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1.
On 13 January
1997 the following news was propagated in the internet:
"If you want me to
clean your screen, scroll up and down"
Below
this sentence an internet  address
was given and the name of the artist: Olia Lialina. If you
call up the given address an opened hand appears on the
screen and when the scroll-bars are moved up and down it
actually seems as if a hand was cleaning the screen from the
inside.
Of course in this work of the Russian net-artist Olia
Lialina it is important that she announces herself by
e-mail, of course it is important that the click on the
given address, the click that calls up the work, is made
before the visual sensation and remains the only
click-possibility.
However, I do not wish to discuss this in detail now; nor do
I want to stress that in net-art apart from the visual
effect, that is the effect which we see on the screen and
which I will speak about during my talk, that in net-art
still two further levels, a technical (the programming) and
a social level (the interaction of the user) are added. This
important idea comes from Reinhold Grether, the literary
scholar and net-anthropologist from Konstanz. He
distinguishes the three levels in Desk, Tech and
Soz.1
But what I do want to stress, first of all is that when we
look at computer-art, strictly speaking pc[personal
computer]-art, 2 levels operate together and Olia
Lialina´s hand makes this particularly clear: Firstly
there is the visual surface on the screen and secondly there
is the surface on which I move the mouse in order to
interact with the visual level. Let me give you another
example: Mouchette's Kill
the Cat
Here, you must hit an fast-moving button with the mouse. The
button is placed in front of the wide open jaws of a cat
which fill the whole screen. This is a fairly tricky task of
hand-eye co-ordination. If you succeed with the click you
are "rewarded" by the question "why did you kill my cat?"
And with a further click you must promise never to do this
again ("Never do it again.").
2.
Normally, the
link is regarded as the most important interaction
possibility between mouse-level and screen and it is very
interesting that Olia Lialina places this link before her
work of art.
A link or a hyper-link is a word or a picture in the
so-called hypertext which gives me a new information when I
click on the screen with the mouse. The hypertext is the
basis of the www, is the method to surfing in the www per
hyperlink. And it was the hyperlink that in the first place
inspired art and literature in the www and perhaps even more
the theoretical reflections on it.
In fact it seemed as if the hypertext would at last enable
the reader or the person looking at a work of art to become
a co-author or a co-creator.
Michael Böhler goes a step further in his reading of
the necessary working together of mouse and screen: he sees
it as a transfer of the creating imagination onto the
mouse-action-level, in other words, as an externalisation of
the imaginary. Böhler says:
"If regarded
aesthetically hyperfiction is not so much a new literary
textform as a new way of reading and a new
text-reader-relationship. Here the place of the literary
"theatre" is moved from the inner brains of mental
processes into the outer room of interaction, where
sensorial perception and haptic acts of selection take
place."2
Lately the
euphoria of "the-link-is-everything" has, however, dwindled
and its meaning is critically queried. Let me list a few
causes:
Bernd Wingert notes a possible shift of attention in the
reading of hypertext from the text to the actual click,
which he quite correctly characterizes as the "centrifugal
force".3 That is the reader is much more
interested in where the links take him than in what he
actually sees on the screen. And so it is quite right to
speak about a hypertextual zap-mentality.
Even more important, however, is Uwe Wirth´s argument.
He says that the degree to which hypertexts dispense with a
structure that is an internal coherence which was thought
out by the author in order to be open for the reader´s
fondness for clicking, I repeat, that without such a
deliberate structure the text in the end becomes optional,
without content and sense.4 This means that in a
fictional text the possibility to decide will always have to
be restricted by producer or author. And so we have an
interesting discussion at the moment: Digital literature is
increasingly discussed in the relationship of text and
picture.
"The next generation of hypertexts will have to be visually
pleasurable, and hypertext will be a work of design and
orchestration as much as a work of writing" 5,
Marie-Laure Ryan says.
[At
this point a disgression on the death-wish in net-art was
actually planned since everything started lethally with the
"death of the author" caused by the hypertext. Now the
hypertext as a means of aesthetics will have to cop it (why
actually, I would like to ask) and with it the whole of www-
and net-work art. Here you may choose if the decline of
net-commerce will lead to the end of net.art (Tilman
Baumgärtel) or the lack of a chance to make money with
net.art will eventually lead to its end (Mark Amerika). That
is, if net.art hasn't already been swallowed up by business
and entertainment as shown by Ars Electronica. But what can
you expect from a medium which was originally invented
thanks to war and is based on the 1 and the 0, that is, on
to be or not to be…As I already said at this stage I
wanted to tell you something about all this but at the
mention of "to be or not to be", literature came back on the
scene like a phoenix from the
ashes...]6
3.
But of course
there is still the other camp which sees net.art exclusively
embedded in the code and brushes the optical result on the
screen aside as only secondary. Let us call this "binary
idealism" for the time being.
As an example of
this let me mention the latest Jodi-project, called
Wrong
Browser. Here again,
it´s all about deconstruction and, yet again, about
making people aware of the fact that behind the
computer-picture you actually see is something completely
different, namely the programming, the code. As one of the
representatives of this "theory" let me mention Tilman
Baumgärtel who says (with Kittler) that the hackers are
the real artists; and there is also Florian Cramer who
categorically demands that authors of net-literature should
write poems with the programming language. I do not say that
this is uninteresting or even wrong; however, I feel
slightly irritated by the almost messianic rigour with which
the "essential", namely the programming code is drawn up
against the supposedly mere surrogate and by-product, the
screen event. I have a déjà-vu feeling:
Let´s go and grab good old Plato from our analogue
book-shelf and open the 10th book (please note: ten is 1 and
0!) of "Civitas".
Here we learn with the bed as an illustration that the
artist produces only a copy of the copy. The carpenter at
least produces a useful copy of the pure
"sleeping-place-idea" whereas the artist just paints the
reproduction already made by the carpenter, that is the
artist produces only a useless copy of the copy , he just
daubs a 3rd grade reality. The binary idealists argue quite
similarly when talking about the computer:
Given is the pure idea, the 0 and the 1, the binary code.
The craftsmen(-women) of the age of computers, namely the
programmers take up this absolute of the machine-code.
Everything else, that is what we ultimately get to see on
the screen, is only a visualisation of the programming of
the machine-code carried out and therefore just as useless
and inferior as the dull, boring piece of art in
Plato´s ideal state.
And yet, the binary idealists have already lost their case,
if we listen to Flusser who praises the surface: If we are
able to write a poem in the programming language it must be
true that this language is not merely "formal" and so a pure
means of the "arithmetical awareness" but at least as a
language is quite strongly contaminated by elements of
lineary writing. This would mean that programm-"texts" are
the expression of a process-orientated, logical
consciousness, and therefore conventional. Flusser calls it
a fact that pictures are existentially stronger that this
conventional text.7 In other words: everything
that appears on the screen is much more impressive than the
actual causal code. Or just to sum up the whole discussion
in simple "flusser-free" words quite radically: I quote Dirk
Paesmans from Jodi: "Media-art is always on the surface. One
must grap people as quickly as possible."8
But looked at like this, isn't there the danger that the
"tyranny of pictures"9 as Virilio calls it or
even "Image surfing"10 as Robert Coover says will
reduce the "essence of a work" to the mere surface, to a
mere "show"? Do we, like Virilio, have to call for the
script as a last hope which will take up position against
the TV-screen; should we therefore, preferably with a
sharpened quill-pen, write as an act of resistance against
the "power of the pictures"11 on the screen?
I like these apocalyptic moods - they are so powerful and
clear and…not very helpful. I say this, even if I, too,
declare myself in favour of the script, the text and the
concept as necessary correctives against the mere picture
which only too easily degenerates into design.
Let me remind you of Marcel Duchamp.12 Duchamp
always rejected the exclusively "retinal" work of art as he
called it, that is the work of art that commits itself only
to the visual. He demanded instead that a picture must refer
to a concept, an idea. A significant means of breaking up
the idea of the pure picture is for him the literary title
of a picture. Even before the ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp
saw in the picture title an important co-creating purpose
and wrote his titles directly on the canvas. Thus: for
Duchamp word and picture form a unity which, however, must
point beyond itself to an artistic concept.
If we then believe in a fertile screen-symbiosis of picture
and word, the concept which goes beyond it offers the
possibility for a general reconciliation. The "concept" has
a big heart and includes all forms of unmasking - even basic
lessons such as: Behind everything that happens on the
screen there is always a programming code, or isn´t
it...?
Paper given
at conference p0es1s
- poetics of digital text
(Erfurt, 27/28.09.2001)
To this article applies the open publication
license.
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