dichtung-digital / Interfictions: Interview with Simon Biggs

SB: Prior to it being common for art schools to have computers and digital art courses most artistic work with digital media was exotic and obscure. Only a small number of artists were active, most were technically knowledgeable (they had to be as they rarely had engineers to work for them) and their artistic practice was heavily informed by the specific character of digital media. Today it is quite different. Digital media are seen featuring in many artists work, people are quite familiar with this and do not query it as they once did and the work produced is less engaged with issues around the media itself and rather more outward looking.

That said, there is a lot of what I think is naive work being done in this field. It is now so easy to access computers and they are so easy to use that there is little pressure on artists (or others) to really understand and appreciate the character of the technology they are using. To put it another way, the computer is so ordinary and pervasive that it has become invisible...and as we know, when we learn to accept things in this way it is usually a good time to start to question them again. A lot of current work is digital in the same sense that a film is cinema because it is made on film...even though it is clear that for a film work to be cinema a particular engagement with the filmic and cinematic has to occur. So we see photographers using digital montage techniques to produce pictures that are clearly impossible, playing upon incongruity to establish their value. The problem is that little of this kind of work is interesting, either as photography or digital art, but it receives a lot of attention because those looking at it do not know any better either. As an artist who has worked in this field for quite a while I find this sad.

dd: This tempts me to ask what do you think about such very different but simultaneously quite medium specific methods of digital photgraphy like Wolf Kahlen's Selfness or Thomas Ruff's series "Nudes" (Review)?

SB: In respect of work like Thomas Ruff's I see this as photography, not digital art. He might be using digital tools, but he is not using the computer as a medium. The computer is only a technical element in his practice, not the main thing. Nor is he engaging with the concepts or epistemiological aspects of the digital. I do not see that this is a bad thing. He is not pretending to be a digital artist. His work clearly establishes itself as photographic art, and in that it succeeds very well.

However, that said, there are a lot of young artists out there who are doing very interesting things, using the media to not only open up new representational strategies but to also question the entire idea of art. There is a lot of work going on where both media and cultures blur, such as experimental music, live digital imaging, computer gaming and the rave scene all coming together in live events. It is not unlike Warhol's Exploding Plastic Fantastic (is that what his 60's performance nights were called...I can't remember if that is the correct name?). Just as then there is a sense of something exciting around these events, of something seismic in how it is moving things along and potentially pregnant in creative opportunities. Of course many of those doing this sort of work do so in ignorant bliss of what has gone before (I wonder how many are familiar with documentation, or the real thing, of Warhol's nights?).

I wrote the article you quote back in 1994 and I think it was more prescient than reporting on the actual when I wrote it. That is, at that time it seemed to me that there was a clear increase in young artists working with digital media and clear evidence of a different attitude towards technology amongst students. However, compared to today that was really nothing. In 1994 most of us still had to look for access to computers, although it was getting easier to gain it, even in art schools. Today most of us carry a computer, in one form or another, with us all the time. In 1994 it was also not yet clear that the Net would explode to the degree that it has. One of the first questions I ask 1st year students is what their experience of the Net has been...whether they use email, surf the web, use chat rooms, have their own homepage, code, etc? A few years ago most replied in the negative to all of those question. Now most of the questions have a 100% positive response, and even the more technically challenging experiences (such as web page design and coding) get a number of positive replies. Clearly things have changed a lot since 1994.

dd: Does this also mean that users start to question what they have become acquainted with, as you requested above for when things have become normal and invisible? Are the users ready for the questions artists raise?

SB: This is a very good question. I think people, or users as you call them, are a lot more aware of what computers and digital media are and are concious of many of the issues around these media and technologies. This also links up with a growing awareness of issues around genetics, bio-tech, GM farming, etc. In many respects this is a case of a developing political conciousness, not unlike what happened in the 60's and 70's around Vietnam and the Cold War, or during the 80's with gay rights, etc. It is perhaps a generational thing too. Each generation seems to find themes that are of particular concern to it. Today we see the anti-Capitalist movement, a sort of neo-anarchist body-politic, but this is a multi-faceted movement, not really a singular movement at all, and many people and groups involved are engaging directly with concerns around new technologies...not that I would wish to see any form of neo-Luddite activity. This would, in my opinion, be a negative response to the issues founded on a misconception of the role of technology.

However, generally speaking, it seems that most of those involved in these political activities have a sophisticated concept of technology. They have all grown up with computer games and the like and they do not see technology as a bad thing in itself. They do however question certain technological developments and the value of their application. This is to be applauded. As such, I would say that many "users" are way ahead of the "artists"...although I do not see much value in this distinction, as we are all users and, to some extent, we are all makers.

dd: This new art is much more driven by technology then ever before. One may wonder whether or not artists can still maintain a critical position (critical towards current trends in society) whilst using new technology? You seem to be suggesting that any possibility to remain critical is lost unless they use new technology. Considering that new media soon will influence (or already do) our lives as much (or even more) as television, one would even think that artists not working with digital media simply cannot meet the demand to analyze and question how important social developments or paradigms operate in the constitution and expression of culture.

SB: I don't think I am saying that you have to use technology to be critical. Not at all. I am however arguing for an enhanced critical engagement, yes, and with and through technology. But not just computers...bio-tech and such is just as important, perhaps even more so. And I also accept that you can take a critical position towards these issues without necessarily using the media in question. There are many strategies. They are all more or less valid.

What I would argue against is a practice that ignores what are some of the most important questions to confront our culture. Any practice anywhere and anytime that does this abrogates one of arts most important roles and is thus radically diminished. I think in the article to which you are refering I was probably lamenting how so many people choose to use technology without either seeking to understand its inner workings nor its socio-political history and current effects.

dd: In the same essay on new media art you write: "Computer games have shifted forever our expectations of media and our role relative to them. The passivity of cinema, video and television is being transformed into an entirely different media culture." I interpret this as an encouragement for interactive art rather than for pieces that 'just' want to be read or watched as books or films. I also understand this as the claim to intervene the televisual flow and to create a new relation to information media and cultural experience.

Your own work is a good example of how profound such interactive projects can be set up and operated. However, I admit I have difficulties when interactivity as such is set as the new bottom line of art. And this holds true for both aspects of interactivity: 1. Collaborative writing projects, which allow the "wreader's" influence not only on their own screen, but also on the source of the project, often doing so at the expense of the project's quality. The text itself looses its attractiveness and is interesting more in terms of sociology, but rarely in terms of aesthetics. 2. Interaction with the program whether it be hyperfiction, hypermedia or computer games often does not exceed click activity and the gesture of disruption, thus supporting an aesthetics of spectacle television induced during the last two decades.

With regard to the link and click paradigm one could argue that the increase of impatience and expected jolts per minute (as Kalle Lasn put it in "Culture Jam") is the real message of this medium. In this light patient, attentive, contemplative perception--not passive at all but also not active just on the click level--may be much more subversive against the televisual flow. Is there a "trap of interactivity"?

SB: I am not arguing that interactivity has to be the bottom line in how art is valued. Not at all. Rather, I am arguing against a shallow engagement with interactive media. That is, I am saying that if you are claiming to make interactive art then it better be really interactive and not some half-baked non-linear system. I get angry when people claim they have done something and then when you look in detail at it you see that in fact it is not at all what they claim it to be. Too many branching CD's and hyper-texts have been made that claim to be interactive and seek to predicate themselves on this "value" and in fact they are not interactive in the sense that I understand this term. In my essay "On Navigation" I make this distinction very clear.

You are right though to question the value of interactivity. I think there is a pressure to experience things too quickly and that a truly subversive practice might be one that is predicated on "slow" engagement. In a sense I would like to think my work is like this. That is, it uses interactivity a lot and mostly in the form of things that happen fast (that is, the reader does something and the work instantly does something too) but that does not

mean you cannot make something contemplative and requiring detailed concentration. In the end it will be the quality of the work that determines this. Poor quality work will feature little more than the mechanisms that make it happen, or worse, a shallow and garish surface designed to mask the void at the centre of the work. Good quality work can afford to expose itself fully and take the risk of demanding concentration and critical engagement.

But I do not want to get into an argument about what constitutes good and bad quality work... that always tends to end up in a dead end. What I would argue is that interactivity, used well, can be one of the most effective disrupters of the televisual flow, as you put it.

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