|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
| Jeremy Welsh´s "Sites such as these" |
|
|
| Jeremy Welsh står bak månedens arbeid i nettkunstgalleriet. I samtale med Per Platou forklarer han det teoretiske og praktiske landskapet rundt "Sites such as these". |
|
|
Per Platou/Kunstnett Norge
Jeremy Welsh (f. 1954 i Gateshead i England), er utøvende kunstner og professor ved Kunstakademiet i Trondheim, Intermedia-avdelingen. Han har tidligere blant annet ledet "Film&Video Umbrella" i London, og skrevet diverse tekster om kunst i ulike publikasjoner.
Sites such as these er en virtuell reise gjennom "en tapt visjon om Amerika". Samtidig skapes det i arbeidet en ny geografi gjennom publikums deltagelse i prosjektet.
1. - The big discussion these days is whether "net.art" is or should be considered within the framework of "tactical media". What is "tactical media"?
- The term "tactical media" came about after the first "Next Five Minutes" (N5M) conference in Amsterdam in 1993. In fact the first N5M was concerned with "tactical television" which meant areas like community access television, pirate TV, camcorder television, various forms of independent and alternative television practice that came out of the 70's - 80's video movement in Europe and North America. After the first conference the organisers (Geert Lovink and David Garcia) became more interested in what was happening with the net, hackers etc. and the idea of tactical media developed further.
- You could say that groups/lists like "nettime" and syndicate have developed the thinking further so that today there could be many different interpretations of the notion of tactical media, ranging from projects like http://rtmark.com/ that are appropriating and deconstructing the corporate languages of the commercial web to "real world" meetings and workshops that are aimed at establishing semi-autonomous infrastructure for networked cultural practices. Finally, I'd say that the term "tactical media" is in itself tautological - it is more concerned with tactical methods of appropriating and using media.
2. - Now world-famous projects like http://www.jodi.org and http://m9ndfukc.com clearly show political/media awareness, playing and commenting the art biz circuit, while others say that the "heroic period" of net.art is over, and that the term is now merely a technical/descriptive term for art projects specifically made for the internet. Where does your project fit into this picture?
- I wanted to make a project that was "net specific" but not nerdy or utopian or pessimistic either. The idea of a virtual geography is something that interests me - one of the first discussions on cyberspace we had in Trondheim was a seminar I arranged in '95 under the title "Terra Incognita". I wanted to make a link between the old postcards as historical/archival, but also anecdotal material and the use of email and home pages.
- Earlier Erkki Huhtamo had written about the archeology of virtual travel, in terms of the Victorians, magic lantern shows etc. Postcards function in the same way. There is also a link there to 60's and 70's radical art movements, independent media practices, mail art, fluxus etc. I also wanted to make a project that was inclusive, so that artists and non-artists would feel comfortable being in it. It's basically a communication channel on a fairly simple level. Obviously, I could have incorporated lots of "net art" fireworks to make it more dynamic, but that would have missed the point. It needed to be kept simple.
- Now I am putting together a new project that will open at IKM in Oslo on 19th of August. It is an installation called Re-Drawing - a very simple piece that is again about communication using technology in a direct and simple way. It is interactive not because the technology displays certain behaviors, but because it only makes sense if people use it to interact with each other. So like "Sites such as..." it is intended to be very open, democratic, accessible, but at the same time you can read certain kinds of political reference that have to do with surveillance etc.
3. - As one of the participants in "Sites such as these" I must admit I didn't have a clue how to respond when I first got the "tent city" card (#29) as an invitation to the project, the context was pretty unclear. When I see the project as a whole now, it makes much more sense. I have clicked through a lot of the links from the other artists, and finding the project to be what the author William Gibson would call a "nodal point" - vast, endless but still contained in this somehow 'melancholic' view on California, the dream country, now layered with so much of the internet culture. What does the whole project look like now compared to what it did when you sent out all your empty cards? What kind of map is drawn from your own point of view?
- I also had no clue at the beginning what would happen with the project or how the "map" might evolve. It was partly built on an intuitive thinking process that was based on knowing quite a lot of people in different places who were used to communicating by email, who were interested in the development of forms of art or cultural practice on the net and most of whom would have some kind of a view on the theme of Californian culture.
- As I said in the invitation originally, the collection of postcards was a co-incidental pretext for a project. I'd had thought of them for years and in a way they represented a project waiting to happen. The combination of email and the web provided the perfect chemistry for turning this potential project into a real thing, for letting the material loose in a way, kind of returning it to the field.
- At first the response was quite slow, and a number of people that I was sure would reply straight away in fact never responded at all. When I had only a handful of replies I thought, well I either have to cast the net wider or give up the idea completely - it would just be pathetic to have a handful of respondents in a sort of closed circle. Then something unexpected happened. The invitation went out on a couple of mailing lists and I suddenly got loads of replies from people I'd never heard of, and then I realised that this was the point of the whole thing.
- I needed to let the map draw itself, needed to really let go of my editorial position, my artist position, and open it up for all kinds of possibilities. I think the variety of people who are in there now is quite interesting and they do give this map a certain sense of being linked to certain geographies. For example there are projects that represent opposite ends of the net.art vs. art-presented-on-the-net dichotomy. Some artists with a kind of purist, medium-specific aesthetic of the net, and others who are using it like a shop window, to show off what they do "offline"
- I think it's interesting that you describe it as a melancholic view of California and I guess that is true, despite the fact that the postcards in their original context and meaning are extremely optimistic, touchingly so from a viewpoint tainted by the cynicising currents of late 20c. culture. While they represent the early years of the century and all of the hopes America had for a modern world, the 1999 map that they have been segued into is altogether a darker picture where innocence is completely absent.
- But nevertheless I meant the project as something positive, and I think people for the most part responded in a positive way, so the optimism survives in another form. Maybe it is a map of different expressions of optimism...
4. - Your works have always been strongly connected to vision and images (video/screen-based), even when dealing with abstract texts and poetry. Do you think that we are still able to decode/read multi-layered visual artworks without losing context on the way? And along the same line, do you think audio and tactile navigation will ever become a common way to surf the information waves, like e.g. "Knowbotic Research" predicted a couple of years ago?
- Firstly: Having an education and a background in visual art, the image has always been a starting point for me, even in cases where I have abandoned it in favour of other forms. I think most of the writing I do is very much based on images and I tend to favour the kinds of literature that have a strong sense of the visual. To the second part of the question - I think that the multilayered visual experience has in fact defined a context, has become its own context, one which is made manifest across a range of media forms.
- Most visibly in things like MTV, CD-ROMs, computer games etc. I think that many have acquired skills in reading that type of image, that type of information and they have an innate sense of knowing what its context is. To backtrack some years, when MTV was in its infancy and TV graphics was still an industry waiting to emerge, a lot of artists working with video/electronic images were exploring the multilayered image as a means of breaking the stranglehold of narrative and as a method of deconstructing media images.
- A lot of that practice leaned heavily on earlier developments in experimental film, which itself could be linked to various developments in painting after the second world war. So the line from artist like Rauschenberg or Warhol to a multi-leveled digital image-interface is a very legible one, and this historical development is itself part of the context within which these forms of representation have developed.
- Third point, on auditory and tactile navigation. Yes, absolutely, it is a huge and neglected area. Visual modes of navigation have an unreasonable degree of domination. People who can not see for example, or people who can see but not read, they all need other forms of access to information. Audio, for many practical reasons, is probably closer than tactile methods. The forms of tactile interaction that exist are mostly clumsy, difficult to use, uncomfortable, insensitive, restricting.
- Fun for people who are into sadomachocism but otherwise a frustrating way of interacting with information. But I'd like to see a better integration of the senses in the ways that we navigate media. I deliberately did not use much audio in "Sites such as these", but it would be interesting to do a follow up project that used more audio, and say speech recognition instead of mice and pointers for navigation. By the way, one of the few buts of audio in "Sites..." is something I found by accident and I like it very much. It's a little midi version of "Purple Haze" - very "lo rez" and crummy, but charming (postcard no. 23).
5. - Yeah, I like that one too! But finally (guess we have to wrap up), I have a problem with digital culture in general, not specifically your project, but with the fragmented references, the lack of "common" knowledge of what has happened in the relatively short history of net.art. The problem exists in terms of originality. This question is not a new one, of course, but I still see a massive lack of knowledge among curators. Critically, I'd say that this has led to a situation where net.art or digital artworks in general are very much about marketing/hype, which is exactly what curators and critics hated digital art for just a few years back (re: Electra, E-on, Screens etc...). For example, I have seen works like Atle Barclay's "Whitemail" ten times before, used by hackers, artists, spam-makers. If we choose not to discuss sampling and copyright (done it so many times!), what is "original" art on the net, and what strategy would you suggest for curators and critics in the months and years to come?
- I think this lack of historical knowledge is endemic in contemporary culture, not just media art or net art. "Re-inventing the wheel" seems to be a curse of the contemporary age. As a teacher I often find this hard to deal with. So often art students come up with things that we have seen a hundred times before. But then we should remember that in earlier times, the way you learnt art - or any trade - was to sit in the workshop of a master and copy what he'd already done, so maybe there's no difference of quality, just of scale, at the present time.
- The problem of critics and curators being prepared to deal with net.art is also a question that has arisen before. During the 70's and 80's for example, most museum curators were terrified of the idea of admitting video into the holy quarters of the art museum. They needed verifiable "big artists" like Bill Viola, Nam June Paik and Bruce Naumann to open the doors. Now you see video art by young unknowns being showcased in art museums and often it's a laughable pastiche of things that were done 20 years ago by the first wave of video artists.
- The young artists doing these things are probably quite aware of their references but what is scary is that the curators are often very ignorant. They seem to think they discovered or invented Media Art a couple of years ago. I should not generalise of course. There are some who are very serious, creative people who make the necessary links between artists and public, we need them. As to the question of originality in net art or anything else, I think the jury is going to be out on that one for some time to come.
- Whilst I agree that we don't want to go off on another long discussion of sampling, it's nevertheless true of contemporary culture that you need to "sample in an original way" to make some kind of a mark in re-make culture. What's fascinating about art on the net at the moment is just how much there is of it and how fast it comes and goes - we have arrived at an art that exists for its own time, for a very short time and that poses interesting problems for history.
Per Platou (f.1964) har bakgrunn fra div. alternative media, og startet produksjons- og distribusjonsnettverket dBUT i 1989. Siden 1995 har han jobbet som hybridkunstner i NOOD og MOTHERBOARD med fokus på digital teknologi, popkultur og sosial interaksjon.
|
|
|
|
