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I
shall try to synthesize the central points of the discourse
on digital art in order to demonstrate the gradual
disappearance of the frontiers between the different forms
of digital creation on the Net, starting with a statement
that is widely accepted: the change from analogical to
digital is affecting all areas of cultural creation (design,
production, distribution, reception) and, in particular, the
art world. Over recent years the specific function of art
has changed. The traditional functions attributed to it
– intuition, revelation, catharsis, expression,
representation – are now performed far more efficiently
by cinema, television and advertising. Art, therefore, has
to reconsider its function, problems and system of
representation. The social significance and the role of art
have now to be sought in the process of communication, which
consists of memorizing, processing and transmitting bits of
information. Art has nothing to do now with the production
of works – whether by traditional or electronic means
– but with the discovery of the internal logic of a
view of the world. Digital artists have replaced the paint
pots, the brushes and the primers with the computer, Flash,
Director or Java, and have become part of the community of
software users. This use of digital techniques is justified
because artists consider that it is necessary to use the
techniques that are contemporary with the thinking on which
they wish to act. To talk of here and now one has to use the
techniques of here and now; if the artist uses techniques
from the past, they will have to say a great deal in order
to be able to speak with the same depth and the same
complexity. It is easier, therefore, to make use of what one
has, the available techniques, as they carry much of the
present: they are born of this present. In this way, the
appropriate technique becomes more than just a simple tool,
a simple fashion: it becomes a significant and integral part
of the work.
But,
simultaneously, this need to use the most recent techniques
is paradoxical, as the technologies are dependent on
inventions and the technological race, and at the same time
a sort of stabilization of these techniques is expected in
the form of standards. Computer science offers complex
software. On one hand, what is called hypermedia consists of
the ordering of a stock of information and, on the other,
the synthesized image depends, from its beginnings,
transformation and performance, on a series of laws coded by
computer science. Should we be talking of software as a work
of art? Digital is a medium with a potential that seems
unlimited: the possibility offered to the artist of
effortlessly combining images, texts and sounds in the heart
of the computer’s space-memory, without friction or
gravity, gives them a freedom of creation hitherto
inconceivable. The appearance of digital technology is at
the heart of a fundamental change in terms of the creation
and perception of images: it is now possible, based on
binary numbers, to create an image that can be manipulated
as never before. Thanks to this new technology, today’s
artists can invent not only new forms of
“reproduction” but also of “production”.
The
digital confers a new power on the image: an infinite
malleability. Until very recently, visual information
remained static in the sense that, despite the possibilities
offered by film editing, the image was fixed. Conversely,
since the image has been translated into digital language,
it can now be modified down to the tiniest elements; it has
become information, and all information can be manipulated.
For the first time in history, the image has become a
dynamic system, given that it is capable of interacting or
dialoguing with whoever creates it or looks at it.
Even though the
public continues to be educated perceptively by images
(photography, the cinema and television) and by the mass
media (still subjected to an order against which generations
of artists have rebelled against), the spread of digital
technology, especially since the 1980s, has introduced
increasingly important qualitative changes in the
relationships of this public with visual, sound and textual
information. This is because one of the revolutionary
characteristics of digital is to associate the user with the
working of the machine, establishing between them a short,
rapid retroactive loop. The computer allows the user to
interact with the visual, sound and textual data
communicated to him or her. By becoming interactive, the
nature of the media changes. An interactive image, though
generated by an optical device (photography, cinema,
television), does not have the same effect as a traditional
image with which no interaction is possible. The author and
the audience share the same communicational logic, the same
desire for crossover, for responsibility claimed in the
making and the circulation of the information, the same
sensitive space (that of the interfaces) and the same
temporality. Artist and audience are forced to share the
same time.
In
the field of the image, digital introduces another change.
It breaks the relationships that link the image, the object
and the subject. The digital image is no longer an optical
projection of the object coming between it and the subject,
and keeping them apart from each other, reinforcing their
status. The image conserves no physical or energy ties with
the real, it is the expression of a specific language, the
language of computer programs fed on algorithms and
calculations; interactivity makes it dependent on the
reactions of the spectator. The techniques of synthesis do
not propose for the real a more or less similar
representation but a simulation. Simulation and
interactivity are linked. One simulates to interact. Digital
introduces a new visual order, at the same time as it
supplies artists with materials and tools that profoundly
alter their relationship with reality. The materials and the
tools of simulation are no longer those of the real world.
Artists do not work with the material, nor with the energy,
but with symbols and information. They process the
information with these technologies because they are
necessary for them to establish a true dialogue with the
contemporary world, in such a way that they often cease to
be tools to become the subject or even the object of the
work.
Artists
construct their language by dialoguing with the machine.
This becomes their partner, their source of inspiration,
their model and often even the subject of their artistic
investigation. In the information era, artistic activity,
like any other, has to adapt itself to mobility, exchange,
the flow of information. Digital images have the advantage
of being everywhere at once; therefore a kind of art is
emerging that is specifically conceived to circulate around
networks.
Digital
art, like multimedia art, processes data that belongs to the
sphere of sounds and texts and to fixed and moving images.
However, what characterizes it is not the mixture of genres,
but the establishment of its own language. The contribution
of digital art does not consist merely in being able to
digitalize music, even if that makes it possible to create
sounds unheard of up to now, but in confronting the receiver
with new, complex perceptive situations that hitherto could
not have been conceived. A classic piece of music on CD-ROM
support remains a classic piece. Digital art is not about
supplementing classic practices, but about proposing totally
new expressive and semiotic situations. The digital image is
not just the fruit of a new way of producing images, but a
radically new image, and it forces art to reconceptualize
the very notion of image.
The majority of
artists’ creations are hybrids in which the technical
possibilities are used to multiply the possibilities of
expression. This hybridization is certainly one of the most
interesting aspects of digital art, as not only does it
break down the traditional barriers between the arts, but it
also introduces artistic approximation into areas that, up
to now, have remained outside them. The main aim is not
pluri- or multisensoriality but consensoriality. This is why
it is so attractive for immersive practices or virtual
worlds: it is a case of specifying new relationships in a
representation that is no longer exterior, in the eyes of
the perceiver, but which embraces them, treating them
simultaneously as a perceiver and a contributor in the
proposed sensorial world. It is thus the return to a certain
realism: the perceiver experiences, in effect, the need for
stable reference points, elements in which they can
recognize themselves, and based on these reference points,
they agree to let themselves be taken away to something
else. The digital artist is the person capable of
introducing semiosis to these technical effects and,
therefore, of allowing his or her critical proposals to be
shared intersubjectively, by making the work speak.
Placing an image
on the Net only makes artistic sense if, and only if, the
installation of this image corresponds to all the symbolic
manifestations of the Net. In 1997, Fred Forest auctioned
the Internet access code of a digital image; the buyer of
this code possesses this work as a real work. The image
ceases, in this way, to be an image, becoming an artistic
objectivization of the concept of a Net. For the first time
in history, a work, via networks, can appear simultaneously
and in the same way, without losing anything, throughout the
planet, as its materialization is merely a screen. This
situation questions the very notions of culture,
universality and totality.
It is
an art without materials (although it needs to be memorized
on material supports and has to be actualized on a screen).
The dematerialization of digital art means essentially that
any digital art creation is, to begin with, designed without
a pragmatic relationship to the material. In this respect,
it only definitely takes shape in a simulation: every
manifestation of digital art is the simulated moment of an
absent material. (The same thing occurs with a play. A
published dramatic work is only a potential work, which only
really gathers meaning in the various objectivizations of
the performances that constantly renew it. This is also true
for a musical score). The book and the score are, with
regard to the theatre and music, the writing space, the
simulation of the work that is realized in every performance
or concert. In a certain way, it makes the old dream of
total art come true: it unifies what up to now has been
separate. Its objects “are not now images, texts,
sounds, nor even the combination of virtual, acoustic and
tactile sensations, but complex devices, hybrids, that
include some of the instruments that have prepared them,
when they themselves are not identified with the machines.
There is no work outside the device – the device
creates the work”[1]
as Jean-Louis Boissier reminds us. It is an art of the model
in the mathematical sense of the term; it is not an ideal
but a formal model, calculable and operational. It is a work
that each time “re-produces” itself identically,
and which each time, at the moment of its realization, shows
itself to be different.
A
generative novel, for example, is a novel whose pages are
not written anywhere before the precise instant of their
materialization in a given place. It is impossible for two
readers to read the same page of the same novel. A reader,
unless he or she has the means to record it, can never read
the same page twice. No two readers ever read the same
novel. There is an author without whom the work would not
have been possible and it is he or she who defines a meaning
horizon for the work, but what changes is the author’s
relationship with the work. In classical genres, the author
always had the last word. In digital work, it is the work
that has the last word because the author finds himself or
herself in the position of the reader who cannot now modify
the result when it is realized.
Fascinated
by real time, digital art is an art form that takes the risk
of the happening, like dripping or certain types of
lyrical abstraction. The work is produced live, and it is
this production the spectator attends. But real time is the
time of reception, not of production. It is the time of the
show, not the physical processes. Digital work has the power
to be everywhere at once: it is present simultaneously,
unchanged, throughout the planet. In this it is like
Deleuze’s rhizome figure, as it can expand and
reproduce itself by diffusion over all the nodes it gains
access to. Thus the Net is the natural place for it to
develop. Theoretically the Net itself could even become a
unique work of art. Now, a single work could simultaneously
occupy, and in several forms, all the screens on the planet.
We therefore say that it has, by nature, the gift of
ubiquity. In a certain way, it is trying to surround the
spectator, immerse him or her in a creative universality in
which the observer is part of the same simulation.
The
digital work is, above all, a group of mathematical
variables. For this reason, it is accessible to any other
group of mathematical variables comparable to it. Thus, two
works can interact, and their interaction creates a new
work, in this way opening itself up to an immense universe
of collaborations. Open to calculations, built on models, it
is spontaneously available to be interchanged; therefore the
presence of spectators influences the work. There even
exists the possibility of constructing a theoretical
spectator, a spectator who is part of the work: it would
only be necessary to introduce a spectator profile into the
model. However, interactivity is not participation, although
in all interactivity there is a certain degree of
participation. Participation is an attitude to the work,
while interactivity is a presence in the work. The
interactive spectator is not external to the work but an
element of the model like any other; he or she is designed
and constructed by it. All other interactivity is restricted
interactivity, as it allows spectators to believe they have
mastery of the work, while they only possess what the
designer of the model wishes to delegate to them.
The
settings of the simulators – such as piloting planes
– as well as many videogames make an effort to give
their users maximum mastery of the process. They work on
reflex behaviour and primitive emotion, but do not try to
cause semiosis or generate any new meaning, precisely
because they have no artistic aims; artistic devices on the
other hand – perhaps because they are destined for
public places – are made in such a way that they
generally establish a distance, a series of ordered
differences. Simulation devices are only efficient if they
produce the most perfect possible clones of reality: to
improve the efficiency of their pragmatic behaviour,
perceivers have to rediscover themselves in the worlds in
which they will find themselves confronted with.
Interactivity defines a learning process in them. In
interactive artistic digital systems, on the other hand,
perceivers cannot know the rules to which their behaviour is
subjected. These belong only to the device they are up
against and they change from one device to another and may
even change from one moment to another in the same device.[2]
It is this difference that legitimizes the new artistic
idea. Perceivers find themselves in a state of permanent
surprise, and the choices they are invited to make are often
blind choices. Interactivity defines an observatory there.
Perceivers always have to try to understand, to anticipate
and thus they are placed in the role of observer.
One
of the most interesting aspects of digital art is therefore
the relationship it maintains between the real and the
virtual, between the world in which perceivers know
themselves to be in and the world in which the artistic
proposal places them in a simultaneous and indissoluble way.
Although they are in it, perceivers know they are also
outside it. They take part and observe themselves taking
part.
It is
in this duality where the basic interest lies. It is a
situation that reminds me a great deal of the Bakhtinian
metaphor of the carnival and its mechanisms of interpersonal
communication. In the carnival there is open communication
that breaks with the habitual hierarchical organization and
social classes, as it is not based on any power structure;
it is a priori an unstructured system, but which grows
apparently chaotically with the incorporation of people who
let themselves be carried away by it, and it develops
according to the paradigm of the Net and a plurimedia format
(dance, rhythm, body, image, disguise, music, text,
context…) all interrelated in a creative, active,
fragmentary, non-linear way.[3]
Moreover, it is an ambivalent experience. Participation is
individual, but not private, as it is open to everybody. To
join in the carnival there are no rules or regulations of
access: you just have to join in and adapt to the game. It
is precisely this integration, participation, and
interaction in a pattern that constitutes the basis of the
carnival. The ambivalence also affects the double function
that the participants take on: they are at once spectators
and actors, they are both subject and object of the event,
observers and consumers of the information flow, and part of
the show. For Bakhtin the carnival is on the frontier
between art and life. As Roy Ascott says, “instead of
creating, expressing or transmitting contents, the artist is
now in the business of creating contexts. Connection,
interaction and emergence are as of now the watchwords of
artistic culture. The observer of art is, as of now, at the
centre of the creative project, and not on the periphery.
Art is no longer a window open to the world but a gateway
through which the observer is invited to enter a world of
interactions and transformations”.[4]
“Old art was made to be seen from the outside. New art
is made to be constructed from the inside”.[5]
Digital
art transforms perception in action. In a society in which
there is virtually nothing natural left (biotechnologies,
genetic engineering, cloning, transgenics…), and in
which the human being has become a cyborg, what Katherine
Hayles calls post-humanity, digital art originates new
symbolic representations and forces us to reconsider the
frontiers between the natural and the technical, man and
object, and perceive how they are becoming increasingly
blurred. The perceivers of digital art are in a state of
experimenting with their own aesthetic perception. The
aesthetic object is modelled and understood when
experienced.
And
this experimentation can only arise in the context for which
it was planned. What counts is the process, not the object
that carries the materialization of this process. Of that
there is never anything left. Therefore it can be claimed
that digital art is worthless. Why keep one line and not
another as the digital model always produces new updates?
You cannot exhibit a digital work of art, you have to
immerse yourself in it, browse, interact, and experience its
processes in the planned surroundings. The work of art,
therefore, has changed its status. After adopting the
religious stance (the object as a sign of an invisible
hereafter), the aristocratic stance (the object as a
hierarchical sign of the person who possesses it), the
bourgeois stance (in which being is confused with having),
the work of art now tends to adopt the financial stance,
that of flow: the work has no value in itself, but according
to the movements it causes. This is logical in the new
context of the information age.
The
Post-modern Text
Yet this entire discourse on digital art is closely linked
to the concept of the post-modern text.
The
notion of the post-modern text[6]
originates from the combination of structuralism, Marxism
and psychoanalysis at the end of the 1960s, mainly in
France. The text is no longer conceived as a product but as
a production, in other words it is never finished, rather
always potentially infinite and it escapes both its author
and its reader. The text belongs to no-one, no-one masters
it, so that the classic linear organization is broken in
favour of a combinatory, fragmentary, arborescent
organization, in other words, into demultiplied reading
routes, where a reading of multiple meanings not necessarily
foreseen by the author is authorized.
Different
readings and different reading routes are always possible;
none is, a priori, better than any other, because it is the
reading that at every moment recreates the text. In this
way, the distinction between writing and reading is erased
like that between the author and reader. Reading is no
longer simple consumption, it also produces text, it is also
writing. These multiple reading routes call out to other
texts: it is the intertext that recalls a group of other
texts in the text, which they forward on to other texts, to
a potential infinite. As Roland Barthes says, every text is
an intertext, it is a new fabric of previous quotes. No
reading exhausts the text: there are always further readings
and virtual routes possible.
The
notion of the post-modern text is not restricted to just
contemporary literature or writing: the text is everywhere,
according to Barthes, as from the moment a reading route is
no longer simple consumption, rather production, it is
authorized to make it emerge. Text can also be found in
visual works of art, including photographic and
cinematographic works. To read, we no longer need the
guarantee of the proprietary author, as the text is not an
object for consumption, rather one of play, work, production
and practice, and is tied to fruition and pleasure, as it is
the space in which no language bars the way to any other, in
which languages circulate.
Barthes’
text[7]
describes the non-restrictive, non-linear non-morphological
way that texts work, which computer programs merely foster.
What has predominated in the last two centuries has been the
Newtonian reduction of the Text to the work. Now it is a
case of displacing the notion of work with that of text. The
work is an object that is seen, that occupies a space; the
text, on the other hand, is a methodological field that is
not shown but demonstrated, which rests on language and is
only experienced in a task or a production, and therefore
does not stay still but is constantly in movement. The text
does not belong to any genre or any classification; it is
always paradoxical. The work is enclosed in a meaning that
becomes the subject of hermeneutics; the text is experienced
in an indefinite search. The text is plural not in the sense
that it has several meanings, but that it realizes the same
plurality of meaning. The text is not a coexistence of
meanings, but a crossing; it cannot, therefore, depend on an
interpretation, but on dissemination. The work is the
property of the author, but the author is not the owner of
the text: the metaphor of the text is that of the Net; if
the text spreads it is due to a combination that goes beyond
the controls of the self who writes. The work is the subject
of consumption, while the text is play, work, production,
practice. In synthesis, a text is not made up of a line of
words, from which a single meaning is deduced, but of a
space of multiple dimensions in which different writings are
compared, none of which is original. The text is a fabric of
quotes that come from thousands of centres of culture. All
in all one may deduce from this that in writing there is no
subject with an identity: the beginning of writing is the
“death” of the author, of this modern entity that
emerges only when the individual and the person is
recognized historically as having value; but in writing, as
Bakhtin anticipated, it is language, not the author, that
speaks. This weakening of the privileged position of the
author translates into a strengthening of the function of
the reader. “(…) a text is made up of multiple
writings, that come from different cultures and which,
together, establish a dialogue, a parody, a response; but
there exists a place where all this multiplicity comes
together, and this place is not the author, as has been
claimed up to now, but the reader. The reader is the place
where all the quotes that constitute a text are inscribed,
without any being lost; the unity of the text is not in its
origin but in its destination (…)”.[8]
Although these theories of Barthes’ differ from
hermeneutics and the aesthetic of reception, given that they
defend an ahistoricism in the production and the discursive
reception, they are close to the critical theory that
champions the precedence of the reader and which constitutes
the most important precedent of the aesthetic of
interactivity and the aesthetic of play.
This
new structure imposes a new space and a new temporality, as
the computer effectively sets the text in a new space and
new temporality; the necessarily linear development of the
text and the traditional book now instantly becomes a
non-linear development: you merely have to click to be in
cyberspace. With the Internet, the multiplication of reading
routes has become immediately possible: by clicking on the
anchors of the text, other texts can appear on the screen,
which at the same time will forward us to other texts. In
this way, just as the space of the text is the subject of a
veritable explosion, of a mutation in hyperspace, inversely,
the temporality of the text is reduced to the point of its
disappearing in instantaneity: in the fragmented text, each
of the fragments is immediately accessible thanks to links,
and any one can potentially come after any other. With no
pre-established order, temporality disappears, and causality
too. It is no coincidence that the most popular hypertext
software is called Storyspace, given that hypertext
fiction is organized in space and not in time: the text
becomes a labyrinth.
The
characteristics of the digital medium contribute to
questioning the work of writing and reading, as well as the
roles of author and reader, which the theory of post-modern
text deals with. The author in front of the computer
effectively has to abdicate his absolute power over the
text, because it escapes him or her. The authors of
electronic literature soon chose to accentuate this aspect
by playing with the interactive possibilities of the web,
systematizing this interactivity by making a game/route of
multiple choices out of reading the text; each reading
therefore becomes, in turn, writing, because only one’s
route or another itinerary allows the text to be
“written”, updating it. Moreover, seeing as not
all the routes can be followed at the same time, each time
some “texts” remain “unwritten”.
For
Landow,[9]
hypertext reconfigures – rewrites – the author in
several ways. The figure of the writer in hypertext is close
to that of the reader: the functions of writer and reader
closely intertwine. Hypertext, which creates an active
reader, contributes to the convergence between reading and
writing; it encroaches upon the writer’s prerogatives
and grants some of them to the reader. A sign of this
transfer of powers is clearly seen in the possibilities for
users to choose their own way, to annotate texts written by
others and to create links between their own and other
people’s documents. Hypertext, by reducing the autonomy
of the text, also reduces that of the author: it does away
with certain aspects of the text’s authority and
autonomy, and in doing so also creates a new concept of the
figure and function of the author.
As
for the reader, hypertext is the culmination of the
recognition of his or her activity that begins with the
theory of reception. Their activity will not just be that of
filling in the “empty spaces” that Ingarden
discovered in linear texts and becoming the “ideal
reader” who constructs texts. Now they can choose their
own routes and establish relationships and links between
texts or parts of texts, so that each reader is unique in a
literal sense.
Reader
of hyperfiction have to take responsibility for their own
routes and be aware of the nature of the text resulting from
their actions, seeing as there is no “correct
route”, nor are some links better than others. By not
worrying about the traditionally conceived plot, the reader
cannot be “missing anything important”, the
feeling that can only be experienced in texts with a linear
plot.
And
when does a work of hyperfiction have to stop being read?
When one has finished reading it? If there is no beginning
or end, it may be complicated to know when to stop.
Landow’s answer is that readers have long been familiar
with multiple or open endings in literature, books that end
physically but without drawing any conclusions. What does
“end” mean? A point of no return? The element that
gives meaning to all that has gone before? When the reader
decides to stop navigating, is the direction of his or her
route reconstructed? A structure seems “closed”
when it is experienced as a whole: coherent, complete and
stable. This experience of the final stability of a
structure will be marked by the particular structure each
reader may be constructing; he or she may even decide to
stop, leaving it open. Are we not, precisely, in a period in
which uncertainty and indeterminacy predominate?
Joyce
warns us thus in Afternoon: “When the story
ceases to progress, when it falls into a loop or when its
route tires you, that is the end of your reading
experience”, “in all fiction finality is a
suspicious quality”. It is the reader who decides when
the reading experience, not the story, has finished. The
criteria for the decision are not the fulfilment of the
action but the fact that the story is not getting anywhere
or that it is boring.
The
notion of identity and authorship, which has been central
since the Renaissance, is questioned not only for having
placed a certain decision-making power in the hands of the
reader, but for the fact that the author often plays at
taking on different identities. One of the characteristics
of hypertext is that of allowing readers to save the course
of their reading route, and in this way contribute to
writing their text, to making their mark on hypertext.
Combining
both discourses, it is easy to see that they have a series
of points in common, such as the consideration of the work
as a process and the text as a product, or the image and
text as information and algorithm, or new perceptual
situations and new processes of semiosis they generate,
hybridisation and simulation, the artistic and literary
objectivization of the concept of the Net, dematerialisation
and simulation, ubiquity, a fragmentary nature and
non-linearity, software as a work of art and as a text, the
updating of the new textual and iconic spaces, reception
time versus production time, and action as reading and
perception.
Textual
Experimentations
Having reached this point, it would be good to check whether
this theoretical discourse is validated, in practice, by the
visualization of some examples of these new spaces of
artistic and literary production on the web, which make a
privileged use of the text and the image, and which could
not be possible on a printed support.
Since
1994, and especially since 1996, the number and the
diversity of creations on the Internet have grown
exponentially. Despite its short history there are hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of creative works on the Net. Without
wishing to classify them, I can distinguish several lines of
research that I group into the following categories:
hypertext, connectivity, code art, relational cooperation,
text generators, and visual poems.[10]
Hypertext
The arborescence, multi-linearity and maze-like structure
that characterise the structure of a good many electronic
works transform the notion of text space on the Internet.
Added to this spatial depth that the relationships between
the pages construct, is the two-dimensional treatment of
each page. The surface on which the text is placed has been
the subject of numerous experiments by artists. The size of
the computer screen, its luminous nature, the status bars
and the scrolls that make it possible to hide the text or
show it, the textured and/or coloured screen backgrounds,
the size and colour of the letters, and the choice of the
typography are ingredients that artists bear in mind when
processing the text in their works. The use of these
possibilities has considerable influence on the meaning of
the words, statements and stories that make up the work.
Most
hypermedia works are “closed” works, in other
words, autonomous entities whose links and nodes are inside
the work. The reason why they are on the Web and not on
CD-ROM or diskette is related to the mode of diffusion
chosen by the creator and the nature of the language (the
software) and the writing. Hypertext literature that has
existed for years, that works with the interaction of texts
integrated with other media, has installed itself on the
Internet both as a mode of diffusion and of creation.
One
of the pioneers of this kind of literature and artistic
creation on the Net is LoveOne[11]
(1995) by Judy Malloy, a work of purely textual narrative
fiction, in hypertext format, set out like the pages of a
diary that seem to explain a love story, although it is
difficult to guess what it is about; many interactors will
not reach the end, as they will feel disoriented or lost. In
fact, it is about the relationship between two lovers, their
emotions, what they feel and how they feel it. It has 129
pages, with a white text set in a column on a black
background, 4 green pages, 9 red and 12 blue. You can click
on every red line to turn the page; the blue lines indicate
that you have already “read” them. On page 129 you
will find the word reset underlined in red; by clicking on
it you accede to another text by Judy Malloy. Space, in
LoveOne, has no importance due to the presence of
technology: it all ends up as a single macroplace.
It does not matter where you are. All the characters feel
and relate to one another in the same way. The fact that the
stories are interlinked creates the feeling of not knowing
exactly when they take place. Time is disordered, there is
no beginning or end – it is like a collage. It is,
therefore, a story without the typical narrative
characteristics (introduction, exposition, denouement).
LoveOne is a metaphor about the Internet, where you
can find everything, pages for everyone and on any subject.
In LoveOne there are also emotions, sex, music,
cars, friends, fun, modems, the beach, all mixed up, as if
it were an Internet portal. The experience of clicking to go
to another page is similar to that of making a search with
Google: you can control where you want to go but the control
is lost when the page you get to is perhaps not the one you
were looking for.
Within
this new form of literature we find the poetry of Jason
Nelson and his interactive poem entitled A tractif[12]
(2000). On the main page there is only the name of the
first eight numbers; by clicking on each of them, a fragment
of text appears. The option “move” allows you to
move the text around the screen and the option “x”
to close it. The different fragments can be opened by
following the numbering, or doing so randomly; you can leave
some fragments on screen and close others, so the poem takes
on multiple possibilities. A soundtrack of murmurs and
whispers seems to breathe at a half-choked pace, somewhere
between anguished and possessive. The interactor can make
over 40,000[13]
different combinations from a single poem thanks to the
freedom to manipulate the texts directly.
Olia Lialina: My boyfriend came back from the
war
http://www.teleportacia.org/war/wara.htm
In My boyfriend came back from the war[14]
(1996), based on the feelings and emotions produced by a
personal situation, the Russian artist Olia Lialina
establishes an interactive narrative scheme in the form of a
conversation. In the evolution of the web, the best-known
browsers (Netscape and Explorer) have made it possible to
read frames, which has made the design of html files more
dynamic. Dividing the surface into areas and allowing some
areas to remain on the screen while others are replaced, the
frames have contributed to dynamizing this space. This is
one of the more notable projects in the use of the frames,
as it shows the narrative potential of this technology. The
image of a couple sitting constitutes the frame of reference
throughout the work. It is a fixed image, and the
relationship between the individuals shown will remain
intact, even if a lot of activity occurs around them and
ends up affecting our reading about this relationship. The
rest of the screen is divided into areas, separating the
conversations that take place into other squares, getting
smaller and smaller. Each conversation is a route that the
reader can take but which will always end the same way, in a
completely black window, representing each time a
possibility that gets darker, a voice that fades in lack of
understanding, lack of communication or misunderstanding.
Waiting and lost hope form the narrative thread of the work,
characterized by the effects produced by the use of frames,
in such a way that they accentuate its dramatic nature more
efficiently. Lev Manovich has established a parallel between
the use of frames in this work and the technique of film
editing. The story hinges on a conversation between a girl
and her boyfriend, who returns from the war. In the
reference image, the two lovers turn their backs on each
other and the internaut, according to the disordered clicks,
will read their first chaotic exchange and will eventually
lose the meaning of the dialogue. The questions will not
necessarily require correct answers, seeing as their
visualization will depend on the internaut’s order of
intervention. But all in all, whatever the route taken the
story remains clear, not in a first semantic degree, but in
the feeling produced by this conversation without rhyme or
reason, which betrays lack of understanding, lack of
communication or misunderstanding. The interface plays a
much more important role than that of simple support, as it
participates in the narrative and semantic construct.
Ghost City[15]
(1997), by Jody Zellen, develops a hypermedia universe where
the image predominates. The user can choose between
twenty-five links presented in the form of a square
subdivided into equal parts of five squares by five, each of
which is an animated image or a coloured square that
contains one of the letters of the title of the work. By
clicking on one of these links, you enter the metaphorical
representation of a ghost city where you find more links,
that send you to other pages, other animations, other
streets, districts, spaces… and you end up getting lost
in this unknown city. Texts that move around the bottom of
the browser take part in the construction of the meaning and
this strange atmosphere. Internauts find themselves becoming
submerged in a graphic maze, in the cybernetic architecture
of an infinite and chaotic space. It is memory and the
journey through time and space, whose images become
fragments of distant memories or a disturbing dream.
Continuing with the reflection on the urban experience, Jody
Zellen, in Ghost City,[16]
suggests using the Internet as a magnifying glass through
which you can look at the city. At first sight, the work
seems simple, like when you see a city for the first time;
when you go through the work, the impressions build up and
become more and more complex. Jody Zellen creates a mosaic
of images and texts that simulate a stroll around the city
as if through a maze; the project has a cyclical structure
based on the principle of repetition, with images that move
and multiply. You will also find several dead ends, hidden
links and unexpected places; also, you can return to the
same spot and think about what you have missed.
Do you Want Love or Lust[17]
(1997), by Claude Closky, presents a hypertext arborescence
with a choice of two answers to each of the questions put to
the interactor. In a satire of magazine surveys, the
internaut is invited to decide between two options. Through
an endless series of personal questions, similar to those
found in tests in popular magazines, this project sends you
on an endless route, which recalls the obsessive activity
that browsing on the Net can turn into. The act of choosing,
often a synonym of interactivity, based on the pleasure of
exerting a certain amount of control over the contents
presented, is soon seen to be frustrating, because the list
of questions proposed by the work gets longer and longer.
The repetitive nature and the limited choice of answers mean
that this adventure soon loses its interest. The internaut
quickly discovers that this supposedly free activity is no
more than following the same process, click after click,
with no answers, no conclusion. The work alludes to the lack
of critical sense and the complacency that easily sets in
when you browse the web, and reflects on the way that
certain websites are aimed at us personally and want to keep
hold of us by making us slaves to the mouse. The first
question to answer is Do you Want Love or Lust? A
choice, therefore, that will lead you to different questions
according to the clicks made. In this way, if there are two
answers to each question, and if each answer determines the
next question, you enter a complex process in which browsing
is merely the result of the retroaction between the user and
the machine. Closky uses, ironically, the magazine surveys
that award points for personality or tastes, juggling with
privacy and sarcasm and plunging us into frustration as we
never obtain any results.
Connectivity
Open works can have two forms: they are either wholly made
with links that are external to the work or they include, as
well as their internal arborescence, links to other sites
not produced by the artist but which participate in his or
her discourse. In the majority of cases, you can begin an
interminable cybernetic drift from these sites, as the links
become innumerable, extending beyond the initial project and
eventually escaping the creator. They are, therefore, works
that use other pages, sites, images, texts, etc., existing
on the Net and conceived and designed by others, towards
which the internaut is forwarded via the links established
by the author.
The
Belgian designer Michaël Samyn, founder of Group Z,
presents Love [18](1995),
a project that explores the notions of what is public and
private, offering different points of view on love (from the
daisy whose petals are pulled off electronically to the
quotes from the Marquis de Sade). Users can contribute their
secrets to it and read those of others. This part of the
work recalls a wall full of graffiti and refers to the
popular and accumulative aspects of the Internet. As is
usual in their projects, the artists of Group Z exploit the
potential of the Internet to reveal everyone’s most
intimate secrets and desires to strangers; in this way, they
highlight the possibility of transcending social conventions
on the Internet.
With
Being Human[19]
(1998), Annie Abrahams gives moods and emotions to words,
which are grafted to their meaning thanks to the use of the
size and colour of the letters, by the choice of typography
and the screen background. For the author, “the project
consists in the exploration of the common denominators of
the human being. Up to now, I have worked on the will, the
need to be comforted, understood, the will to open yourself
up to the other and the need to protect yourself. On the web
we are all nomads face to face with our status as strangers.
I try to make propositions that have the possibility of
making this state liveable”.[20]
Being
Human[21]
is interested in communication on the Internet, in
particular in the nature of e-mail correspondence. Taking
the text as a means of expression and exploiting the
different ways of processing it visually, the artist wonders
about the wish to come into contact with the other, about
individual difference, about the possibility of establishing
a true interchange on Internet. She uses different visual
interventions in order to express the nature of these
interchanges: the choice of the text and screen colour, the
size of the lettering, the superimpositions and the
fragmentation of words, their appearance and disappearance,
all tend to underline different states that have to do with
the quality and intensity of the interchanges. The work
highlights the will to communicate, its possibilities and
limits: what makes us human beings is that fundamental
desire to relate to others. The main page proposes different
links that take you to different sections: good morning,
your wishes, identity, I want (a kiss, tenderness, respect,
pain, a future…). Good morning functions autonomously
and does not present any interactivity; it acts as a
welcome, an introduction to the work. Coloured windows
bearing messages open and close, composing a unilateral
conversation with the internaut: “Bon jour, comment
allez-vous?”, “Ça va”, “Who are
you?”, “Vous ne me connaissez pas”, “Who
am I?”, “The same as you”, are questions and
answers that make up this dialogue. Here, then, Annie
Abrahams questions the identity of the Net, the “qui
sommes-nous sur le Net?”. A piece of advice closes this
page: “wave to your neighbour”, that shows us what
the first step ought to be for one individual towards
another. Other links execute small applications in which the
internaut is deprived of interactivity and obliged to wait
to the end of the messages in order to have further access
to the website. “What are our limits and our
possibilities in the desire to communicate on the
Net?”, asks the artist. How can the user receive this
information knowing that it is not meant for them
personally, even though the message asks them directly? How
can one experience something intrinsically human through a
computer screen, with a stranger to whom we are also and who
writes to all kinds of internauts? Can you experience the
other on the Net?
Juliet
Ann Martin,[22]
with oooxxxooo[23]
(1995), combines the meaning and the material nature of
words, giving them a space on the screen that pushes back
its limits. These signs, words and sentences take routes
that go beyond the immediate surface of the screen and which
the use of scrolls allows us to discover. This work falls
within the tradition of calligrams, poems that draw a figure
in space relating it to an aspect of its content. Grouped
together in them are a series of texts, related through
links, that are chained together and reply. Not only do
these calligrams form silhouettes, vaguely recalling real
objects, but they also construct trajectories that push back
the limits of space; in effect, they often exceed the edges
of the screen, introducing elements of surprise and waiting.
Every picture visually describes a state of the spirit, an
emotion, a situation that corresponds to a text mentioning
the gap between the organic world and the technological
universe and mixing these two realities unexpectedly.
Privacy cannot be achieved; the machine gets in the way and
imposes itself, creating a tension that cannot be resolved.
The work is defined in this way by its double meanings and
its breaks of meaning, which contribute to creating a poetic
atmosphere that the visual configurations and the spatial
trajectories eventually support.
Some
works take the rhizomatic aspect of the Internet much more
into account, so much so that the entire work consists of a
series of links. This is the case with the work of Natalie
Bookchin, who radicalizes its practice up to the point that
it only exists through its external links. Searching for
the Truth[24]
(2000) is presented as a quite minimalist page that consists
of a white screen on which we find a series of nine numbers,
where each one is an anchor to a different link; all of them
go forward respectively, to the answer obtained by the
search based on the word Truth made by different
search engines. The result is a series of long lists of
sites about the Truth. This search for the truth by Internet
leads us to a conclusion: it is not on the Internet where we
shall find the Truth. It is an interesting work because on
one hand it spreads through cyberspace, proposing many links
that forward us to other links, forming in this way the
branches of an arborescence that escapes the artist, and on
the other, this limitless rhizome is a clear example of what
Jean-Pierre Balpe calls[25]
“the silence and the noise”. Even today, the
majority of those who connect with the aim of finding some
information still fail; and this, according to this author,
is because the internaut comes up against two obstacles. The
silence, when the search engine does not offer them the
right answer, or the noise, when it offers them thousands of
web pages. Natalie Bookchin shows, through her offering, the
great mass of information on the Internet and its absolutely
vast nature. We are faced with the mastery of what is
absolutely huge (cyberspace) and infinitely small (the
internaut). The artist, therefore, centres on the theme of
infoxication. Too much information kills the
information.
Read
me, the British artivist Heath Bunting commands us in the
title of the work readme.html[26](1998),
and we have to take this order literally, because with
read me, Bunting makes use of the Web’s powers
of virtualization and transmutation to turn himself into a
text, that is, a hypertext. We should not forget that the
term “read me” is that of the instruction file
accompanying a piece of software: here the hypertext gets
mixed up with its own reading instructions, placing it on
the stage, and its author. It is a masterpiece and at the
same time a piece of great simplicity, which puts the bases
of the Internet onto the screen; it is first and foremost a
(hyper) space of language, read whilst browsing. In addition
however, read me also shows up the place of the
artist that has to dive into this sea to perform, to
disappear in order to appear, underlining in a poetic,
ironic, critical and playful way the tension and the
interpretation of the private, personal and public that
characterises this medium. In read me we read
“Heath Bunting” described in a biographical text
in the form of a telegram that describes his life and work.
But this text is written, apparently, by an
“other” (James Flint, The Telegraph, Wired 50). It
is not, then, Bunting who speaks; moreover, each word of the
text is underlined and this fact, as well as turning every
word into an anchor for a link, depersonalises the artist,
dissolving him not only in the words of another on the
screen, but in the links that lead to other links all over
the Web: by dissolving himself word by word in the
hypertext, the artivist infiltrates the web that he ends up
possessing and being entirely. Visibility, presence and
action, on the web, thus depends on a work of appropriation
and disappropriation, of staging and dissolution. The links
to which it forwards us are not his work: he has only
intervened in the work of investigation and selection. In
this way, the notion of creation remains ambiguous, it
refers us to Duchamp’s ready-mades, as Bunting uses
pages previously constructed, in which he does not formally
intervene, in this way distancing the work from the creator.
He only intervenes in them as a conceptualist and as a
technician creating a series of links to other webs.
“The
arts require witnesses”.[27]
The Internet is, in a certain way, a supplier of witnesses
and a safe place for fans of voyeurism to observe from. It
is almost certainly for this reason that the cameras
connected to the Net twenty-four hours a day have
proliferated, monitoring public places and private spots in
real time, turning the public and the private into something
that may be observed from the anonymity of one’s own
home. There are many artistic projects that use these kind
of cameras and their fans as a source of creation. Among the
projects that cast a critical gaze over the multiplication
of webcams is Multi-Cultural Recycler[28]
(1997) by Amy Alexander. It is a work that brings together
several of the resources that are considered as belonging to
digital art and Web art: interactivity, fleetingness,
voyeurism and a certain degree of surprise. It also uses
materials of which she is not the author. It gives the
visitor the possibility of choosing three cameras, from a
menu of about twenty, that are connected to the Net and set
up in different parts of the world – at monuments,
tourist sights or in private homes. Then the image one of
these cameras is capturing at that moment is taken and mixed
with the other two and as a result a collage is obtained
that the visitor can sign and exhibit. In the recycling
process the compound images already taken can also be used.
Anybody can go to the original sites of these webcams.
Multi-cultural Recycler knocks off-centre three
phenomena of the web: the abundance of already existing
images; the craze of the webcams that “look” at
anything, no matter what and the fascination this generates;
and the weakening of the notion of author and
reappropriation/withdrawal that all information may
experience in this medium. An interesting fact is that it is
impossible for two people to arrive at the same result, even
if they choose identical sources, as, by being transmitted
in real time, the image from each camera varies constantly.
In this project a fundamental problem is posed for web
artists: the notion of the work of art. The artist puts at
the disposal of the user an autonomous application suitable
for digitally mixing and recycling the video-images that
come from webcams that were already present on the Internet:
she just chooses some without taking part. The active and
artistic dimension of this work lies, on one hand, in this
invitation to interaction between the application and the
user, and on the other, in the fact that it uses images
apparently of no interest to give them meaning in an
original pictorial composition. With this action, the artist
criticizes the proliferation of these webcams that, after
all, are not much use, and she gives them a second function,
recognizing their existence on the Internet and conferring
upon them the status of a work of art.
Code
Art
A constant in electronic art is artists exploring the medium
and the language that constitutes a new technology when it
appears. The consequence is generally the production of a
series of texts to analyze the “aesthetic” of the
new works, while it is the tool, the equipment itself, that
is the content of the works. They do not have, therefore,
any other content than the medium and its technical
possibilities. What all these works have in common the fact
is the focus on a technology without trying to stake a claim
to any artistic doctrine or style, or professing to
containing any message or purpose. The internaut is at times
invited and at times expelled from these micro-cyberspaces.
It is, basically, a case of browsing and appreciating the
compositions and recompositions of constructed,
deconstructed and reconstructed universes.
This
is without doubt the most subversive category of Cyberart,
as it is the favourite domain of the hackers, the
iconoclasts of the web and those who spread confusion in our
browsers. Others, less extremist, use the technology as a
pretext and artistic medium, changing the digital tools and
media around to produce a work. Their aesthetic is based on
the taste for the code font and low technology; it adopts an
anti-image and pro-code attitude, prioritizing the use of
the code machine, namely data without format: the ASCII is
considered pure art. The interest in low tech is reflected
in the supremacy of text over image, which is also
low-quality such as bitmap. Its artists reject high
technology such as multimedia, Java and Shockwave and
express their interest for low bandwidth. Their artwork is
an anti-usability race. They carry out different acts of
sabotage around the browser: buttons and false menus, or
traps designed to make interactivity and communication
difficult, or cause it to get blocked. Their intention is
none other than to reach the limits of the browser.
One
of those most representative of these practices is certainly
Vuk Cosic,[29]
a Slovenian artist very active on the Net. He works with
computer language and especially ASCII (American Standard
Code of Information Interchange), the standardized code that
allows text information to be exchanged between computers.
The use of the ASCII lettering in these works is the result
of a choice made by the artist in favour of low tech and
refers to the origins of art conceived by computer and to
the basis of communication via the Internet; it recalls
certain ideals, like the wish for universality linked to the
establishment of this code and the promises of accessibility
of this technology. This looking back is also a critical
response in the face of the frenzied race of new technology
and the incessant consumption they demand of users. His site
gathers together all his works and links to other works by
different artists. One of his best-known ideas is
History of Art for Airports[30]
(1997), in which Cosic renders classic works of art in
the form of minimalist pictograms; in this way he interprets
the paintings in the caves of Lascaux, the Venus de Milo, a
portrayal of Saint Sebastian and one of the Pietà,
Cézanne’s Card Players, Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase, Malevich’s
White Square on White, and Warhol’s
Campbell’s Soup. Cinema is also present with
the brothers Lumière, Star Trek and King Kong.
Finally, it is the turn of Jodi, Bunting and Shulgin: in
this way, Cosic confers upon his contemporaries the status
of great artists.
Some
authors use technological language for its graphic and
aesthetic qualities, like Ted Warnell, who composes works of
poetry based on HTML and e-mails. With Berlioz[31]
(2000), the artist invites the internaut
to compose a graphic poem by browsing and clicking on the
pre-existing lines of text in order to make other fragments
appear. These texts come from messages sent to him by
different artists. The poems created with this application
(16,384 different ones can exist, according to Warnell) have
an abstract meaning and their legibility, difficult for the
interface itself, showing that it is not the meaning of the
words and phrases that matters, rather the impression and
the feelings that their graphic form arouses in us.
Nevertheless, it is a feeling of frustration that
predominates, as although its form is aesthetic, the work is
made up of words, the word carries the meaning, and this
escapes us completely. Does the poem represent a criticism
of communication on the Internet? These phrases, which are
overlapped, cut and created, written one on top of the
other, these words erased by the pixels of the background
image, do they not point directly to what becomes of a
dialogical experience on the Web, namely chaos caused by an
excess of communication? This techno-poem, composed of
fragments of e-mails, codes and HTML language that accompany
messages that are usually hidden, does not represent an ode
to the glory of technology and the communication age. We
were promised the communication age, the information
super-highways… Is it really a medium adapted to
communication and exchange between people?
The
case of Jodi[32]
is paradigmatic; they are a couple living in Barcelona, the
Dutchwoman Joan Heemskerk and the Belgian Dirk Paesmans,.
Their aesthetic and their formalist line have made them one
of the inescapable references of Internet art. Their
innovative, daring and carefree style has opened a line of
work that has helped to define an important tendency in
Net.art. The spirit of the work of Jodi can be summed up by
the hacker slogan “we love your computer”.[33]
They play with the Internet, with the code, with the
browser, and with us. And we play with them. They claim that
when the Internet user visits their site they introduce
themselves into his or her computer. Their work is
impregnated with a decadent and obsolete aesthetic that
recalls the typography and appearance of the monochrome
screens of the first personal computers. When users go to
their website for the first time, they find themselves
looking at letters fluctuating on a black background that
fill the computer screen, with no clues for browsing. You
click at random. You find yourself faced with a series of
pages that stage the code, the language, endless
superimposed error messages, or the icons that populate our
screens, etc. Gradually, you learn to choose, to browse
without a compass in the space proposed you. Jodi force you
to be not merely active but inventive, to explore, to put
your imagination to the test, without stupidly following a
mode of use. The surprise is total, you never know what
awaits you on the next screen, what will happen… The
worry that the computer will crash is ever-present.
In
the project 404[34]
(1997), their best-known work, the first page to appear is
that of the famous error “404 URL not found”.
Error 404 always originates when the user asks the server
for a wrong address, which gets stored in the
error.log file of the server program. Composed of
only four pages, on its homepage it reads only 404, where
each number links with one of its three other pages,
“unread”, “reply” and
“unsent”, all divided horizontally. A box of text
appears in the bottom frame, reserved at the entry of the
user’s message, accompanied by a reply button with the
label “Re”. Once the message has been written and
sent, the result will be the appearance in the top frame of
this text with certain alterations that will deliberately
sabotage the act of communication: in “unread”,
the vowels of the discourse in question are omitted, leaving
a meaningless text composed of consonants and punctuation
marks; in “reply”, the message is hidden and is
substituted by the user’s IP address; and in
“unsent”, the vowels from the initial e-mail that
were not sent are visualised. These three sections clearly
show, respectively, three constants in Jodi’s work: the
interruption of interaction, the loss of anonymity and the
denial of communication. It is, therefore, a case of taking
advantage of possible errors and unforeseen factors in
hypertext language to construct projects of great graphic
impact, in which the internaut is forced to fight against
some pages that he or she never really understands. It is
degree zero of the game.In the project 404 (1997), their
best-known work, the first page to appear is that of the
famous error “404 URL not found”. Error 404 always
originates when the user asks the server for a wrong
address, which gets stored in the error.log file of the
server program. Composed of only four pages, on its homepage
it reads only 404, where each number links with one of its
three other pages, “unread”, “reply” and
“unsent”, all divided horizontally. A box of text
appears in the bottom frame, reserved at the entry of the
user’s message, accompanied by a reply button with the
label “Re”. Once the message has been written and
sent, the result will be the appearance in the top frame of
this text with certain alterations that will deliberately
sabotage the act of communication: in “unread”,
the vowels of the discourse in question are omitted, leaving
a meaningless text composed of consonants and punctuation
marks; in “reply”, the message is hidden and is
substituted by the user’s IP address; and in
“unsent”, the vowels from the initial e-mail that
were not sent are visualised. These three sections clearly
show, respectively, three constants in Jodi’s work: the
interruption of interaction, the loss of anonymity and the
denial of communication. It is, therefore, a case of taking
advantage of possible errors and unforeseen factors in
hypertext language to construct projects of great graphic
impact, in which the internaut is forced to fight against
some pages that he or she never really understands. It is
degree zero of the game.
Riot[35]
(1999), by Mark Napier, is an application that is presented
in the form of a conventional browser with which you can
connect to the Web in the classic way. On the other hand,
the presentation of the pages is not conventional.
Riot is a system that steals the code font of the
pages it shows. The result is a notable confusion of
information, of decomposed pages, of deformed and pixelated
images taken out of their context, of repeated logos…
At each page loading, not everything disappears in order to
reconstruct a further act of sabotage. The result is screens
constructed with elements that come from a great
multiplicity of sites, each internaut constructing (or
deconstructing) his or her page on the basis of what
preceding internauts have done. Napier explains, in relation
to Riot, that he has created animated digital
compositions that evolve when the spectator comes into
interaction with them. Collages made with fragmented
interfaces, broken figures and bits of images found on the
web: these motifs change over time, responding to the
interaction of the spectator in a surprising and often
unpredictable manner. At times they disappear suddenly or
slowly dissolve, they unfold while the spectator is
exploring the space of the work of art. Riot
dematerializes the canvas by not imposing any limits on
it. It is as if all the sites where we have browsed have
regrouped in a single unique page, with the interferences
that this entails. And right in the middle of the nois
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