precluded many fascinating, online, real-time, performative experiences that don't really work asynchronously. You had to be there then, and we didn't see a huge difference between documentation of such an event and documentation of a painting exhibition, although the two original events are obviously very different.
This is how it worked in practice. Getting back to Antin, there was also a theoretical construct lurking in the background.
I have two things to say. First, when we talk about video art,
that this notion is obsolete, but look, what happens here in Liverpool
and Manchester, is a big festival of specific video art. It
still brings together a lot of money, a lot of people and a lot of attention.
And talking about net art in all these discussions people write net.art.
It much more reminds of a name of a file rather then a new -ism.
And I think its very important because this term net.art includes
a lot of self irony about the very name. Also when we talk about net.art
and art on the net some people say that we should get rid
of the very notion of art and that we have to do something that is not
related to the art system, etc. I think it´s not possible at all,
especially on the net, because of the hyperlink system. Whatever you do
it can be put into art context and can be linked to art institutions,
sites related to art.
--Alexei Shulgin
I feel it's time now to give a light on the origin of the term - "net.art".
Actually, it's a readymade. In December 1995 Vuk Cosic got a message, sent via anonymous mailer.
Because of incompatibility of software, the opened text appeared to be practically unreadable ascii abracadabra. The only fragment of it that made any sense looked something like:
[...] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 [...]
Vuk was very much amazed and exited: the net itself gave him a name
for
activity he was involved in! He immediately started to use this term.
After few months he forwarded the mysterious message to Igor
Markovic,
who managed to correctly decode it. The text appeared to be pretty
controversial and vague manifesto in which it's author blamed traditional
art institutions in all possible sins and declared freedom of
self-expression and independence for an artist on the Internet.
The part of the text with above mentioned fragment so strangely
converted by Vuk's software was (quotation by memory):
"All this becomes possible only with emergence of the Net. Art as a
notion becomes obsolete...", etc.
So, the text was not so much interesting. But the term it undirectly
brought to life was already in use by that time .
Sorry about future net.art historians - we don't have the manifesto any
more. It was lost with other precious data after tragic crash of Igor's
hard disk last summer.
I like this weird story very much, because it's a perfect illustration
to the fact that the world we live in is much richer than all our ideas
about it.
.....moscow wwwart centre......
http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart
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The meta medium
Computers both produce the material we experience and allow us to access it. The computer is a language machine. ... Turing simply defined the computer as a machine that could be any machine. It could be this because it was programmable--as such, operating symbolically upon symbolic things. This universe of symbolic forms includes the computer itself, and the recursive aspect of the medium is what leads to its real technological and therefore social power. To paraphrase Turing, the computer is the medium that can be any medium.
--Simon Biggs**
What haunts net art is only partly the mutability that underlies it. Unlike with video, there is no Big Brother TV casting a shadow over the Net. If the computer is the meta medium, then the Net is the ubiquitous carrier. It is embedding itself in every aspect of our lives, from toasters to TV, and it is infecting every major industry, from electricity to Hollywood. Combine an infinitely malleable medium with an omnivorous instantiation and you have something that may be unique but which is not easy to pin down: net art.
Follow the Leader: Artists
The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explored.
--Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds
In Dyson's terms, net art practice is a tool-driven revolution. Artists create new things that they would like to explore. b e y o n d i n t e r f a c e follows the trail, rather than attempting to blaze it. A "map" of the results might have the following nodes. (In a 2-D, linear format, it is hard to avoid implications of pigeon holing and hierarchy, but that is not the intent. Fluidity, hybridity, multiplicity all characterize much of the best art on the net.
While nerd culture acknowledges the starting point of the human condition, it's hope is not expression but experience. For the new culture, a trip into virtual reality is far more significant than remembering Proust.
--Kevin Kelly, "The Third Culture"
net.art
The net.artists are the most rigorous about the necessity of the net to implement their work. Collaboration, process, open systems. These terms are all descriptive of net.art, as well as being undergirded by some serious theorizing. Comparisons are often drawn to Dada, Fluxus, conceptual art--and always debated. Not unlike the work of these other groups, net.art art is sometimes the hardest to appreciate in terms of our more traditional understanding of art. See, for instance, the discussion engendered among the steering committee by Shulgin's Desktop IS. Identifying specific projects does not give the fullest picture of net.art, and Bunting's irational.org, Shulgin's easylife.org, and other sites that serve some of the specific Homework projects are all important constellations of activity.
Netart functions only on the net and picks out the net or the "netmyth" as a theme. It often deals with structural concepts: A group or an individual designs a system that can be expanded by other people. Along with that is the idea that the collaboration of a number of people will become the condition for the development of an overall system. Netart projects without the participation of external persons are perhaps interesting concepts, but they do not manifest themselves as a collective creativity in the net (Dieter Daniels, http://www.hgb-lepzig.de/
theorie/mailart.htm)
--Joachim Blank
Storytelling
On the one hand, hypertext evangelists like Mark Amerika are proclaiming that yes, hypertext is the "genre of the future," while in The New York Times Laura Miller is savaging Robert Coover and the Brown program that Amerika came out of. Even within the net camp, an artist like Simon Biggs is very clear that "static" hypertext only gives the illusion of dynamic navigation. Yet, the hyperlink is one of the fundamental capabilities of the net. Using it will not go away. Each of these five artists takes advantage of the it to tell their own kinds of stories--and they're fun! Also, don't miss Randall Packer's very informative paean to Grammatron and Jodi.
What's most remarkable about hyperfiction is that no one really wants to read it, not even out of idle curiosity. The most adventurous souls I know, people amenable to sampling cryptic performance art and even those most rare and exotic of creatures, readers of poetry who aren't poets themselves -- all shudder at the thought, for it's the very concept of hypertext fiction that strikes readers as dreary and pointless. Laura Miller, NYT Book Review
Both the term "navigation", and the sense in which it used, represents a narrowing of the possibilities for interactive media. The idea of navigation is primarily founded on a
very traditional notion of what an artwork might be. Fundamentally, the use of this word implies work which is more or less fixed in its content, and through which the
reader can "navigate" in a non-linear fashion. This allows the emergent illusion that the reader is experiencing a dynamic and interactive work. Simon Biggs
Socio-Cultural
Many net projects have a political or social bent. These three are exemplary of a few different directions--which are by no means exhaustive of the myriad possibilities. Crane and Winet's General Hospital is both sophisticated in its understanding of contemporary media culture while being sympathetic and providing practical help for people's health needs. Temple of Confessions, of all the b e y o n d i n t e r f a c e projects, probably comes the closest to being an adjunct to the sited performances and not the other way around, but the way Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes use the Net to gather their materials is instructive and in itself entertaining and revealing. Finally, Hutton skillfully deploys the Net "against" our human (male) nature to actually connect with the viewer about a sometimes boring albeit important aspect of the net--what is the best way (or, in this case, one of the worst ways) to regulate the Net?
Almost all conventional wisdom about digital
culture - especially as conveyed in recent years by journalists,
politicians, intellectuals, and other fearful guardians of the existing
order - is dead wrong. The Internet, it turns out, is not a breeding
ground for disconnection, fragmentation, paranoia, and apathy. Digital
Citizens are not alienated, either from other people or from civic
institutions. Nor are they ignorant of our system's inner workings, or
indifferent to the social and political issues our society must confront.
Instead, the online world encompasses many of the most informed
and participatory citizens we have ever had or are likely to have.
--Jon Katz
Biographical
It is around issues of identity and autobiographical webs that some of the most extraordinary efforts are occurring on the net. Like the net.artists, much of this work may also be more difficult to fit into traditional notions of art. It's always in process. It's not easy to get any distance from it. It's generally very convoluted. No wonder it's perfect for the Web. For the b e y o n d i n t e r f a c e steering committee, these works were also among the mostly hotly discussed, precisely because they tend not to have a single project focus but are truly "sites." In the end, each has such a strong point of view, that we felt they were different than group sites, although there are also strong similarities and some argued vehemently for a broader definition of "net art" that would include such sites as a new art form in themselves. This debate was never resolved.
In the technical sense, the hypomnemata could be account
books, public registers, individual notebooks serving as
memoranda. Their use as books of life, guides for conduct,
seems to have become a current thing among a whole cultivated
public. Into them one entered quotations, fragments of works,
examples, and actions to which one had been witness or of
which one had read the account, reflections or reasonings
which one had heard or which had come to mind. They
constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or
thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for
rereading and later meditation. They also formed a raw
material for the writing of more systematic treatises in which
were given arguments and means by which to struggle against
some defect (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or to
overcome some difficult circumstance (a mourning, an exile,
downfall, disgrace).
From an Interview with Michel Foucault
See Robbin Murphy for more on hypomnemata
Tools
At first it seemed obvious that "tools" like i/o/d 4: "the web stalker" and the plumb design thinkmap/visual thesaurus were not art projects. It is also here, however, that the notion of "beyond interface"--of blurring the distinctions between art and design, art and engineering--came into play the most strongly. See in particular Susan Hazan's essay "Are the Engineers Holding hands with the Artists?" about these two projects.
It is refreshing to find new visual metaphors of data interpretation of the web. In b e y o n d i n t e r f a c e I feel that these two Web projects are doing just that. Looking beyond the surface of the web in order to redefine the building blocks of the networked environment, the raw matter that is part of the new interface.
--Susan Hazan
Digital Objects
So much of the art world is oriented around objects--paintings, sculptures, photographs. What is an object on the net? There is a technical definition, of course, which Biggs deploys quite elegantly in his description of "interactive art." Another example is John Simon's java applet, Every Icon. Essentially, it is a set of instructions--not unlike Sol Lewitt's or Christo's, perhaps--that are carried out in standardized ways--i.e. the java programming language. John even writes ownership of the applet into the code, so that while it is "infinitely" and perfectly reproducible as a digital object, it also carries with it, always, knowledge of its ownership. A boon for future art historians, perhaps.
An object is composed of both the data that describes it and the code that will operate upon it. As such, every object has within it everything it needs to go
about its business. If an object is to be drawn it will draw itself. It will contain its own code for how to do that; it will not need to refer to or be acted upon by
an external program.
--Simon Biggs
Performance
Real-time performances that use the Net, such as the Franklin Furnace series or Adrift are an increasingly significant strand of net-based art. For b e y o n d i n t e r f a c e however, we decided that after-the-fact documentation of even extraordinary net-based efforts did not necessarily make for interesting net art (per se).
Analog-Hybrid
On the other hand, both Goldberg's and Fujihata's projects, even though--actually because--they have a real world component, they are extraordinarily moving experiences via the Net. It seems likely that with efforts like these showing the way, we will not have only "real live video" web cams to surf, in the future. Quite the contrary. As cost and size of digital devices that can interact with the analog world drops and their capabilities increase, the possibilities for artistic invention seem limitless.
Cheap, ubiquitous, high-performance sensors are going to shape the coming decade. In
the 1980s, we created our processor-based computer "intelligences." In the 1990s, we networked those
intelligences together with laser-enabled bandwidth. Now in the next decade we are going to add sensory
organs to our devices and networks. The last two decades have served up more than their share of digital
surprises, but even those surprises will pale beside what lies ahead. Processing plus access plus sensors will
set the stage for the next wave--interaction. By "interaction" we don't mean just Internet-variety interaction
among people--we mean the interaction of electronic devices with the physical world on our behalf. Paul Saffo
Interactive Art
The idea of an autonomous, self-replicating art practice is difficult to even imagine, let alone accept. Nevertheless, both of these projects point toward a strand of net and computer-based art that will not "go away." As our lives, whether we realize it or not, increasingly come to rely on machine-to-machine communication (think of your credit card approval), artists will intervene. These are fascinating projects.
The term interactivity can be used to refer to those works which feature some form of responsiveness to the reader, where that responsiveness causes the content of the
work to be altered. Such an approach is in marked contrast to the unresponsive character of non-linear navigable work. Simon Biggs On Navigation and Interactivity: interactive work
Interfacers and Artificers
There is not much that I know how to say here. For me, the artist team jodi and Piotr Szyhalski are truly digital artisans who speak through the interface with such fluency that it is impossible to imagine them doing the same thing in any other medium. And they create tremendous art.
In Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, the digital artists of the late 21st
century are no longer hyphenated or hybrids. They are simply artificers.
And in Interface Culture, Steven Johnson refers to a similar melding, a
kind of vocation: "The artisans of interface culture . . . have become some
new fusion of artist and engineer--interfacers, cyberpunks, Web
masters--charged with the epic task of representing our digital machines,
making sense of information in its raw form." b e y o n d i n t e r f a c e I
Notes
* David Antin, "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium," Video Art, ed. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, p. 174.
Video art. The name is equivocal. A good name. It leaves open all the questions and asks them anyway. Is this an art form, a new genre? An anthology of valued activity conducted in a particular arena defined by display on a cathode ray tube? The kind of video made by a special class of people--artists--whose works are exhibited primarily in what is called "the art world"--ARTISTS' VIDEO? An inspection of the names in the catalogue gives the easy and not quite sufficient answer that it is this last we are considering, ARTISTS' VIDEO. But is this a class apart? Artists have been making video pieces for scarcely ten years--if we disregard one or two flimsy studio jobs and Nam June Paik's 1963 kamikaze TV modifications--and video has been a fact of gallery life for barely 5 years Yet we've already had group exhibitions, panels, symposia, magazine issues devoted to this phenomenon, for the very good reasons that more and more artists are using video and some of the best work being done in the art world is being done with video. Which is why a discourse has already arisen to greet it. Actually two discourses: one, a kind of enthusiastic welcoming prose peppered with fragments of communication theory and McLuhanesque media talk; the other, a rather nervous attempt to locate the "unique properties of the medium." Discourse 1 could be called "cyberscat" and Discourse 2, because it engages the issues that pass for "formalism" in the art world, could be called "the formalist rap. ** Simon Biggs, "Multimedia, CD-ROM, and the Net," in Clicking In, Lynn Hershman, ed., p. 320.
Links
Robert Adrian net.art on nettime
http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/37.htm
