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jodi: '404', 1998 |
UTOPIA
'Interactivity means that you, the viewer, will have to change from being a passive admirer to become an integral participant, directly conscious of this new paradigm on matter and time. There will be no need for rational thinking. The results of all the experiments will soon be disseminated into the Global City, and perhaps art and life will eventually become one.' - Johan Pijnappel 1
'Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology - but by humanising it; by allowing people access to the information tools they need to shape and reassert control over their lives.' - Raindance Corporation 2
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Mark Napier: 'Digital Landfill', 1998 |
These two quotes typify the rhetoric which surrounds media art: high ideals for the use of technology mixed with claims of radical departure from previous practice. The late 1990s are witness to an increasing number of artists delivering work to audiences via the World Wide Web. However, both texts pre-date the Internet as a global mass medium: in 1994, the date of the first quote, Internet usage was estimated at 20 million users in 92 countries 3: the estimate is now 152 million in almost every country 4. The second text, from 1970 refers to information tools - television, video, radio, computers, telephones, fax - which are now converging around the Internet.
Drawn by the potentially large audiences for their work, artists are starting to engage with the issues inherent to the medium. Can artists' efforts to engage with new technologies make an impact now that our perceptions of the web are largely moulded by two American software corporations?
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David Hall: '7 TV Pieces', 1971 |
HYBRIDITY
There are any number of problems and contradictions in making art for the computer network, which is both tool and medium. It can be used in a highly active, creative fashion, but also in a relatively passive way. Whilst new media encompass a wide range of activities and contexts, I am concerned here with art on the web as a screen-based artform, mediated by a standard interface - the browser.
Video is an important reference point, delivered through a similarly uniform filter. The theorising of video and television borrowed largely from film theory and sociological discourse, but the technological differences forced critics to consider issues such as the nature of simulation, access to the medium, the domestic viewing environment. The results were hybrid theories of video and media, not a new paradigm. This approach can also be applied in describing computer networks, which are not uniquely new.
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jodi: 'OSS', 1999 |
ARCHAEOLOGY
Different traditions are manifest in creating art with or for computer media. The computer is a synthesis of existing media, one which can be varied according to artistic emphasis - visual, audio, or literary. When I look at art on the web, I am looking at video: a continuous flow of electronic signals scanned across pixels on a screen, albeit one which I can interact with, communicate with. When I connect to the Net I use a typewriter keyboard to make the computer dial a telephone call, whilst staring at a video monitor. I do not witness the internal workings of the computer nor the data from the Net, but I do see a graphical video representation of these processes.
Computer-specific aesthetics are dominated by conceptual legacies. As an example, a few common metaphors from the personal computer interface: window, browser, surf, mail, desktop, mouse. The conceptual frameworks for software are grounded in a particular view of the non-digital world. Most programming code is based on the English language and Western mathematical notation. This gives every piece of software written a specific historical and cultural background. An awareness of such issues is crucial for art which aims at a critical approach. A useful framework for thinking about the web can be built from examining the development of technologies in video, broadcasting, computers, telephony, audio and mechanical writing.
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Stephen Partridge: 'Sentences', 1988 |
STRATEGIES OF DISCLOSURE
Art starts to address its context through making the viewer aware of the artifice and technology behind what the art appears to say or mean. The artists known as jodi 5 start to get near this, revealing the code intrinsic to the work, and using the programming language Java to play games with the browser software. Mark Napier's Digital Landfill 6 allows audiences to build a layered collage of web 'junk', addressing the information overload and banality of much content on the Net.
The specificity has changed, but the strategies employed by these artists are remarkably similar to those of an earlier generation of video artists. The aim is to disrupt the flow of information being consumed by the audience. David Hall's works for television achieved this by employing an alternative visual grammar, thereby making the audience aware of the constraints of television conventions, and their complicity in the process of constructing meaning on the glass screen. In the same way, jodi and Napier attempt to upset expectations of a seamless, easy web 'surfing' experience. The preoccupation of jodi with malfunction of language, the unravelling of codes, mirrors work by video artists in the 1980s such as Gary Hill and Stephen Partridge. Partridge's Sentences series for television deconstruct linguistic meanings, the contradictions of media semiotics. Constantly evolving syntactic forms resemble hypertext in their fluidity of meaning, and the reliance on the viewer to make links: conceptually rather than by clicking a mouse button.
Certain artists have referenced the video art tradition in web work, notably the Technologies to the People project from irational.org 7 which purports to be a web based collection of video art classics from the past. On trying to view any of the works, a series of warnings ensue, advising that the latest technology is required. These are so highly specified and wide ranging that only the highest level technocrat could be so well equipped. An effective criticism of proprietary video and audio streaming standards on the web, and implicit is a view of video art as an elite practice restricted to a tiny audience.
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Steina & Woody Vasulka: 'Vocabulary', 1973 |
DISAPPEARANCE
'Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction... The cool universe of digitality has absorbed the world of metaphor and metonymy.' - Jean Baudrillard 8
It has been often claimed that art on the web resists assimilation as a static art object in the gallery or museum. Its malleable form and reproducibility will dictate against commodity status. This claim was once made for video art: the failure of artists' television to substantially infiltrate broadcast networks and the medium's eventual incorporation (as video installation) into the art institutions implies that objectification, and thus commodification of artwork, consumes electronic art too.
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Heath Bunting: 'The Internet Beggar', 1996 |
CONTENT/CONTEXT
'There is a certain property of the electronic image that is unique... it's liquid, it's shapeable, it's clay, it's an art material, it exists independently.' - Woody Vasulka 9
This almost infinite plasticity is relevant not just in terms of the making process, and the viewer/user/audience interaction with the work, but also in context. Presently new media exist in two main physical environments: the home (PC, Hi-Fi, games consoles, VCR, broadcasting) and public spaces (cinemas, galleries, museums, shops). There are also a variety of virtual contexts, both individual and social, such as e-mail lists, and IRC chat rooms. It is not so much a question of real versus virtual objects, but perhaps which audience: a mass of atomised individuals, a real social environment, or a virtual one? Whilst at the creative stage, net art can be said to exist in the terms expressed by Woody Vasulka above, the technology used by the audience is integral to reading the work. No two computers will show exactly the same image of a given web page. The end user's choices regarding operating system, browser, monitor, fonts, and speed of connection will all influence the site's appearance.
At the moment, Net artists broadcast/publish their work across an open network; the audience does not pay to experience the work, and cannot meaningfully own it. But late capitalism has shown that value can be exchanged for the immaterial. Will artists adopt the televisual model of pay per view, siting work on secure servers and demanding credit card numbers for access? Perhaps no-one would pay to see Net art, but many museums charge entry fees. Money is already electronic: art tends to follow money.
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irational.org: 'Reward Card', 1997 |
Heath Bunting 10 has pursued this agenda with satirical intent: in particular a project involving supermarket loyalty cards. Bunting re-coded the magnetic stripes of the cards to inflate the number of 'points' stored on each, then distributed them to Internet users via a web site. The companies issuing the cards were not amused, but Bunting performed a détournment by reproducing the lawyer's letters on the website, with links to his card scheme. Internet beggar was a joke at the expense of e-commerce: perhaps surprisingly Bunting's virtual outstretched hand received numerous credit card donations from curious passers-by.
'Will 'to be on line' be a privilege or a right? If only a favoured section of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of 'intelligence amplification', the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.' - Howard Rheingold 11
When video arrived the utopian potential was seized upon by radicals, as a means for everyone to make television. Camcorders are now widespread, but the question of how to gain access to distribution networks is still central. Most artists on the Net operate in the equivalent of cable access channels: with the majority of the population watching the other (commercial) channels. Access to broadcast/publish via the Internet is low cost, but publicity in traditional media to attract audiences costs plenty; people won't use search engines to look for Net art if they don't know it exists...
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Heath Bunting: 'World Wide Watch: CCTV', 1997 |
METAMEDIUM
Alan Turing's notion of a 'universal machine' 12 has been taken up by artists working in new media. Simon Biggs describes the computer as: "a system of writing that can write itself; a medium that defines itself".13 This defines one context: a creative, almost Dada machine aesthetic. But it strikes me that the forces defining the medium are similar to those which define broadcasting, cinema, print: commerce, dissemination of information/disinformation, advertising.
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Pictorial Heroes: 'Sniper', 1987 |
John Logie Baird's original vision for television was as a two-way communication medium, yet it is a one-way broadcasting network for political and financial reasons rather than technical. The Internet has allowed computers to provide many-to-many television through video conferencing, as well as mail services, publishing, libraries, gaming devices and work tools. Will this change to a more one-way, 'push media' network as the corporations tighten their grip? I am reminded of two advertising slogans for Microsoft and Apple respectively. "Where do you want to go today?" posits the Net as a trip, a journey, a tourist excursion to exciting locations, not as a way of communicating with people or realising creativity. Apple's "Three easy steps..." campaign for the iMac paraphrases Timothy Leary's famous slogan. Again, the Net as a 'trip', and as a replacement for Leary's televisual (or radio) metaphor for dropping out of society. It may be the task of artists to resist such views of the Net, and for creative people, computers can be tools of empowerment and engagement.
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David Hall: 'TV Fighter: Cam Era Plane', 1977 |
TACTICAL MEDIA
The notion of resisting existing power structures, inciting social change through media activism is an idea with roots back to 1960s media radicalism, or guerrilla media, an activity involving a whole range of social groups. Video artists have been involved in articulating concerns around the issues of access to and control of the media. The work presented in art contexts tends towards intellectual critique or satire. Paul Garrin's tapes from the 1980s, or those by UK scratch duo Pictorial Heroes, dealt with video surveillance and social control. The idea of the screen as the frame of a military target was explored very early on by David Hall in the 1974 video tape TV Camera Plane. Artists have commented on the totalitarian aspects of the web medium, as they did with television. Heath Bunting has explored the prevalence of 'webcams' on the Net as a form of global surveillance and policing in A World Wide Watch - CCTV.
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Dara
Birnbaum: 'Technology/Transformation: |
Wonder
Woman', 1978TRANSFORMATION
As well as critique, artists have been concerned to change viewers' perceptions of structure, time and space in media. From the films of Bruce Conner to the scratch videos of Dara Birnbaum and George Barber, mainstream media have been subjected to restructuring and manipulation. This use of found material in a collage style allows the construction of new stories and meanings from pre-existing narratives, often used to expose the psychological or ideological subtext.
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Mark Napier: 'The Shredder', 1998 |
Equivalents to this technique are being used to change the way the web is viewed. A close parallel to the scratch technique is employed by Mark Napier's Digital Shredder 14, which re-configures any web page the viewer chooses in a randomised, cut-up style. The browser as imagined by William Lee? i/o/d 15 have devised software for the web, Web Stalker which, though it carries out many of the functions of a browser, differs in vital aspects. Instead of presenting the web as pages one at a time, the Stalker proceeds from a given location, tracing all the hyperlinks in progression, then the links from those points. The display is an abstract cluster of circles and lines forming star patterns: a topography of the web. In representing the underlying structures of the network, the software creates an alternative to the standard browsers.
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i/o/d: 'Web Crawler', 1998 |
The medium and electronic processes are different, but the intent of the Web Stalker - to visualise the fundamental, shifting form of the web - is similar to Woody Vasulka's in the early 1970's. Vasulka created video images generated solely by voltages, thereby revealing the essence of the recording technology.
As the web becomes more uniform, and integrates more closely with digital television, prior models from video art, as well as projects such as the Stalker and Digital Shredder demonstrate the challenge for artists: to restructure the dominant interface and create truly radical software.
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Woody Vasulka: 'The Matter', 1974 |
Notes
1. Johan Pijnappel, introduction to Art & Design 39: Art and Technology, London (1994)
2. Raindance Corporation, Editorial in Radical Software No.1, New York (1970)
3. Walter van der Cruijsen, interviewed by Johan Pijnappel, Art & Design 39
4. "How Many Online?", Nua Internet Surveys, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html
5. http://404.jodi.org/ or http://oss.jodi.org/
8. Jean Baudrillard, "The Orders of Simulacra" in Simulations, New York (1983)
9. Woody Vasulka in Lucinda Furlong, "Tracking Video Art: Image Processing as a Genre", Art Journal 45 (Fall 1985)
10. http://www.irational.org/heath/
11. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought, New York (1985)
12. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950
13. http://www.easynet.co.uk/simonbiggs/
15. i/o/d is a collective comprising Simon Pope, Colin Green, Matthew Fuller. For further details see Variant Vol.2, No. 6, Autumn 1998, or visit http://www.backspace.org/iod/
c. Chris Byrne 1999. All rights reserved.