neoscenes: texts: net to art

Imagine.

Enter a plain white room with an Other. Take a facing seat one meter apart in not-too-comfortable chairs and follow these instructions: "You have three hours, create a dialogue with each Other." There is no piped-in music, no magazines on coffee tables, no televisions, no mobile phones, no windows. No implements, tools, ethernet connections, or whining hard-drives. And, as this is not an experiment, there is no one watching from behind mirrored glass or by video surveillance.

Start the dialogue.

Imagine, what are the possibilities?

Now, increase the separation to ten meters between you and the Other. Repeat the instructions. What now? Add the mediation of a heavy glass window between; add a microphone and speakers on each side. What happens? Abstractly paint over the glass with opaque pigments. Take away the microphones and speakers, each of you has a pencil and paper to write messages which will then be carried by robotic assistants from one half of the room to the other via a long hallway.

Imagine designing the rooms.

Add the fact that neither of you speaks a common mother tongue, but instead, you must use a third or even fourth language, sometimes relying on a book to supply the proper words.

Imagine building the rooms.

Split the room in half, place the two halves at least 1000 kilometers apart, replace the hallway with a slender wire of glass, you are given the means to throw words, encoded with several layers of machine translation, through the glass wire. Provide keyboards for each to touch, exchange the glass window with a monitor that displays the color, form, sign and symbol of your decoded dialogue.

Imagine several hundred million rooms, a person in each.

What are the dialogues about? Is any one dialogue more valuable than another?

Add an arbitrary team of humans to choose which languages might be used, and which dialogues are more significant than others. Connected through a tree-branching structure of glass wires, have the selected dialogues distributed to all Others.

Go back in the plain white room, sit in one of the chairs and talk about things with an Other.

OPENING CONNECTION

Hard-wired almost directly onto the Finnish Internet backbone here in Helsinki, my first experience of n2art.nu consisted of the message "Netscape is unable to locate the server n2art.nu. Please check the server name and try again." I checked to see if there was a problem with the local DNS (Domain Name System) server, but it appeared that the Internet's command-and-control system was intact. I found out later there were technical problems with a temporary host server the project was using.

Okay, this is nothing new -- just a typical example of Murphy's Law operating on digital-media-based projects -- that at least 50% of the time 50% of them don't work. Technical failure is part of the process and until the Cultural-Industrial sector gets funding like the Military-Industrial sector, triple-redundant systems will be for the war-makers only.

Persisting for several days, I finally made it to the n2art.nu introduction page...

RECEIVING SIGNAL

The Nordic culture scene, with some specific exceptions, has been relatively quiet when compared to central and eastern European cultural networking initiatives. Contentious social issues that often stimulate network-organizing activities elsewhere are largely missing, in part because of the homogeneity of Nordic societies. It is ironic that although the region is drowning in telecommunicative fetish objects and public cultural funding, one does not often encounter a deep practice of cutting-edge networking activity. Because of European-wide state economic policies promoting the Holy Grail of "content," though, it seems that the Nordic Cultural-Industry sector has finally "discovered" network-based activities and the funding is flowing from Ministry-level accounts. We will certainly see many cultural content producers materializing and competing for these funds in the near future. One can only hope that the cash reaches the artists who deserve it!

Materializing in the first wave of this current investment, n2art.nu is a geographically defined vehicle featuring network-based Nordic art projects. It was organized in the midst of the ongoing debate whether or not traditional curation of network-based activity is desirable or even possible. The curatorial committee, with one representative from each Nordic country, took a sensible path by keeping the project development process somewhat transparent. For example, they published a transcript of the curatorial team's opinions on some core issues: this article looks at some of the same issues. The selection process had no thematic criteria, allowing the participating audience to contextualize the included projects based on their own criteria. Anyway, with five curators, agreeing on a theme and actually finding enough work to fit it would have been difficult or impossible.

Cultural institutions and their associated heirarchies of power face an implicit conflict in the task of commodifying the activities and processes of the artist-networker. Hierarchies, by nature, construct static, sterile structures within their hegemonic environment by restricting and channeling the flow of social energy. Ideal networks operate as dynamic and anarchic fields of energy that embody the conditions of natural life -- where energy movements are continuous, multidirectional, and cyclic. As in the case of other mainstream curatorial contact with network-based activities, n2art.nu balances precariously at the intersection of these two elemental social forms. Traditional curatorial strategies closely bound to the physical or definable object-ness of art work fail to recognize that in the network domain, the tangible objects that do appear are often only digital traces of a distributed communicative process: "You had to BE there!"

Curation inherently is a process of targeted exclusion that limits the richness of the networking experience and denies the multiple contexts, conflicts, and cross-disciplinarity that is the networked space. In the collective roar of digitized tera-bytes of information groping their way across the divergent post-Cartesian event horizons, anyone making convergent curatorial reductions should be immediately suspect. It is clear that curation, among many other socio-cultural processes facing the dynamics of the non-hierarchical communicative network space, needs to transform itself.

Long conditioned to be the passive consumers of curatorial production, there is also the significant problem of re-educating the public. Many networking initiatives demand that audiences become active participants in diverse communicative processes. In the end it is a burden that will weigh down artificially organized networking events where, instead of having a "grass-roots" constituency, there is the traditionally detached audience expecting a cultural spectacle. In a way, this is evidence of the self-regulating process that makes heirarchic versus networked structures so difficult to bring into juxtaposition.

Anyway, better to look at the projects included in n2art.nu now and come back to the question of curation later.

FEEDBACK

A quick click-through of all the projects and related hyperlinks revealed a typical range of technological challenges for the potential participant -- long download times, downed servers, plug-ins and specific software needed, and dead links. Murphy's Law is back in action. Although this is often annoying, it is just the way the medium works: technology does not always work! This is not a criticism, only a recognition of the facts. Keep it in mind the next time you board an airplane.

All of the projects fall more-or-less under the operational paradigm where the artist (or group of artists) is creating, designing, and constructing a situation to be located in a networked environment. Within this conceptual space, online participants engage the Other in a mediated dialogue -- sometimes with the creator of the project, with an anonymous, random, or automated Other, or with specific remote individuals.

There are many ways of categorizing the divergent range of the works. Placing them on a scale that measures the operational freedom offered to the participant can provide some insight into the resulting experience of the work. By setting the conceptual limits too narrowly, the artist forces the participant to restrict their creative activity and input. Overly codifying and mediating the encounter with the Other reduces their presence to a marginal feature of the experience. The work, deprived of this energizing presence, falls into the ghetto of static click-through eye-candy -- art-on-the-web -- and fails to activate the unique possibilities of the network. When the situation too open or ambiguous, the participant ends up floating without orientation in the online digital limbo. Of course, limits are subjective, relative, and different for each participant and each situation might have intrinsic value. The issue is how to balance technical, psychological, conceptual, and social possibilities and limitations across the flux of users.

Emma23, by Thomas Broomé, and play.ground, by Kevin Foust, both take full advantage of the chaotic "ready-made" richness of the Internet environment. By tapping in on the global IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network (Emma23) and the killer-application power of email (play.ground), the "author" remains very much in the background and conceptually provides the participant great freedom of action. Both works are open-ended and easy to understand, although a basic familiarity with IRC is necessary in the case of Emma23 and with standard free web-based email services in the case of play.ground. Their conceptual strength is in their simplicity and the potential for encountering the raw life force of the network -- text-based communications between disembodied individuals. Emma23, a 'bot (programmed text-based conversationalist) raises the users experience from the normal flow of chat to a psychological playground in which the informed participant may interact with mystified onlookers or just lurk around to see what develops.

Discussion.is, by Thóroddur Bjarnason and 10thCity: share life, by the katastro.fi collective, are both projects that expect the participant to actively seek out a collaborative Other -- within a particular conceptual framework that might be difficult to immediately understand. This initial conceptual learning curve places an additional responsibility on the author(s) -- that they must act as facilitators -- a deeper role that must involve the be-ing of both the author and the participant. It is an active role that does not end with a simple explanation of how to proceed. In the process leading to the network deployment of these two situations, the artists did not focus enough attention on how to facilitate the involvement of a community of participants. Personally, I know that the artists involved in these two projects do not naively assume that once the work is on the Internet that people will magically participate. Nevertheless, the fact is, it takes a massive amount of attention and energy to develop a networked community -- the very thing that sustains and vitalize such projects. This is not a process solved by adding figures to the budget, either. It is a personal process that is at least as important as the technical construction of the environment itself. It demands a dynamic and possibly life-changing extension onto the conceptual space itself.

Páll Thayer's Sólarlag illustrates the fact that network-based projects have a life span and developmental time-line that is fundamentally different from traditional curatorial objects. The artist's concept and construction of the situation leading up to the release into public space is only a beginning. Similar to the previous two projects, the author must then actively construct a viable network of participants -- a network that carries the work forward. As a long-time networker, Thayer will probably make Sólarlag succeed in a certain social dimension, but for several reasons, technical implementation will continue to be a source of severely limiting problems.

In all three of the previous works, the richness of the resulting collective database of experience and by the resonant depth of the human network that is established is the clearest measure of success.

Musical collaboration located within telecommunication networks is not a new idea, but given the natural possibilities of audio expression, it remains a fertile field for experimentation that Peter Fjeldberg digs into in his work, Molecubes. Unfortunately when trying to participate I was repeatedly told that the "Region is fully populated" -- and at that point, I gathered that I could only participate as a listener. After navigating around in the space for ten minutes trying to find an unpopulated region and hearing a variety of oscillating tones, somebody poked their head into my workspace and asked politely if everything was okay. I said yes. There is nothing like having a dialogue when, as in a dream, you speak but no sound comes from your mouth, while the Other is humming a tune and you can't quite remember its name.

Apparently an online prototype of a corporate prototype-design process, it is not clear whether servoline_1/urbantoys by Servo is or is not prototypical. There are many net-based projects that subversively take on corporate forms, identities, and paradigms -- etoy, needweb, and ®™ark come immediately to mind as examples -- so the idea of subversively acting like one is not being subversive seems like a novel and almost amusing strategy. They even automated the download and installation of the Cult3D plug-in (without user authorization, mind you) -- now that is subversive! My browser crashed immediately. When I finally made it back to the project, I was able to design a prototype selected from their product-line and have it physically produced and shipped to me via DHL for several hundred dollars. I decided not to give my Visa card number. The servoline_1 interface plays with the idea of creation and distribution of material objects via networked systems. However, in the end, do we really need more design, production, and consumption of urban toys in the world?

In One Minute Movies by Oncotype, the experience of the Other is so highly mediated and the degrees of freedom so limited that the resulting experience, compared with play.ground, seems like a vague one-liner. Please let me know if I am missing something important.

With free access to a 200mps connection, I had fun watching the balloons inflate and the public transportation go by the window in Tore Nilsson's piece, The Way That You Love Me. Somehow, though, it is a little hard to imagine interacting with this work via a dial-up line, paying by the minute. A balloon or two popping might have stimulated my interest, but that never happened; actually I had no sense of connecting with anyone at all. The thought crossed my mind that the mere presence of technologically networked space is not a de facto reason for artists to work there -- some projects might translate better off into traditional physical situations or installations. I wondered if Nilsson should have at least put the installation in his home, next to the breakfast table or at the head of the bed -- at least not in a gallery space sterilized by remote absence.

CLOSING CONNECTION

The mechanics of creating "interactive" situations in a technologically networked space is often so complex that little energy is left over to position the work critically in the ever-changing context. By context, I mean specifically the matrix of ideas that the work is developing within. In the case of network-based activities, the matrix is the rapidly developing social environment that is expressing itself through communications networks. This environment is a direct extension of the "normal" social milieu; its expression in networked spaces is an accumulation of a broad range of social activities. For this reason, I agree fundamentally with Saskia Sassen's sentiments (expressed a year ago in Tallinn at the "Interstanding 3" conference,) that the contextual "meaning" of networked spaces lies in the accumulation of all practices taking place within it. This idea implicitly reflects a theme of inclusion, and suggests, at the very least, multiple curatorial and critical voices in dialogue.

It is not only cultural producers, but the artists as well who needs to maintain a critical dialogue with this broad inclusive context and the probable results of the participative encounter by staying actively tuned into their own social networks. Interested in exploring networked space as the locus for creative action, they must develop a deep understanding of what a human network actually is and how it functions. Without dynamic and distributed feedback during the personal creative process, there is a definite risk that the work will not fulfill initial intentions.

On the question of curatorial contact between the artist-networker and cultural institutions, there is no answer. Purists who insist that no curation can or should take place -- that curation is a deadly strike against the nature of network-based art projects -- are probably taking the situation too seriously. On the other hand, artists who are constructing creative network-based projects (and networks) need to critically examine the impact of heirarchic institutions on their working methods and goals. This is especially important in the Nordic region where state patrimony is not just a passive feature of the cultural landscape: it supports a vast range of creative activities. The artificial constraints that heirarchic organizations inevitably impose may cause serious damage to a natural network.

One of the best curatorial alternatives, expressed by Perttu Rastas, senior Media Art curator at KIASMA, is for cultural institutions to support development for open-platform environments -- temporary or semi-permanent situations that are relatively free of traditional curatorial limitations -- that foster the creation of new ideas, initiatives, and procedures.

In the end, individual humans make up both heirarchies and networks and it eventually comes down to how these individuals interact -- either through distributed open-source channels, or centralized "black-box" control. Assuming that they understand and develop the project, I would challenge the new hosts for n2art.nu, NIFCA (the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art based in Helsinki), to have all future curatorial dialogues and discussions recorded for distribution on the NIFCA web site via Real Video. Networkers know this concept of sympathetic "full disclosure" of personal process is a powerful energy flux that initiates and sustains human connection like no other single action. This energy directly feeds back into the network to keep it healthy. Ideally speaking, if all the humans involved in cultural processes establish and maintain deep communicative pathways with each other, a radical restructuring of the social landscape will result. Otherwise it will be, literally, business as usual.

Build a white room, find a couple chairs, find the Other, and keep talking, keep doing.

Imagine that.

Helsinki, 04.December.2000

John Hopkins is nomadic networking artist and educator moving across northern latitudes. You may reach him at jhopkins (at) uiah.fi. Information at http://neoscenes.net.