ed. by Roberto Simanowski
(Editorial)
This issue -
Paris Connection - is co-produced and
co-published by Frédéric
Durieu: Review (The Body in Cyberspace: Invented,
Morphed, Generated, Dismissed) Issues
2002: Issues
2001: Issues
2000: Issues
1999:
5.Jg. / Nr.
28 - ISSN 1617-6901
earlier
newsletter
Editorial
| Introduction
1 |
Introduction
2 |
Introduction
3 |
Introduction
4 |
Birgé-Intro
| Birgé-Interview
| Clauss-Intro
| Clauss-Interview
| Clauss-Review
| Durieu-Interview
| Durieu-Review
| Lamarque-Intro
| Lamarque-Interview
| Schmitt-Intro
| Schmitt-Interview
| Schmitt-Review
| Servovalve-Intro
| Servovalve-Interview
| Servovalve-Review
| Concrete
Poetry
Arteonline.arq.br
(Rio), Coriolisweb.org
(Toronto), dichtung-digital.org
(Berlin), Turbulence.org
(New York). The version on dichtung-digtial is made
possible by ZKM.
It contains introductions to, interviews with, and
reviews on: Jean-Jacques Birgé, Nicolaus
Clauss, Frédéric Durieu, Jean-Luc
Lamarque, Antoine Schmitt, Servovalve
(introductions and interviews by Jim Andrews,
reviews by Roberto Simanowski and Carrie Noland).
All contributions are in English. For a French,
Portuguese and Spanish version see: http://vispo.com/thefrenchartists.
(Go direct to the 
main
page of
Paris Connection).
Co-publishing
a project such as Paris Connection is a
way of expanding collaboratively to amplify the
critical process and also the its much deserved
exposure. Paris Connection showcases a
looselyknit community of artists who know each
other, sometimes collaborate with one another,
and all use Macromedia Director, combining cool
programming and philosophical reflection,
representing a version of software-art slightly
different from what Lev Manovich depicts in his
essay "Generation Flash."
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/editorial.htm
In looking
at the work of any of them, one is suitably
impressed. In looking at the work of all of
them, the relations between their various
approaches and issues are fascinating, and the
range of the work, taken as a group, is wide but
coherent. This has partly to do with the fact
that all work is done in Shockwave where the
emphasis is on fusion of the visual, the sonic,
video, and programming. But the coherence of
their work, viewed collectively, has mainly to
do with their influence on one another, and
collaborations together.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/intro-andrews.htm
This group
of French artists and their intriguing creations
inspire us to ask the following question: like
the impressionists before them, could they be
producing a new dawn of seeing or a new view for
art? A complex, eminently active, interactive
and scientific view?
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/intro-pinto.htm
Is there
netliterature as brilliant as this
netart? The problem lies in the art form. While
visual artists are inclined to reflect on their
material and to look for new material,
experiments in literature mostly do not happen
on the visual level of words but on the mental
level of pure language. Another reason: since
formal aesthetics and abstract paintings the
audience of visual art is used to paintings that
involve sensual stimulation rather than mimicry
or realism, literature still has to meet the
demands of meaning-centered expectations; the
effects of digital technology do not seem to fit
into such agenda.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/intro-simanowksi.htm
Algorithmic
poetry may very well be a good description for
them all—if one takes poetry to be an
all-encompassing term, rather than a division of
literature. The mathematics—the
programming—are at the service of the art,
at the service of synthesis, at the service of
human intelligible meaning and emotion. In the
way in which we talk about these six artists one
can sense that we are in an in-between. We may
not know what art will be in twenty or thirty
years, but we can be sure we will not talk about
it in the same way, any more than we now talk
about performance art in terms of the discipline
from which it emerged and those that contributed
to its development.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/intro-thorington.htm
He is not
an artist-programmer, does not do Director work,
but he is nonetheless influential in the group.
He creates the sound in many of the works of
these artists. He is a musician, composer,
producer, moviemaker, author - and has been
doing multimedia live shows since 1965.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/birge-intro.htm
I teach
too, but not many young people have enough
general culture to follow. They are stuck in one
musical style, as the style is nothing. The only
thing that matters is to be believed. My style
is philosophical and has nothing to do with
fashion, that's why I could last! .... I still
think we should change the world. It's running
upside down.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/birge-interview.htm
It will be
interesting to see, as his work proceeds,
whether he is able to sustain invention without
getting into programming more deeply. What often
happens to digital artists who can't program
whatever they want is that they hit a point
where they begin to repeat themselves, unable
either to implement what they imagine or, worse,
sometimes unable to imagine beyond what they
know.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/clauss-intro.htm
In 1999 I
came back from overseas after a trip of 6 years
(from India to Korea and Australia), I had a few
show sin France then and decided to see what was
possible with computers. Then I saw in an
exhibition the cdrom Alphabet, I was
amazed, I asked around me and someone told me it
was done with a software call Director. I got
the software and started working on it like
crazy for 3 months. ... My aspiration is to
experiment with the space between video,
interactivity and painting and I find it very
exciting.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/clauss-interview.htm
The end of
painting is verbally expressed in Clauss’s
Mechanical Brushes, a moving still
life and a revision of a Futuristic gesture.
The brush no longer embodies the appropriate
tool. It can only serve as a symbol of its own
lack of necessity. The brush of digital images
is the code; painting, in its materiality, has
become text.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/clauss-review.htm
The aim of
all this is to create poetry. So, I like to
speak about algorithmic poetry. A poem is a text
that procures you poetry if you read it. The
code I'm trying to write is a text that procures
you poetry if a computer reads it for you.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/durieu-interview.htm
Many of
Frédéric Durieu's works confront
the grotesque body. In Autoportrait it is
his own face that the user can reshape, in
Puppettool the user manipulates the body
of an animal. What is behind this play with the
digital body? What about the grotesque body of
humans: in cyberspace and real life? And how do
the body's disappearance, reinvention, and
reshaping online affect our self-understanding
and our own feelings towards the body? A
discussion of the virtual, cyborgian body,
drawing from examples of body art online.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/durie-review.htm
When I
showed Pianographique to my friend Cliff
Syringe, it blew his mind.
Pianographique, it seems to me, is
interesting both as a tool or instrument and as
a work of art. It's visual also, but the sound
is the foreground. You can set up a backbeat or
a background sound and then improvise with the
sounds that don't repeat, and then change
background sounds.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/lamarque-intro.htm
When I
created the Pianographique in 1992, I was
very influenced by Dada, surrealists, collage
techniques and experimental movie makers like
Oscar Fischinger who worked on the synesthetic
relation of sound and image.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/lamarque-interview.htm
Schmitt's
work is almost down to the code except for the
few graphical lines involved. His aesthetic is
minimalistic. The philosopher, artist, and
programmer/mathematician are all present in
Schmitt—a rare combination. It is important
to see how the creations of object-oriented
programming can be spirited with hope and
generous utility for the benefit of
humankind.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/schmitt-intro.htm
I stand at
the crossing of a practice (programming) and an
artistic quest, mostly humanist. I use
programming as matter that I mold to create what
we call 'plastic' art in French, that is, mainly
objects or situations. My main concern is 'the
tension between what is going to happen', and
programming is a unique way of exploring this
field. In the case of Avec determination,
the tension is between the desire to stand up
and the difficulties in doing so, which is both
metaphorical and desperately physical.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/schmitt-interview.htm
Like
Rilke’s panther, Schmitt’s creatures
have the double life of a symbol. They represent
what they are: a panther imprisoned in a zoo and
a programmed creature caught in a box. They also
signify those looking at them, because their
viewers have their own bars. ... Finally we may
come to understand: the point is not that we
cannot free them for their programmer controls
their options; the point is that we desperately
hope (or at least should) he really does.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/schmitt-review.htm
One is
struck by the minimalist congruence of the
visual and sonic in servovalve's
audio-visual-interactive Shockwave work. ...
ligne de ville is one of my favorite
pieces by him. Turn out the lights, go
fullscreen on this one, and turn up the sound.
The sound consists of a background loop and,
when the graphics change, one of several
different pure notes plays. It's rather a cosmic
piece, somewhat night-skyish suggestive of the
architecture of the heavens...or the bones of
our own designs.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/servovalve-intro.htm
Our common
point is the use of a tool, Director, for its
exploration possibilities... similarities stop
here... everybody can express his own
sensitivity... and happily, we're not using this
tool/instrument in the same way... a trash-metal
guitarist, or a country guitarist are both using
a guitar... we're building our instrument, and
we're playing with it... sometimes we share
it.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/servovalve-interview.htm
As Joan
Brooks McLane explains in Early Literacy,
small children do not distinguish between
drawing and writing. The letters are lines and
shapes as well as letters. They are houses and
trees and snakes before they are H’s and
T’s and S’s. The teleology of culture
demands that we see the child’s acquisition
of literacy—and therefore her reduction of
lines to letters and depictions to
characters—as progress. ... It is
specifically this “flickering” or
“oscillation” between an
inscription’s two distinct phenomenological
modes of being—viewable or
legible—that Servovalve exploits in the
work entitled nurb.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/servovalve-review.htm
Concrete
poetry is visual not because it would apply
images but because it adds the optical gesture
of the word/letter to its semantic meaning. The
philosophy behind this shift towards typography
is to free the word from its representational,
designational function towards the "pure
visual", the image for images sake. On the other
hand, the deconstructive play with the symbolic
orders of language is considered to question
social patterns and to even have a revolutionary
potential. Does digital concrete poetry
rather take up the latter or the earlier
legacy? About predecessors, mannerism,
aesthetics of the spectacle, and the "l'art pour
l'art" of coding.
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/parisconnection/concretepoetry.htm
