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Raiders of the Lost ArtBase
During March and April 2005, Michael Connor tunneled through the
Rhizome ArtBase, hunting for buried treasures both ancient and new.
Once a week, he posted his findings on this weblog, and kept a list of
bookmarks online at http://del.icio.us/connor/artbase.
The Rhizome ArtBase is an online archive of more than 1400 new media
artworks. The archive has been nearly six years in development. If you
want to have a look, check out Rhizome.org for a free trial.
It’s a big night:
my last post to Raiders of the Lost ArtBase, Liverpool beating Chelsea
in the European Cup semifinals. I’ve recently decided to move to
London, and so I’m retroactively reinventing myself as a Liverpool fan.
Just so I can really wind up all those flash Chelsea types down South.
After the match tonight, I got to shake Rafa Beni’s hand. I’ll never
walk alone.
In a recent talk at FACT, Vito Acconci
said that what drew him from writing to art in the late 60s was its
status as a ‘non-field field’. Likewise, I was initially attracted to
new media art because of its status as a field that enjoyed that same
‘non-field’ status, a sphere of activity without rigidly defined
borders, coming from multiple origins and headed for uncertain
territory. Yet many of us in the field are now making attempts to throw
the boundaries of this field into sharp focus, creating more
transparent frameworks for understanding the History of New Media and
How to Curate New Media. These days, it seems like everyone’s asking,
‘where are we now?’ and ‘how did we get here?’ instead of ‘where do we
go from here?’
Maybe these are the right questions to ask.
Nabokov said, ‘the future is but the obsolete in reverse.’ Smithson
used this quote when he talked about his favourite subject, entropy -
the tendency of organised systems to disintegrate over time. Entropy is
a subject that computer types know well. It is a force that affects my
inbox, my desktop, and my drawer o’ CDs. While many people in new media
art simply want to revel in this entropic drift, others think it might be a good idea to get organised.
Despite
the problems of historicisation, the new media salvage heap is yielding
plenty of interesting stuff. While new media types have been
prominently implicated in proposing futures based on techno-utopias or
sophisticated control systems, the idea of proposing a future in which
a ragtag band of digital misfits are left to wade through ruins of
hardware and software civilisations past in search of meaning seems to
be more recent on the scene. This dream of extracting use from
obsolescence intersects nicely with nostalgia for the machines of my
youth in the work of TreeWave, a band based in Dallas, Texas created by
Paul Slocum and Lauren Gray.
‘The band uses unique
instrumentation: music is performed using obsolete computer equipment
for instruments. Currently they are using a 1977 Atari 2600 game
console, a 1986 portable 286 PC, a 1983 Commodore 64 computer, and a
1985 Epson dot matrix printer. The equipment runs custom music software
written by Paul designed specifically for the band.’
One of
these unique instruments, Paul’s Dot Matrix Synth, can be found in the
Rhizome ArtBase. The printer generates different notes by using special
software to adjust the frequency of the printing process. ‘Higher
pitches tend to come from the firing of the pins against the paper, and
lower pitches come from the rattle of driving the stepper motor.’ The
result are a range of noises that will make you look at that old
printer in the back of your closet in a whole new way. Paul’s interest
in obsolete technologies doesn’t carry over into an interest obsolete
music. TreeWave’s sound is electro pop, but in a genre where everyone’s
trying to be the first to guess the new hip sound (the 606? 808? 909?
666?), TreeWave is playing by their own rules.
Paul Slocum’s ArtBase entry
the Dot Matrix Synth
TreeWave’s home page
Thanks to alert reader Lauren Cornell for suggesting Paul Slocum’s work for this blog!
**
I
guess that wraps it up for this blog. It’s been funny over the past few
weeks how many times people have said to me ‘hey, I’ve seen your blog’,
and how many times I’ve asked people, ‘have you seen my blog?’ The blog
is the filofax of our times, a true status symbol, but blogging is hard
work too - especially for someone who revises their writing as
compulsively as I do. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to tell my
friends ‘I can’t hang out, I have to work on my blog’ so often, it’s
become a running joke. So it’s time to bring all this to a succinct
close. And here it is:
The obsolete holds the key to the future. We must excavate our path forward from yesterday’s remains.
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Ian Haig is a
complicated man. A lot of his artwork seems to be made of sex toys,
which he displays at booths at porn industry get-togethers. The front
page of his website shows a photo of Hugh Hefner looking at said artwork while sipping a bourbon & coke. Pamela Anderson figures largely in another of his submissions to the ArtBase.
‘Men of the Internet‘
is a bit different from the Pamela Anderson one, I’m afraid. It’s
basically a collection of photos of men harvested from the web. Haig’s
taste in men is somewhat unusual. They’re nearly all white, and (in the
artist’s words) ‘have had their bodies literally transformed and
modified as a result of prolonged computer use… bigger brains,
protruding craniums and enhanced eyesight with enormous glasses.’
The
men in Haig’s collection represent a classic teen movie archetype - the
nerd, scorned by society at large, who resorts to technology to become
more powerful/rich/strong/athletic than his classmates. In this day and
age, nerds live the teen movie dream by starting a blog and catapulting
themselves from the lowly depths of geekdom to become iconic übergeek pundits with 40,000 readers a day.
In
the course of their incredible rise to greatness on the world wide web,
these men have clearly forgotten one of the great possibilities
afforded by cyberspace: on the Internet, nobody has to know you’re a dog.
In response to this cartoon from the New Yorker, Art McGee famously asked, what’s wrong with being a dog? This, Art, is what’s wrong with being a dog:
Using
this blog for the purpose of ridiculing others is a bit Vice
Magazine-y. I hope I haven’t taken too many points off your IQ.
Ian Haig’s ArtBase entry
Men of the Internet
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It’s a gross rainy day in Liverpool I didn’t finish my homework (this blog) last night. Squelch.
It
was only a matter of time before I wrote about MIDI music projects on
this page. Today, that time has come. MIDI has OG status because it was
the first audio format to take off on the web. The quality may have
been crappy, but it took only moments to download a MIDI track on even
a really slow connection. Things have gotten a lot fancier since those
days, but there are plenty of people out there who still love the way
MIDIs sound. Eddo Stern, for example, has a huge collection of MIDI pop songs. That he listens to. Just for fun.
Cool.
Another MIDI lover is Jack Stockholm of Oddible.com. Jack has made a website called The Web Midifier,
which converts any web page into MIDI music - mostly horrible, atonal
MIDI music, at that. It literally converts the characters on a page
into musical notes. As an experiment, I tried making a MIDI file out of
this page, which is that awful racket that you’re hearing right now if
your speakers are turned up. Before we go any further, I have to
apologize to my parents about this. Yesterday on the phone they told me
they have to look at this website from the public library because it
takes too long to load on their dialup connection. This MIDI file is
only going to make matters worse. Sorry, Mom & Dad.
(UPDATE - I’ve now taken the MIDI file off the site because it was driving me nuts. You can still listen to it here if you want.)
The
funny thing about MIDIs is that they’re having a bit of a rebirth as
the source material for cheesy mobile phone ringtones. You can actually
make these ringtones yourself using another piece in the ArtBase, Freeloader, by Katie Lips and Paul Stringer.
I used Freeloader to turn my MIDI file into a polyphonic ringtone
for my phone. You’re welcome to download it to your phone too, if you
have bluetooth or WAP. Next time I get a phone call, I’ll be the most
popular person in the office!
Because they’re so crap, MIDI files are in a kind of copyright gray area. It IS illegal to host a MIDI version of Battle of Evermore,
for example, on your web page, but nobody seems to really CARE that
much. If you use Freeloader to turn that MIDI file into a ringtone,
though, then you’ll be cutting into someone’s market share. Tsk, tsk.
Freeloader is a project that FACT commissioned, so yes, this is blatant self-promotion.
oddible’s ArtBase Entry
The Web MIDIfier
Katie Lips’ ArtBase Entry
Freeloader
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Using the Wayback machine, I put together a list of splash pages
that appeared on rhizome.org in 2000 and 2001. This may not be
comprehensive, so please feel free to leave a comment if there were any
omissions.
Some of these splash pages - JODI’s
in particular - seemed to be doing everything in their power to prevent
visitors from actually gaining access to the site itself. Ah, the good
old days.
Thanks to anniea for making this suggestion in the comments from my first post!
Rhizome splash pages 2000-2001
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Joao Simoes might be a genius.
Between
January and May of 2003, he traveled through the backwaters and country
lanes of the web looking for moments of true web zen. His goal: to be
the first visitor to an apparently active web page, as evidenced by the
page’s hit counter. For example:
The hit counter is definitely a relic of the early web. Olia Lialina may have missed a trick in her text about the vernacular web.
True headz don’t use them any more - now that we have fancy tools like
Webalizer, the little clicker doesn’t have quite the same appeal it
used to. Maybe this is because they were abused by people who ‘padded’
them by a few hundred thousand here or there. If I see a stat counter
reading anything over 136, then I get suspicious. But to find a
brand-spanking-new, never-been-hit counter? That’s purely quixotic. Did
the site’s creator never look at their own page? Didn’t the webmaster
know to start the counter at 53,042 instead of zero? Was the page never
visited by the Google bot?
In spite of the challenges, I can
understand why Simoes went on this search. These pages have never
before been seen by human eyes. It’s like excavating King Tut’s tomb or
something - the thrill of discovery. And if you’re lucky, this thrill
can one day be yours. I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. I’m
inserting a web counter in this blog post. The next visitor will see
that big number one roll up on your screen. Whoever you are, could you
leave a comment and tell us how it made you feel, so we can live
vicariously through you?
Free Hit Counter
The
temptation to check the results is going to be enormous, but if I check
them before someone else visits the page, it’s going to ruin
everything. This is a bit like Schrodinger’s cat experiment. The cat
would be locked in a room with a radioactive isotope, doomed to die at
some indeterminate point in time. According to Schrodinger, the cat’s
state in the locked room was exactly alive AND dead; until I visit the
page again, the hitcounter’s state will be exactly zero AND one. Whoa.
While
we’re on the subject of the number one, it’s worth pointing out that
Google’s number one search result for the search term ‘number one’ (in quotes) is The Onion. What’s that all about?
Also, please note that I love cats and would never dream of locking one in a room with a radioactive isotope.
#1
Joao Simoes’ ArtBase entry
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‘The ultimate
American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in…a
consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he
lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in
a real world, while all the people around him are effectively actors
and extras in a gigantic show.’
Slavoj Zizek
wrote these words in the days following 9/11, capturing the zeitgeist
of our time. The fantasy that life is a simulacrum infuses both pop
culture (The Matrix) and real-life battle (The roof, the roof, the roof
is on fire).
Microsoft, like Zizek, seems to know a thing or two about zeitgeist these days. In 2004, they launched a marketing campaign called ILOVEBEES
that mixed online gaming with meatspace gatherings, cryptic telephone
messages, and hidden clues in unexpected spaces. The campaign was of a
genre known as an ‘alternate reality game.’
Because the edges
of the game’s magic circle are not defined, the alternate reality game
feeds the paranoiac fantasy that ‘all the world’s a stage’. The
inevitable result is that players trawl the web (and, perhaps, the
world at large) looking for hidden clues. In this search, the game
found a website called capitALLism.org,
a site run by lefty activists whose site probably expressed a healthy
level of paranoia of its own. (Although in their case, this paranoia is
not based on some stupid video game, but on the massive right-wing
conspiracy that controls everything).
For some reason, players
of ILOVEBEES became convinced that capitALLism were a part of the
narrative of the game. After some initial resistance, the makers of the
site realised the creative/political potential of being able to shape
the game play, from the inside. Hijinks ensued, and you can read all
about it on their excellent documentation pages.
The moral of
the story is that it pays to be the conspiracy theorist who’s in the
right place at the right time. But you have to have a thick skin: one
ILOVEBEES player bases capitALLism’s claim to authenticity on the fact
that it is a ’strange rantings from suspiciously well-organized and
well-designed fringe elements.’
Be proud, capitALLism. You’ve really reached them.
capitALLism’s ArtBase entry
ILOVEBEES: The Reality of Alternate Reality
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If you’re worried
about your web searching becoming too efficient, and you long for the
days when a search for ’sore throat’ would lead you to a website about
rock gardening, then I have a handy tip for you: use Google image
search whenever you need to find something on the web. It’s the best
way to insert that element of uncertainty and danger that we all crave.
But be careful: it may be addictive.
During the past week of
searching the Rhizome ArtBase, I rediscovered Beat Brogle &
Philippe Zimmermann’s project ‘onewordmovie’, which may be the best
Google image search hack going. The premise is simple: type in a
keyword, hit the ’search’ button, and the site will run a Google image
search and make an animated video from the results. The video is
stitched together from still images according to a predetermined
pattern of loops and repetitions. Searches for any kind of round
object, from ‘oreo’ to ‘jupiter’ tend to be graphically very pleasing,
but check out the list of favourite searches on the onewordmovie
website for some real blockbusters. ‘What is Life?’ is one of the best
- the images fit together so naturally in sequence, it hardly seems
accidental.
onewordmovie is so much fun, it makes me want to
ask the banal question posed by the philistine tabloids about Tracey
Emin and Turner Prize nominees: how is this art? Is it just another
clever Google hack? Plenty of image search hacks have come up on delicious,
the source of all weird and wonderful things on the web, but none of
these can be found in the ArtBase. (If I do a onewordmovie search for
‘Rothko’, does that make it art?)
In an accompanying text for the exhibition ‘Database Imaginary’,
Steve Dietz quoted Maurizio Cattelan saying ‘It is good for the artist
to insinuate himself into the open mesh of any system — not in a
provocative and visible way, but mimetically, using their same
mediums.’ This quote does beggar belief, coming from the man whose public art project in Milan was taken down by an outraged member of the public within 27 hours, but point taken.
In
sum: the best art projects on the net may be the ones that aren’t
obviously Art. And, I promise never to bore you like this again.
Beat Brogle & Philippe Zimmermann’s ArtBase entry
onewordmovie
Technical note: before you can launch the movie window, you’ll need to install Shockwave Player.
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Last week, I
wrote about Olia Lialina, who praises the clunkiness and slowness of
the early web as a feature, not a bug. The dusty corners of the 90s web
yielded the kind of surprises that led to comparisons between web
surfing and the Situationist idea of the derivé: ‘locomotion without a
goal’. The derivé was a playful, political urban critique;
Situationists would practice it by navigating Paris, for example, with
a map of London, just to discover hidden back alleys and bistros. Just
for the sheer hell of it. Surfing the web can be kind of like that too
- plenty of hidden back alleys and treasures, and where you end up
might not have much to do with where you thought you were going.
Lately,
the web is looking a lot more like the M25 than 1960s Paris, (Note to
the non-Brits: the M25 is a big motorway, or ‘highway’, around London).
Some artists are looking at the speed and traffic of the web for
inspiration, rather than its weird forgotten bits. The idea that a
website or email can be spread through a potential audience of
thousands or even millions in a relatively short amount of time is a
seductive possibility, and many people have set to work trying to
master the gestalt of the viral online project.
My favourite
discovery of the week investigates the space inhabited by these ‘viral’
projects after their short lifespan has ended. ‘Cyberzoo’
is ‘the first zoo dedicated to the artificial life.’ Argentine artist
Gustavo Romano is developing a collection of what he considers to be
the most endangered life forms of the web. So far, the zoo’s residents
are all computer viruses. Each specimen is accompanied by a description
of the virus, and some have a nice recreation of the virus in action so
you don’t have to destroy your old Windows98 machine in order to have a
look.
Romano’s artist statement is also well worth a read. If
ideas are organisms like viruses, he writes, then art gives these
viruses life after their human carriers have died.
Now I have to go get on an airplane, see you next week.
Cyberzoo
Gustavo Romano’s ArtBase entry
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Not long after I posted my last message, Olia Lialina posted a text to the ArtBase called A Vernacular Web.
It picks up on some of the themes of the amateur web raised by ‘Zombie
& Mummy’, and it makes the argument that the ‘under construction’
banners and outer space backgrounds that used to rule the Internet were
part of a cultural moment that is now disappearing (or going
underground), for better or worse. Personally, I only ever had access
to a text-only browser until 1996. With a text-only browser, images
wouldn’t show up on my screen. Instead, the browser would list the
names of image files, and I remember wondering what delights were
hidden behind names like starback.gif. OK, let’s be honest, I probably would have been more interested in the earthly delights of boobs.gif.
Lialina
reminds us that the great thing about the old days of the web was that
we were ALL idiot geniuses. Every page we made reinvented the form from
scratch, and every time we logged on was a new adventure. (Remember Superbad?)
There *was* something special about that time, but rosy nostalgia might
make us forget that the web has always been a contested territory. The
animated ‘under construction’ gif may have been an art form unto
itself, but in the nineties, it’s worth remembering that CompuServe
held a patent on the GIF file format and that a website could be made
to pay a small fee for each time such an image was downloaded.
In
a nicely symmetrical turn of events, that patent has expired in time
for the practice of reinventing the amateur web to come into its own.
Pages of animated gifs no longer indicate that you’re naïve, they show
the world that you’re a cultural historian ahead of the curve. One
example is Sinae Kim, an artist based in Seoul, who writes in her ArtBase profile,
‘I honestly think art is not that serious some people or scholars
always define.’ She’s definitely on to some kind of zeitgeist with
‘What’s Your Icon?’ (2005). The artist presents the piece on the
ArtBase with a statement that romps through religious iconography, mass
media imagery, and interface design that seems to undercut her claims
of populism, but the site is super awesome. Turn your techno up loud,
are you ready? OK, now
click.
If
you’re still reading this, that means you probably didn’t follow
instructions. ‘What’s Your Icon?’ is s a collage of animated gifs which
have been collected, not made, and collaged with elements of the
Windows Desktop. (No, it’s not chaotic, it’s deconstructivist!) Don’t
worry, you won’t get lost, there are only four pages in the piece, and
there’s only one way through.
Sinae Kim seems to be on to the same animated gif collection as artist collective Paper Rad. Paper Rad also used this beating heart gif in their ‘Welcome to My Home Page’ video (2003). There’s a nice bit of Mickey Mouse piracy in there as well. I ask you, is the real moment of the amateur web happening right now?
OK, turn the techno off, put Rod Stewart back on, and get back to work.
Sinae Kim’s Rhizome ArtBase entry
What’s Your Icon? (2005)
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When I
recommended Drax to do the design for this blog, I should’ve known what
would happen. There you sit; on the left side of your screen is an
amazing fairyland of birdies and dinosaur bones and treasure, and on
the right side of your screen is me blathering about net art. Good
grief.
Drax (co-producer of Maxi German Rave Blast Hits 3)
isn’t on the ArtBase, but Olia Lialina (Grandmother of Net Art) is, and
the two of them are the brains behind Rhizome ArtBase entry number
28592, Zombie & Mummy.
Zombie
& Mummy are two badly-drawn characters living an unexamined life.
They travel abroad, but end up spending the trip watching MTV after
spending all their money on pirated DVDs; they set out to make a family
tree, but end up drawing a squirrel. The site seems partly about the
artists’ semi-ironic enjoyment of their own imperfections, and partly a
send-up of the amateur web itself.
My favourite episode is ‘Make a Home Page’, where you can look through Zombie & Mummy’s bookmarks, which include a link to a page described as ‘Some Nice Bla-Bla Sites’.
(caution: a lot of the bla-bla sites have now disappeared. Try the 2nd
& 5th from the top, these seem to still work.) When I first saw
this, I thought it was a work of outsider dadaist genius. It was only
like a year later that I realised that it was part of Alexei Shulgin’s
site. And then I KNEW it was a work of outsider dadaist genius.
Olia Lialina’s ArtBase entry
Zombie & Mummy website
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Text by Michael Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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Cmon, this cannot be all already!!
Or, as the architect Rem Koolhaas says: “Cyclic restatement of a single theme: creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked, endlessly reenacted. Barbarism giving way to refinement.” Maybe there’s more to Prada than we think.
The question is whether the cyclical narrative of ‘restatement of a single theme’ is an adequate excuse for a society’s failure to articulate a compelling vision of the future…