Writer's Archive
Artist Interviews
Exchange via e-mail with Ilya Eric Lee, Taipei/Taiwan
By Geert Lovink, 2001
Interview with Yukiko Shikata, Canon Art Lab
By Geert Lovink, 2000
Interview with Young-hae Chang HEAVY INDUSTRIES
By Molly Hankwitz, 2000
Young-hae Chang: Progress Report MAAP99
Tina Gonsalves: Progress Report MAAP99
Rick Vermey: Progress Report MAAP99
Reviews
MAAP01 EXCESS Review, Real Time Magazine
December 2001 (posted 7 december)
by Douglas Leonard
MAAP2000 Review Metro Screen Magazine
by Anne Kennedy
Press Archive
Conference Papers
Niranjan Rajah : MAAPing
a Virtual Geography - presented at Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific
Forum, Brisbane, 1999.
(work in progress to post archived conference papers)
MAAPing A Virtual Geography
Key-note paper at 2nd Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific Forum, APT3,
Brisbane, 1999
Niranjan Rajah Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts Universiti
Malaysia Sarawak
ABSTRACT
With reference to the ancient art of picture recitation, this
paper first argues that history provides the basis for a universal
theory of convergence - one that will transcend the present technocentric
view, one that is more meaningful from an Asian and an Asia Pacific
perspective. It then examines the technological hegemonies, virtual
boundaries, transgeographical strategies and the dissemination
of radical information on the Internet. It looks at sacred 'sites',
site specific 'installations', regional networking and warns of
an emerging techno-orientalism. This paper presents two new sites
- 'PostScript' at - http://neptune.spaceports.com/~ps/ An on-line
forum for institutional critique in the visual arts and E-ART
ASEAN ONLINE at http://www.freespeech.org/eartasean/index.html
an interactive resource for electronic art in South East Asia.
It will consist of a comprehensive DATABASE of new media art including
profiles of artists and samples of artworks, a JOURNAL dealing
with the historical development of electronic art in South East
Asia, theoretical and critical issues related to the use of electronic
media in the visual arts as well as reviews and analysis of electronic
artworks. The site will also host an Internet discussion arena
or FORUM as well as index LINKS to related websites world-wide
and, eventually, a WEBART space. This site is being developed
at the Faculty of Applied And Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia
Sarawak.
MAAPing A Virtual Geography
Towards A Universal Theory Of Convergence
Beginning with the inspired realization that the computer's facility
for numerical manipulation could be applied to expedite what we
have come to refer to as 'word processing' all categories of representation
have ceded to the digital domain. The differences which arose
from the physical particularities of the various materials of
analog representation have been leveled in the reductive and integrative
logic of the silicon chip, which has introduced an unprecedented
degree of integration and interpenetration in all arenas of human
endeavour. Thus far this 'convergence' has been understood in
terms of technological advancement. However, an excavation of
precedents in the 'history of multimedia', might yield the basis
for a more universal construction of the 'new' representational
paradigm. Technology aside, the various disciplines of the arts
are in the process of merging. In the visual arts, for instance,
the traditional categories of 'painting' and 'sculpture' have
been extended to incorporate text, performance, video and an expanded
range of media and approaches. In contemporary Installation Art,
the space and architecture of the gallery or other site as well
as the social, political, historical, theoretical and critical
contexts of the work are all treated as objects of the presentation,
while in contemporary Performance art, a branch of the visual
arts, live bodily gestures are employed to take form and concept,
emotion and critique directly to the audience, outside the confines
of the gallery and beyond the proscenium arch!
Looking further back to the Chinese Pien Wen or 'transformation
text', Victor Mair reveal's the global development of the ancient
'multi-media' tradition of story-telling. To 'perform' a Pien
Wen, the narrator makes use of a 'transformation picture' or a
'turning transformation' (picture scroll). Mair's thesis is that
this tradition originated in India, spread to East and West Asia
and the Middle East and then on into Europe[1]. It is in this
integration of 'painting and performance' - wayang beber in Java,
par in Gujarat, etoki in Japan, parda-dar in Iran and so on, that
we should locate the origins of multimedia. Indeed, anyone accustomed
to enunciating their ideas with the aid of 'Power Point' projections,
will empathise with the argument that the Asian picture recitation
is the primordial form of multimedia. Perhaps, it is in a reconsideration
of this ancient tradition as well as of other analog precedents
that we will find the insight and perspective from which to comprehend
the wider implications of digital multimedia.
Hegemonies And Boundaries In Cyberspace
Today, as a consequence of increased computing power and high
speed computer networks, 'multimedia' representations can be conveyed
with unprecedented fluidity. Indeed, the near instantaneous connectivity
of computer mediated communications seems to have eliminated geographical
distance as all 'points' on the Internet exist in virtual proximity.
Surely, this must signal the end of geographically rooted notions
of community, culture, economics, politics and even art. Indeed,
the Internet is a new kind of terrain, one that transcends geography
- a 'cyber-terrain', whose 'frontiers' are being 'opened up' and
in which 'claims' are being 'staked'. In the course of this communications
revolution and the ascendance of multinational capital and global
news and entertainment networks in our new world order, geographical
specificity is being displaced by global scenarios in all areas
of human activity. Indeed, accelerated by the use of computer
mediated communications, all economic variables in the global
economy now fluctuate to the rhythms of powerful international
players and the devastating effects of free flowing speculative
capital has been felt right across Asia with repercussions in
the wider Asia pacific region.
Just like national economic and financial systems, local cultures
cannot resist the onslaught of information that ensues from globalization.
Satellite television and Computer Mediated Communication are opening
domestic leisure markets to international marketing. Cultural
differences are receding as a transnational 'media machine' homogenizes
the values and tastes of audiences around the globe. While the
Internet offers the potential for the cultivation of difference,
an assessment of information flows on the Internet reveals a heavy
movement out of the United States, in contrast with a less voluminous
flow in, consisting mainly of requests for information. Indeed,
a study of the computer network infrastructure of the world reveals
the centrality and supremacy of North America in this era of global
communications. It can be said that these communications infrastructures
are 'Roman roads' of the virtual empire we call the new world
order. In 1996, with the aim of indexing the cultural geography
latent in this cyber-terrain, I produced a web work - 'The Failure
of Marcel Duchamp/ Japanese Fetish Even!' [2]. Apart from a critique
of European aesthetics, this parody of Marcel Duchamp's 'Etant
Donnes', attempts to mark the problem of cultural constituencies
in the Internet. The work has an erotic element that is unacceptable
on Malaysian servers and so the site was located on a server in
Germany. Yet, it directly addresses a Malaysian audience in a
society in which sexually explicit materials are purportedly taboo.
The sense of 'geography' is heightened with the installation of
internet terminals in Malaysian art spaces, so surfers can decide
whether or not to access 'inappropriate' content, transgress cultural
taboos and undermine national obscenity legislation under public
scrutiny.
Radical Information And Transgeographical Strategies
The ubiquity of the Internet is due to the meta-connectivity
of its Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The TCP/IP
suite has the ability to interconnect networks that use different
local protocols, while also allowing networks linked by other
internetworking protocols to connect with the Internet, forming
the wider 'matrix' of Computer Mediated Communication [3]. The
genius of this protocol is its ability to ensure that messages
are relayed from one computer to another, even when parts of the
network are inoperative. Any deliberate attempt to restrict the
passage of information is circumvented by TCP/IP, quite simply,
as if it were 'damage'. The result is that all information on
the Internet is instantaneously and globally accessible, regardless
of compatibility with local laws and values. In Malaysia's bid
to leap from rapid industrialization into the global information
economy our government has embraced the free flow of information
on Internet. In contradiction to our approach to print and broadcast
media, with regard to the Internet, it has been recognised that
in the interest of development, government control over information
might have to be set aside. In the course of the current political
struggle in Malaysia, trans-geographical Internet strategies have
been instrumental in the battle to win hearts and minds as well
as in the mobilization of crowds on the streets. Using servers
outside national jurisdiction, the 'Reformasi' movement has kept
networked Malaysians informed (and misinformed) of the ongoing
crisis [4]. Indeed, the internet has been used to propagate what
might be called 'radical information', in order to undermine the
state hegemony of the media and even change the dynamics of the
Malaysian political process.
Of course it is not only the despotic governments of the developing
world that control the dissemination of information. There are
many forms of censorship and control of information in societies
all over the world. The Internet offers us the possibility of
cutting through these barriers and of making critical reflection
an unavoidable part of cultural and political life. Newly online
is 'PostScript' [5], a forum for institutional critique in the
visual arts. The forum begins with 'Dickheads, White Australia,
Theory And Me: An Asian at the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial'.
This article was commissioned from me by the editor of 'Eyeline'
in 1996, after my presentation of a paper [6] at the 'Present
Encounters Conference' of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial. That
paper had dealt critically with the politics of representation
in the emerging regional arenas for art and I was invited by 'Eyeline'
to produce more of the same. After acknowledging receipt of the
finished article in November 1996, 'Eyeline' abruptly terminated
communications with me. Despite making several telephone calls,
I was unable to speak to the editor and received neither a reason
for rejection nor a payment for my submission. I assume the article
was not published and imagine that it was rejected because of
the sensitive nature of its contents. The ideas in the article,
which seemed so urgently in need of expression in the wake of
the second APT, seems relevant once again as artists of the region
engage in the fanfare, festivities and forums of the APT3. Thanks
to the interactive and inherently libertarian nature of the Internet,
I am able to publish this 'radical information', and invite discussion,
overcoming the stifling effects of editorial censorship.
The 'Site'
The traditional Hindu view relegates physical and psychological
existence to the subordinate realm of 'maya', while ultimate reality
is located within our being in that 'immanent place in the heart'.
In the Vedic 'Hym of the Cosmic Man' or Purusasukta the gods sacrifice
the giant Purusa, to create the physical universe. "Purusa
is this all, that has been and that will be … From his navel
was produced the air; from his head the sky was evolved; from
his feet the earth … " [7] The human body is the source
or, in linguistic terms, the root metaphor for the universe, which
in turn, is what is 'modeled' or represented in the Hindu temple.
As Titus Bruckhardt observes, "that which is in ceaseless
movement within the universe is transposed by sacred architecture
into permanent form". He further observes, that a temple
is a sanctuary for 'divine being' and "spiritually speaking,
a sanctuary is always at the centre of the world"[8]. Analogously,
as a result of the instantaneous connectivity and interactivity
of the Internet, the contemporary notion of 'being' is no longer
rooted in the physical realm. Indeed, as I outlined above, the
Internet is a network of computer networks, forming an ubiquitous
communications metanetwork within which all sites are in virtual
proximity. The 'centre' is everywhere in the virtual geography
of the Internet. In an attempt to develop this analogy, a temple
to lord Shiva has been 'erected' in VRML and soon it will go on-line,
inviting video conferencing pilgrimage.
As digital simulacra proliferate in the secular realm, the distinction
of an actual place, person or thing, from its image or representation,
is being dissolved. In "Tortoise Zone" [9] Ting Ting
Hook explores the relationship between interior and exterior in
human consciousness in terms of the notion of 'place'. Using the
conventions of painting and installation art as points of departure
for an Internet work, he invokes a slightly hallucinatory mode
as the viewers disembodied impressions of a virtual place impinge
on his or her encounter with an analogous physical site. The differences
between the outdoor site in Kuching, Sarawak, and the online interactive
domain increase with time, as the intense tropical climate rapidly
takes its toll. Eventually the physical place is left as a residue
of an event, a 'marked site', a scar even, while the virtual site,
remains unweathered and unchanged in perpetuity. Documentation
of the real site was uploaded to the website as the event progressed.
Indeed, with the impermanent and/or inaccessible qualities of
the 'site specific' installation works of recent decades, photographs
have became a surrogate medium of experience. At the heart of
my second web project, 'La folie de la Peinture [10] is a multivalent
linking of photographic documentation of a previous installation
work. As the photographs are articulated with video, audio and
interactive elements, objects from the original installation are
invested with an online interactive presence. The presentation
of this work in the gallery involves re-presenting the actual
objects along with an Internet-ready workstation in the exhibition
space. Some of the objects are exhibited as in the original installation,
others in a vitrine to index history and the museum.
Regional Networking And Techno-orientalism
In the last decade, art from the 'Asia Pacific', 'Asia' and 'Southeast
Asia', has been gathered and exhibited in various regional centres
with superior cultural infrastructures. The administration of
these expansive and comprehensive exhibitions, curated on the
basis of national sections has produced what can be described
as neocolonial curatorial hierarchies with national co-curators
feeding powerful central selection committees and, invariably,
there seems to be an insistence on national particularities to
which the co-curators are obliged to comply. In the course of
these developments an auto-orientalism has emerged in which Asians
understand each other in terms of national idioms. There also
seems to have been an overt promotion of politically critical
art in these regional arenas, echoing the hegemonic 'democracy'
rhetoric of the 'new world order'. As artists from non western
countries struggle to domesticate digital technology, there has
emerged a similar tendency for them and the new curators of new
media art to put forward works that index national idioms. This
amounts to a kind of 'techno-orientalism' which favours digital
expressions of indigenous forms over attempts to address the universal
issues of art and technology. The problem with this scenario is
that the centre stage seems to belong to those from the centres
of cultural authority, while the 'others' are relegated to ornamenting
the periphery. In constructing the emerging digital aesthetic,
it is important to recognize we all have equal claim to the centre
and Asians will be more influential if we are less tokenistic
in our expressions of difference.
It must be noted, with regard to new media, that some Asia Pacific
countries have very poor infrastructure while others have poor
human resources even if the infrastructure is available and others
still have no concept of the fruitful engagement of art and technology.
While it is easy to criticize the dominant arenas of the region
as neo-orientalist hegemonies, it would be irresponsible to do
so without offering practical alternatives. The challenge for
artists in developing countries is to overcome financial and technical
inadequacies and institutional inertia at home to produce our
own networking hubs giving others the opportunity to criticize
us for a change. In this regard I would like to announce a fledgling
web project that we are currently developing at the Faculty of
Applied and Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak - E-ART
ASEAN ONLINE [11]. This will be an interactive resource for electronic
art in South East Asia. It will consist of a comprehensive DATABASE
of new media art including profiles of artists and samples of
artworks, a JOURNAL dealing with the historical development of
electronic art in South East Asia, theoretical and critical issues
related to the use of electronic media in the visual arts as well
as reviews and analysis of electronic artworks. The site will
also host an Internet discussion arena or FORUM as well as an
index of LINKS to related websites world-wide and, eventually,
a space for WEBART.
References
[1] Victor H. Mair . Painting and Performance. University of
Hawai Press, 1988.
[2] Niranjan Rajah. The Failure of Marcel Duchamp/ Japanese Fetish
Even. 1996. http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/waterfall/
[3] Paul Gilster. The New Internet Navigator. New York: Wiley,
1995.
[4] Official Anwar Ibrahim's Online Resources http://pages.whowhere.com/sports/vr4/
[5] 'PostScript' http://neptune.spaceports.com/~ps/
[6] Niranjan Rajah. "Who do you represent?" in Present
Encounters Conference proceedings, Brisbane: Queensland Art gallery,
1996.
[7] Robert Gombrich. "Ancient Indian Cosmology" in
Carmen, B. & Michael, L., ed. Ancient Cosmologies, London:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1975.
[8] Titus Burckhard. Sacred Art in East and West. Middlesex:
Perennial Books LTD. 1967.
[9] Ting Ting Hook. Tortoise Zone. 1998 http://westwood.fortunecity.com/gucci/369/index.html
[10] Niranjan Rajah, La folie de la Peinture. 1998 http://www.kunstseiten.de/installation
[11] E-ART ASEAN ONLINE http://www.freespeech.org/eartasean/index.html
Note
This paper has been consolidated and developed from ideas expressed
in 'Towards a Universal Theory of Convergence', (INET98: Entering
The Mainstream Proceedings on CD-Rom, Eighth Annual Conference
of the Internet Society, Geneva 1998), 'Sacred Art in a Digital
Era' (presented at the 2nd Consciousness Reframed Conference,
Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University
of Wales College 1998) 'Regionalism In A World Of Borderless Transactions:
Networking The Art Of The Asia Pacific' (Australian Network for
Art and Technology Newsletter #37 June 1999) and 'Slow Download!
' (Third World Wide Web, Special Digital Issue, Third Text no.
47, Summer, 1999).
Biography
Niranjan Rajah is an Art Historian, Cultural Theorist and an
Internet artist. He heads the Critical Studies Department at the
Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak
He has served on the Malaysian National Art Gallery's Planning
and Acquisitions Committee (1996-97) and has curated and co-curated
national and international exhibitions, including Malaysia's '1st
Electronic Art Show' (National Art Gallery, 1997) and the '1st
Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial' (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1999).
He was on the Programme Committee for the 'Ninth International
Symposium on Electronic Art' (Liverpool/Manchester, 1998) and
chaired a Session titled 'Art in an Age of Borderless Instantaneous
Transactions: A Critique' at the Annual Conference of the College
Arts Association (Los Angeles, 1999). His writings have been published
extensively, including 'Sacred Pictures Secular Frames' in the
'ART-Asia Pacific Journal' (ISSUE 17, 1998), 'Prosthetics for
the Mind' in the 'Digital Creativity Journal' (VOL 9 NO 1,1998)
and 'From the Control of Content to the End of Art' in the Internet
Societies 'On the Internet' (JAN/FEB 1998) magazine.
Young-hae Chang: Progress Report MAAP99
Interview with Young-Hae Chang online
from Korea.
Four months into the net.works/ online artist residency, Young-hae
Chang reveals her thoughts about her work, MAAP99, the Internet,
technical achievements and some interesting anecdotes.
What are your thoughts about your own work?
In general, once my own work is completed, I no longer think
much about it. Or rather, any problems I confronted then, I deal
with in my next work.
For example, I'm worried (not quite the word: more like: thinking
a lot) about the absence of interactivity in my first web art
work, "The Perfect Artist's Web Site." I mentioned to
Jeff and the net.works/ artists that I find the interactivity
on the Internet to be much like the ball-squeezing of the guy
who watches a sporting event on T.V.: a half-hearted mea culpa,
when the best thing to do would be to turn off the T.V. and go
for a run.
I find that Internet interactivity is a way to delude ourselves
into thinking we're doing more than just watching commercials
on a computer monitor.
There is no interactivity on "The Perfect Artist's Web Site,"
which on the one hand bothers me from a technical standpoint,
much like it would be bothersome for a poet who didn't use rhyme
because she didn't know how, and spent most of her time convincing
herself that blank verse was O.K. But on the other hand, I'm all
for guiltless T.V. watching. There's no sense in reading a book
at the same time. Which is also to justify my next work for net.works/
--it will not have interaction either, although I haven't resolved
the problem from a technical or a psychological standpoint.
And it's the psychology of Internet art that intrigues me. If
I don't know how to use oil paint and so use acrylics, or if I
don't sculpt marble nor use bronze, I don't worry about it. What
then is the source of my anxiety (again, not quite the word: more
like: interest) when doing Web art? I would guess that I'm dealing
with basic computer angst, just as a musician who ignores musical
notation but who plays by ear might feel foolish in certain musical
gatherings. And I use poetry and music analogies to underline
my questioning because I find that Internet art resembles them
more than oil painting. Poetry and music are languages with more
or less strict rules, and Internet art, which follows Internet
and computer grammar, has stricter rules that other art genres.
All said, I like my first art work on the net.works/ site, and
my second one (coming very soon!), while using the same grammar,
has a more complex syntax.
Did your trip to Australia influence any of the thinking for
the text in your work?
Indeed. I created "Artist's Statement No. 45,730,944: The
Perfect Artist's Web Site" specifically for Beth Jackson's
conference. She had invited me to talk about my work in the context
of net.works/, and I found it easier to create something than
to discuss things.
The text is also in English, which is my third language. I mentioned
in my proposal for the net.works/ program that all artists from
non-English-speaking countries confront the essential artistic
(not to mention business) problem of communication. Many artists
resolve the problem intuitively: they communicate through imagery.
But because I had already done textual artwork in Korean, I found
myself translating into English for MAAP. This is not an entirely
comfortable situation for me nor, I suppose, for any artist who
is not a native English speaker. I'm not talking about the lack
of complete fluency, but the surrender to one of the essences
of globalisation, which is that it is English-language, based.
Translating textual art into English is less an artistic decision
than an ideological one. Australians did laugh in the right places
during "'Samsung' Means:To Come," which makes me more
comfortable with my translation. But I do wonder if textual art
can communicate as much cultural flavour as the original text.
I think translated textual art is closer to translated poetry
than to translated prose. One of the reasons why I add a musical
soundtrack is because no translation is needed.
In terms of the ideas and images in "The Perfect Artistic
Web Site," they are a mix of the Internet and Korean culture.
I had decided that the MAAP audience was sophisticated enough
for some Korean politics (i.e., North-South tensions), and indeed
it was.
How much have you learnt from the exchange so far?
A lot. I think MAAP is a turning point in my art work. It's allowing
me to be an Internet artist. Jeff and the net.works/ artists introduced
me to the world of Web art. MAAP gave me the computer programs
necessary to create Web art. I'm learning how to create with Flash
4, but I have my eye on all the Macromedia and Metacreations applications.
One of the most important lessons for me is how close Australia,
China and Korea are to each other. I think I mentioned it to you
already, Karen, that the MAAP Online Residency Program is globalisation
at its best. I sit in my small Japanese house in Seoul (I'm repeating
myself) and I'm in contact with people across the world. And the
contact is meaningful for me: through my art.
How often do you communicate with the other artists in the exchange?
I think we're all in contact with each other about once every
couple of weeks. One of us decides to write a progress report
to the others, and that sparks activity on all fronts. Then there
are the big events, like Mengbo's baby photos. That's exciting.
I really appreciated Tina's sending to us the call for entries
for the Global Multimedia Interface show in London. Although I
don't think they'd accept my video work (it's a big video screen
on a public square) because of its sex, violence and politics
overtones, I'm grateful to her for sharing the information.
I enjoy picturing travelling across Australia in a car, something
Rick and Tina have talked about doing in their e-mails. You can
travel across South Korea in a day. I imagine the wide expanse
in the middle of Australia is not unlike the middle of America,
which is the scene for so many road movies.
I've had one fun chatting session with Jeff, and we almost had
another. I foresee more sessions--if Jeff agrees to it--because
I can't seem to find the answers I need to resolve certain technical
problems concerning the Macromedia software. But there's still
the problem of the collaboration between the four artists. I'm
so busy what with my own works and earning a living that I haven't
sat down with myself to consider the collaboration possibilities.
But I will, and I'm looking forward to it.
Any technical disasters/highlights?
Well, I'm the technical disaster, of course. But I'm hoping that
as with most things in art, the less you know the more creative
you can sometimes be. But then again, there is always the psychological
intimidation of doing artwork in what seems more and more to be
a technical milieu.
The highlight of my technical career was, of course, "my"
creation in two days (with spoon-feeding from Jeff) of "Artist's
Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artist's Web Site"
for Beth's conference, "Collapsing Geographies" at MAAP99.
But stay tuned for some more disastrous highlights, coming soon!
Funny stories?
The Korean curator for APT3 works for the Samsung Foundation,
here in Seoul. She came to the premier of "The Samsung Project,"
saw it, and left angry with me. Then Kim Machan was nice enough
to choose me for MAAP99. During the artist's party in the Queensland
Art Gallery, who should I bump into but. . . the Korean curator
for APT3. She asked me politely what I was doing in Brisbane.
I told her I was there to present "The Samsung Project"
for MAAP. In my mind she fainted and fell to the floor. In reality
she invited me to dinner. In English I think you say: if you can't
beat them, join them.
Tina Gonsalves: Progress Report MAAP99
Melbourne artist, Tina Gonsalves was prompted with the following
questions after the MAAP99 Festival in September 1999.
Q. Where do you go from here? How do you see the project progressing
over the next 6 and 12 months?
I guess we didn't get us much time to sit down together as I
thought we would have, so time lines are still in the air. 12
months would give it a lot more time to really develop. It would
be interesting just to see the growth factor - of the Internet
as a medium, and also how we are all using the Internet as a medium
for communication, collaboration and expression.
For Young-hae and myself, the Internet is a new medium, so that
will be interesting. Over twelve months it will be interesting
to also see how the collaboration relationship/ friendship between
us develops, and how this influences each of us.
Q. Is there going to be a big learning curve getting into the
Macromedia and Metacreations software?
Huge learning curve. But that is pretty exciting. I have learnt
a lot about the Macromedia Software, because it has a higher profile
than the Metacreations software. I have never done any 3D work,
so it will be interesting to see how that feeds into my work.
From what I have heard, you begin in 2D to create something 3D
- so that would suit me better. I have already started trying
to learn them - I found the PDF file of Metacreation's Bryce,
so that will make it a bit easier. I have also found someone who
knows it, so I'll probably learn it that way. I hate reading manuals.
I also got a grant of the Australian Film Commission to learn
web design, and I have about 20 hours or so left - so by the time
I have finished that, I hope to know everything back to front.
Pretty exciting. The software is great.
Q. What benefits do you hope to get out of the project?
The collaboration will be really interesting. Especially cross
culturally. How this influences my work, I don't know - time will
tell. But I have a feeling, working within an interactive spontaneous
environment will have a great effect on my visual expression.
So this is a definite benefit. I view most change as a benefit.
It will develop some interesting friendships - interesting dialogue,
discussion and hopefully some debate.
Q. Do you think the idea of the online artist exchanges work?
From the work I saw of Rick's collaboration with Indonesia and
the other work of the collaboration with China and Australia -
I think it works. There are some great possibilities. The fact
that we got to meet each other first will make a big difference.
Although it is online, I think it is important to physically know
whom you are working with, and what they are about. I think we
should use video conferencing as often as possible - just to look
at each other again and have a laugh. I think it is important
to maintain that sense, to sort of remain connected. But then
again - this is all new to me - Rick is the one that can talk
by experience.
Q. What are the good and bad aspects of an online artist exchange?
Bad parts - when you get immersed back into your own environment
- life can take over. And I guess because no one is physically
there saying you have to be there at a particular time - it will
have to be all self-motivated. Which is fine by me - but I hope
it is for everyone else. I guess we sort of need to keep things
rolling, keep it interesting. But then again, if we have a few
weeks or so that we don't do anything - that should be cool too.
That's life!
Good parts - writing e-mails, chats, and using a keyboard can
sort of take away the personal sense of expression, of fun, that
letter writing and talking had. This is not a bad thing in the
case of this collaboration. It could create some interesting misinterpretations.
As we won't be there to physically explain our art - this leaves
heaps of room for misinterpretation. I think that makes art pretty
interesting. Sometimes, when an artist explains too much, it sort
of loses the magic. I guess one of the good points are we are
doing things in our own time, when we feel like doing it. There
is great freedom in that.
Q. Do you think cultural differences will hinder or enhance the
project? Is it a problem for future online collaborations?
ENHANCE. Especially with everything that is happening in Asia,
namely the Timor crisis. It is all in our region. Cross-culture
makes you reflect on your own environment, and how grateful or
ungrateful you are to be in that environment. It also reflects
how ignorant you can be of other people's environment. It will
be a great learning experience for all. The only problem in the
future is censorship of the net.
Rick Vermey: Progress Report MAAP99
Western Australian artist, Rick Vermey, has previous experience
collaborating in an online artist exchange. Here he shares his
thoughts about the MAAP99 net.works artist exchange project.
Q: What are your thoughts about your own work?
Well, in all honesty, I've not made much new work specifically
for the net.works project since our time in Brisbane. This has
been a (predictable) consequence of being over-committed to extra
projects in addition to net.works and my teaching duties. So in
that sense I'm frustrated about the progress of my own work.
Q: Did your trip to Brisbane for the MAAP99 Festival influence
any of the thinking for your work?
Certainly did, particularly meeting the other artists for the
first time, and having to consider what life might be like for
artists in China and Korea. I think I've also been influenced
in my ambitions for the kind of work I want to develop by the
methodologies and styles of the others. I'm inspired particularly
by the immediacy and non-preciousness of Tina's approach to making,
the "interrogative documentary" form of Mengbo's films,
and the acute precision of Young-Hae's poetic/political language.
In terms of the significance of the trip, the single most important
factor was the establishing of a personal relationship with each
of my collaborating colleagues on the project. This is in stark
contrast with my previous experience of cross-cultural collaborations,
where the anonymity due to distance was initially a hurdle to
overcome.
Q: Even though you have been in another artist exchange, how
much have you learnt from this exchange? Has it been a similar
experience?
No, this is a very different experience. In my last web-exchange
project, there was a galvanising factor, which generated urgency
in the communication and exchange of ideas - that being the political
turmoil in Indonesia around the period of that country's first
democratic elections in 25 years.
In contrast with that experience, I'm not yet sure what the common
ground is for the four of us engaged in the net.works project.
I suspect it will become a territory of aesthetic cross-pollination
more so than a union of conceptual intents. That said, in my opinion
it is really "early days still" to be asking that question.
We have yet to really hit the straps and start running with the
project.
Q: How often do you communicate with the others?
Not frequently enough yet to have really bonded conceptually....
From my perspective, I'm inundated everyday with 30 -40 incoming
messages, and email is the last thing of the night, so I'm frequently
too exhausted to articulate clearly and thus the less urgent messages
are left till a more alert time.
I think that is an inherent component of a "virtual"
exchange, one of the frustration's I've experienced before also.
What I mean is when there is a busy and demanding RL world expecting
constant attention, any task that does not get "in your face"
is prone to be neglect. That is a structural issue of project
coordination, which we have yet to address as a group.
Outcomes/expectations are not defined for this project, so urgency
is lacking.
Plus we are all very busy people. I'd describe the communication
as sporadic seedings and sproutings, not determined by any pattern
of "climate', but by individual energies and enthusiasms.
E-mail exchange with Ilya Eric Lee, Taipei/Taiwan
By Geert Lovink
In late November 1999 I went Taiwan, for a second visit. The
media activist and nettimer Ilya Eric Lee, together with the art
critic and curator Manray Hsue had organized a lecture tour over
the island, in which we covered activist strategies, arts, politics
and economics of new media. It was 2 1/2 months after the '921'
earthquake had hit the central part of Taiwan. I
wrote a report about this impressive trip for nettime (posted
on December 19, 1999). For Ilya this period was a particular difficult
and emotional one as he was about to be drafted into military
service for a one and half years period. On July 24 2001 he is
a free man again. A cause for celibration - and a reason to do
an e-mail interview with Ilya about his experiences in
the army, Taiwanese net activism, Chinese-Taiwanese 'infowars'
and the Chinese language 'nettime-zh' mailinglist which Ilya and
others are planning to start. With a guest appearance of Autrijus
Tang, co-founder of www.elixus.org. Enjoy.
GL: How did the 921 earthquake effect Internet use?
IL: The immediate syndication of students and TANet (Taiwan Academy
Network) BBS administratorsopened up a dynamic virtual channel
(DVC), connecting campus information centres and civil resources
(e.g. independent BBS) to
deliver emergency information islandwide, which was a spectacular
work done during the first few months after the earthquake. After
the emergency, networking became so diverse and disparate that
an online communication environment was required and created.
We have powerful and smart local people acting as live clients
to find out every possible means for breaking
through communication blocks, but due to the lack of long term
planning and continuous governmental support, the channel could
only last for a short time. I think the underground BBS syndication
is a substantive use of the Internet, even though it happened
only on a small scale and was extremely fragile.
GL: Which new media art events recently happened in Taiwan and
where do you think such initiatives are going? Would you say it's
a pure commercial environment? Will there be place for experimentation?
And if so, where?
IL: There are more and more international visiting artists, DJs
and academics/leaders who come to exchange and collaborate with
local activists and artists. This breeds the valuable hybridization
process that really pushes Taiwan forward. Strictly speaking,
however, there hasn't yet been any new media art events worth
mentioning. On the other hand, I don't think
Taiwan is purely commercial.These kind of events indeed need sponsorship
and support from both the private and public sectors. That's the
general condition of network survival and growth. People without
enough imagination
usually think of this condition as signifying that the new media
can only be commercial-oriented. If you are a hammer, you'll see
everything as nails. This view manifests the routinely low feedback,
under-interactive single direction mode of life and mind. Participants
are just considered as customers, and makers as foci of spotlights.
I think the interdisciplinary
exchange will be the booming zone of new experiments that will
happen. At the periphery of schools and labs, well-established
art institutions and commercial studios, there's always some people
experimenting and creating. Some TAZs formed around those peripherals
will be the lounge of continuing experiments. For instance, the
Elixir/Elixus.org collective is aimed to
serve as such a lounge intermediating hacker culture, coding expertise
and netivism.
GL: There is much talk about hackers and cyberwars between Taiwan
and China. How much of that is propaganda and rumours? Doom scenarios?
Wishful thinking?
IL: My fieldwork survey of the so-called war fronts on the Taiwanese
side found that most of them are simply hoaxes. By the war, defacement
doesn't represent any real ongoing infowar. Most of the news that
focused on the defacement acts was actually playing into outdated
nationalism; surely, that's a way the powerless and thoughtless
mass media generate its potatoes. Even though this may instigate
some computer geeks to make real fights over the net frontiers,
the practice of reinforcing nationalism in the cyberwar is not
something to be praised. Defacement can be more profound and powerful,
as in the late Ogawa Shinsuke film, Summer in Narita (1968), that
documented the peasants' resistance against national violence.
Loads of shit covering the bodies as a form of defacement turned
into something symbolically and psychologically effective
in a real warfare. I think a lot more than simple defacement on
the frontpage is required to achieve a real media situation for
all, resonating in the participants' mind and heart, not their
huge-egotistic eyeballs. Otherwise, it could only be a sign of
doomsday.
GL: Are there new initiatives from media activists in Taiwan?
Do people look at post-Seattle and the www.indymedia.org phenomena?
IL: Yes, and no. New kinds of disciplines and practices gave
birth to possible new media initiatives. The universities and
colleges are a nice test bed for rebellious youth, but realities
fiercely bite back. After the local MP3 Police raided the National
Cheng-Kung University campus and caused island-wide panic, the
new generation stood out to express their opinion to
the whole society. (http://residence.educities.edu.tw/flyingstore/nckualbum/,
and the campaign T-shirt online voting at http://140.116.132.37/saveNCKU/sale.htm,
etc.) But due to the lack of media awareness and holistic view
, the students are
fighting very hard. Yes, the campaign to save the university students
is the media action. No, they are still isolated, resorting to
traditional media attention, and not yet organised enough to welcome
the globalisation dawn. The Pots Weekly (http://www.pots.com.tw/),
a free local magazine that features alternative cultures and minorities
with a critical consciousness,
keeps their eyes on news after Seattle to Genoa and Indymedia
in their globalisation department. Some of the articles were relayed
from the Hong Kong Radical Net and other independent resources;
critical minded eyeballs/submarines/translation machines translated
other articles locally. :) Take volume no. 156 as example: it's
the precious Chinese information,
which exposed details of the diary of Judy Rebick and other images,
on the Quebec/anti-FTAA warfront. The zine is widely read by youth
in Taipei also as a what-to-do/where-to-go manual. Besides the
Pots, Coolloud Web (http://www.coolloud.org)
is another activist media concerning the global condition. They
initiated the website and campaigns since 3 years ago. They
are supporting the protest toward Papua New Guinea's killing event
in their Chinese version column in July.
And another kind of new task force is the elixir, a local movement
organisation composed of people in the pursuit for media freedom
and alternatives of lifestyle. It's a connection-oriented loose
organisation, concerning issues such as net.activism, net.culture,
online rights and the digital public domain. I'd been in the elixir
for months, and our recent work is the initiative of the project
Metalist. The project tries to combine BBS-community, open discussion
mailing list threading and Slash-code
syndication platform, and to produce the digital public domain.
It will make its first announcement atthe ICOS, International
Conference of Open Source Taiwan, August 3-5, 2001.
GL: Please tell us a bit more about your new initiative, the
Metalist project in the elixir server. Is it gonna be more than
Internet? Which projects do you have in mind?
IL: It's a project of services which serves more than what usually
is considered as the Internet. The 'metalist' project is designed
to aimat connecting most services availablein the Chinese language
environment, i.e., preserving the live interactive and vigorous
info caves, while affiliating them to one another. Services want
to be connected. People are separated
along different lines of division, not only physically but also
virtually. They aren't aware that "The Sky Is the Limit,"
of the full potential of the fibersphere. People want to act like
a gopher, digging around yet remaining confined in their little
zapped "customized" fields. So we have the metalist,
http://meta.elixus.org. It's
an experiment on expanding the individual's perception by implementing
the kind of connectivity originally conjured and now still worked
on by the www think tanks. I mean people like Tim-Berners Lee
and the Semantic Web, even Microsoft's the .Net structure. We
are working on theories about independent
media, picturing technical roadmaps and producing the information
infrastructure system needed by possible activists.
The character encoding systems , BIG-5 / Traditional Chinese and
GB / Simplified Chinese, segregate Chinese-speaking writers and
readers. The first one includes Taiwan and Hong Kong; the latter
one includes Singapore and China. For the different groups of
people, being able to generate news and follow discussions via
their local tongues, the Unicode database is one ultimate solution.
Open content and open audience must rely on such a robust infrastructure.
Beside the encoding endeavour, connected services provide a new
web for mutual recognitions inside the digital public domain.
That is the idea of the Metalist project infrastructure and the
nettime-zh mailing list. On the horizon of connective media /
auto exchange between participants, we want to launch the nettime-zh
mailing list, introducing networking activities realtimely in
Zhongwen/Chinese format while syndicating them into the Metalist.
We are the intersection. (metalist whitepaper: http://autrijus.org/metalist.html)
GL: Are the cyber attacks on the side of both Taiwan and China
fake, or more merely symbolic, irrelevant? Do you think they are
done by adolescent boys, individuals, or is there more behind
the 'infowar'?
IL: The cyberwar never exists without/outside the real warfare
domain. There is a real plan'n'plot set to penetrate each of the
two BIG intranets mutually. And the military institutions must
prepare for more than that, in order to generate enough energy
to precede any action. On this level of defense and attack, sadly,
it's concrete enough, practical and serious. Even
to the hoaxes, jokes, loveletters, and worms. No matter how vulnerable
the BIG intranet is, cyberwar is ,like Castelles' word, a real
form of virtuality. What's confidential under satellites' surveillances
and scandals ' media exposure? What's confidential in this era
of globalized information society? Or, it's the propaganda set
to its own people and soldiers?
AT (www.elixus.org co-founder, Autrijus Tang): Besides, netizens
already understand that voluntary demonstration, e.g. the Blue
Ribbon campaign against CDA, has a power far superior than destructive
attacks like DDOS or security breaching, because it moves real
people. Like Falun Gong or Napster, this kind of infowar is fought
more fiercely and actively than
those defacement actions. Hence, both government's main weapons
are not any black-hat cracker teams, but their sophisticated measures
on blocking and distorting the information flow both from and
toward the Internet. For
example, FreeNet has became the de facto publishing platform for
dissidents in China, and the Chinese government has shut down
access and prohibited its use recently. It is a common suspicion
that China will outlaw strong encryption schemes like Mixmaster
and PGP altogether, as the government is gunning down ISPs allowing
these services. That's one of the reasons China is pushing the
Hague Convention so eagerly.
GL: Please say something more about nettime-zh. You are about
to launch a Chinese language version of nettime which is going
to be part of the Elixir initiative. Or should we say Mandarin?
Where does zh stand for? What kind of
people and topics do you think the list is going to deal with?
Will nettime-zh be a truly global list, with participants from,
let's say, Vancouver, Osaka, Sydney etc.?
AT: I think calling it Mandarin is improper, since Mandarin is
but one dialect in which written Chinese could be spoken. As you
would've guessed, 'Zh' stands for ZhongWen, incoporating zh_cn
(China), zh_tw (Taiwan), zh_sg (Singapore), zh_hk (Hong Kong)
and zh_ma (Macao). What we imply by nettime-zh, me thinks, is
that its content will not be constrained to any particular character
set (Simplified/Traditional/CJK), political region (see above),
or spoken dialect. So as long as its participants understand Unihan
ideoglyphs, I think, membership could be truly global. Of course
there are technical concerns on how to operate a cross-encoding
mailing list, but we'll strive to solve it.
IL: Based on the fundamental cross-encoding concern, I think,
'nettime-zh' will represent two important tactics of our praxis.
One is the technical reality taken into consideration rather than
- outdated politically confined language imagination. Chinese
is imaginable since the millenniums before last, but as the huge
Other for all the peripheral brains'n'pens to project their emotions
to, the C is quite empty and vague. The encoding reality brings
the old and new Zh alive; we then have found/created a new imagined
community. It will be a global list if we discover something in
common in the digital new medium territory translational wide.
We use our native language to discuss and exchange, but this time
it's not only a backward translation, culture broking and reselling
to a place the digital tide has not yet covered. It is simultaneously
proceeding and serving as the basis
informational backbone cross encoding barrier and boundaries,
the intersection.
GL: Ilya, over the last 18 months you have been in the army.
You just got out. How did you survive there and what did you do?
Did you have access to the Net?
IL: When you cannot do anything, at least you can watch and listen.
Before disappearing into the 'national war system', I was an Internet
activist dealing with the government; witness that networking
issues became more and more important. So many business people
take the free ride making a profit from it. The military zone
is another closed circle, a special kind of society for people
to make a living. Those masters always need people to serve, not
minds to interact and exchange. I happened to enter a project
which needed a network administrator and programmers. As a professional
submarine and listener, I could serve people's need of administration
and programming. To separate the mind and the basic, functional
daily routine, I got my offline freedom to surf and listen. That
transformed me a lot, to re-discover the everyday life on the
post-coldwar island. Yes, while in the army I had access to the
Net. That's quite a privilege. When they need people to pave the
road towards the Net, I was right there, just in time. It really
made me think of the situation: access/literacy as the valuable/
expensive commodity, and what it really means. I developed a way
of dealing with email, digested during the weekdays and action/discussion
on the weekend. They called me the "Weekend Internet Activist,"
dually lived and thinking. Luckily, I found a group of people
considering similar things with practical mobility, and they also
discussed on the weekend. :) With Elixir, we have a strong syndication
after the last several months of my military life: not only access,
but also thinking and practicing, collaborating. Dialogue is the
best way to overcome isolation.
GL: Could you tell us a bit more about the circumstances of the
army basement and the work you had to do there? How do you look
at all these stories about technological warfare now that you
have been in the army yourself?
IL: It's really hard to write it inside. Taiwan was once a police
state for more than 40 years under martial law. We have for a
long time an intimate enemy to solidify our island identity, and
under that we can only talk about anything commercially. :) Even
though we have been free for more than a decade from many bad
restrictions, the imaginative threat still prevails and only a
business risk can be reasonable enough for folks here to break
it. There's no law protecting people. There's only a law to protect
security and national war-related welfare. So how can I write
anything in detail? Or, part of the truth? Which part would be
the safe part? I think that's most people's consideration. Which
keep Taiwan's military bureaucracy under 'safely' protected by
responsibility-free, underdevelopment situation, even though the
governments change from the long ruling Kuo-ming-tang KMT party
to the new Democratic Progressive Party . I served in an information
centre of logistics services, acting as one of the
network admins of the whole headquarter. It's more like one of
the Kong-wen (Official Document) processing centres, not a decision
making headquarter. Most officials were tied on documents to and
fro. I don't think people buried in the documents, all day signing
papers, have time to think and make decisions. Most officers view
the commercial world as more challenging and
riskful /resourceful, even though what they held in their hands
are important decisions to make and will influence others in the
military sphere. Low communications between these institutions,
units and decision-making groups, were mostly formal. Maybe that's
the same in other places, maybe not. Collectively, they form a
mute mass following welfare trends and policy directions, waiting
for a great leader to evoke, or being passively quiet in their
militarily life trajectory. A bit sad, I feel. 'Cause inside the
military milieu, you feel quite normal as ordinary people. Only
can we imagine the necessarily tough training and cool hard new
tech attack means,. even though we are proximal to the top organisation.
Being a military soldier is totally different from a technical
warfare reader performer. If you were among the soldiers, you
must believe the fragmented POV given from above, doing everything
hard and snap as possible as you can, waiting for the day of retirement.
Vaguely adapting the nihil confinement, counting the days. Working
hard, and taking the technical warfare seriously, you will get
schizophrenized. Contrasting this, I think activists are a group
of people who live positively-like aliens.. More exchange and
dialogue, which will really modify the formalistic errors and
save the vague people, if the imaginative war could end some day.
GL: What are your feelings about defending Taiwan against a possible
attack of China? Do you think the young democracy on Taiwan is
worth defending? Or would you rather take a pacifist stand? How
do you see the conflict between Taiwan and China after having
been in the army? Different?
IL: The young democracy in Taiwan gave birth to us. Our parents
survived from inner and warfare displacement, the Japanese colonial
period, the KMT, the cold war and the new government. The adaptation
is not quite well, because we are so young to join that. Because
we are so stubborn, we aren't yet used to confront the conflict,
and to negotiation. That's from my native
eyes. But the place's still open, still having the possibility
to catalyse other nodes in the Zhongwen/Chinese speaking/reading
area. But we need to prepare; we need practice. Before the military
confrontation has us all, before the commercial nihil emptiness
swallows our young spirit, before the patent confines our inquiry
and discovery(TM) as invention. Defending means to identify with
the beautiful things discovered among the ruined mess, and means
to find something really beautiful. I love the
people, in their most native ways of living, their kindness and
insistency on their dreams. I want to explore their potential,
just as myself. The potentiality exists in open spaces, the public
domain, the border-free DMZ (de-militarised-zone), then we can
envisage the beautiful in the mess. I will defend the beautiful
in the mess. I think it's clearer after the army examination,
a small more closeup of society's reality check. Maybe that's
not popular, not embracing the mainstream ideology of living,
ways of
working and dying. If that's Taiwan, who and whatever they are,
I will defend it.
(edited by Manray Hsue)
An E-mail Interview with Yukiko Shikata
curator Tokyo Canon Art Lab
By Geert Lovink
For many years Yukiko Shikata has been curator for new media
arts at Tokyo Canon ArtLab. She is very well informed about the
latest works and trends within electronic arts, both in Asia and
Europe. Because of schedule reasons, Yikiko Shikata was not able
to participate live during MAAP festival's streaming media event
(Brisbane Powerhouse, September 17, 2000). Instead, a short e-mail
exchange was arranged.
GL:
Over the last 10 or 15 years there have been a lot of complaints
in Japan about a structural under/zero funding of new media arts,
compared to the size of the country, its wealth and most of all,
its focus on new technology. With the spectacular rise of Internet
and the capacities of computers, for example to do digital video
editing, perhaps young people working with new media don't need
institutional support anymore. Do you see any sign in the direction
of a more independent media culture? Is working inside big companies
still the only option for young people?
YS:
As you know well, it became much easier for Japanese young people
to have access to the computers and other new media equipment,
compared with the early 90s. But the point is actually not on
the amount of available equipment, but the motivation to use it
creatively and tactically, as independent media.
The notion of "independent media" and the necessity
of having it is rather weak in Japan, being somehow concealed
in the society. The necessity of "independent media"
rises when (1) the people shares the notion of "being independent"
as one of the fundamental human right, (2) they are aware of being
in a crisis of individuality by social and/or political reason,
(3) they are conscious of role of media. In the society such as
Japan (as a virtual "homogeneous body"), it is not easy
to find an "independent media culture", compared to
elsewhere, especially Europe.
Japan is good in producing portable, wearable gadgets. By having
smaller, cheaper gadget people's obsession to be on trend will
be satisfied. They feel themselves as part of "now, here"
in man-machine environment. People are made by the products, such
as fetish objects. The new products form an economical loop between
the user and the company, and it is not that easy for most of
Japanese to get out of it.(of course, enjoy being in the loop
and trying to make independent/creative breakthrough does not
contradict each other, and only from that point, Japanese young
people could be creative).
By the way, I think institutional support would make sense, if
it provides artists opportunity to make totally new kind of creation.
The thing can be achieved with institutional support is different
compared to the personal/independent level. Of course very few
places in Japan and even in the world where artists can utilize
the higher level of equipment and sometimes professional engineers.
One of such places is Canon ARTLAB where I work as one of the
curators.
GL:
What do you think of WAP cell phone as a platform? The text message
as new Haiku? Or the cracked games culture of PlayStation and
Dreamcast? A settopbox interface culture? Are we really getting
away from the personal computer?
YS:
Cell phone is getting more and more popular platform for the mobile
communication.text message would be a kind of monologue, coming
from the unconscious flow.not formalistic and minimal as Haiku
output. (and all the people know commercially, this is the strategy
of Europe and Japan to shift more mobile, cell phone-based culture,
making initiative in the field far advanced from the personal-computer-based
U.S. business).
The ways of communication will be surely change by different interfaces,
and this would in turn change our style of thinking. At the moment
I cannot say that we are getting away from the personal computer,
but being conscious of the different of each media, and use them
parallel would make sense. At least we have to watch the situation
by our own responsibility.
GL:
Do you know of streaming audio and video initiatives in Japan?
Or do we see the same trick of companies like NTT, to make streaming
so expensive that no one is going to even think about it? How
did Japanese kids respond to the Napster MP3 craze? Does this
put the recording industry under pressure in the same way as,
let's say, in the United States?
YS:
There are very few. Tetsuo Kogawa (media theorist) and Jun Oenoki
(media artist) are the ones initiating audio streaming. They have
the experience of free radio activities for a long time, raising
the issues to the public. Japanese kids did not respond to the
Napster MP3 craze that vividly. They are rather watching the hype
as observers, unconsciously controlled by their existing role
in society... not finding the way. I personally am in favor of
Napster, Internet culture and the new rules which belong to this
new environment.
GL:
The NTT InterCommunicationCenter in Tokyo has lost half of its
budget and will have to move its exhibition space to a much smaller
premise inside the Tokyo Opera City building. This happened not
only because of the breakup of NTT in NTT-East and NTT-West. What
do you think of this development? Is it good or bad? ICC has been
criticized a lot for its megalomaniac approach, its narrow definition
of new media arts and mafia type of organization. Is this likely
to change? On the other hand, last December ICC brought Survival
Research Laboratories to Tokyo to do a free performance. Was this
a clever way to silence its critics?
YS:
It is a pity that ICC will be smaller with less budget, in addition
to the existing structural problem. It is true that SRL in Tokyo,
the wild event realized by ICC, in outside space, provided a kind
of critic to ICC from inside.
But it's also true that it would not silence the critics to ICC
in general. But even that, I think it is very important that ICC
goes on, as ICC is only one in Japan and one of the few in the
world which exhibits new media arts on a permanent basis.
I just hope ICC would be more flexible in organizing independent
activities and smaller events, rather showing a kind of "masterpieces"
of media art.
I think that we are getting out of the time of media arts which
represented individual artists by using hi-end machines, in a
closed dark space or environment.
Going into the 21st Century, we are shifting into the more actual,
connective environments, which would be done in/with the public
space such as Internet or in the city.
These would be more collaborative, communicational activities,
such as "Vectorial Elevation" (by Rafael-Lozano Hemmer
and his team) and the works of Knowbotic Research. It could be
a kind of hybrid of research, communication, activities, between
artists, theorists, researchers, curators, etc., interwoven, with
the filter of "art". Not art in the traditional way.
I would like to keep on being involved in such activities, as
one of participants.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
http://www.yhchang.com
Interview with Young-hae Chang: Web Artist
by Molly Hankwitz
Young-hae Chang lives in Seoul, Korea. She was artist-in-residence
at MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific)
in 1999 and won an Honorable Mention in the SFMOMA Webby Awards
this year.
She has recently completed web-based projects for the New Museum
of New York, ISEA 2000 Forum des Images,
Biennale Interferences, Flash art for Net.congestion International
Festival of Streaming Media, and Web Project 8 for
the Total Museum in Seoul.
I interviewed the artist because I enjoyed her comical, feminist
web works which bear an unusual simplicity and
ease of access for the viewer.
Moreover, exploiting the spectacle as a place to have a voice,
an attitude, and to self-promote, these works
challenge the space of the web while speaking poetically of love,
mishap, loss, and adventure. The texts appear
in English, Korean and French. I met her streaming on the Web
at MAAP 2000 and conducted this email interview
in English In October 2000.
(All references to events now over have been kept in for the sake
of her commentary, i.e. Media City Seoul)
To find the YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES webpage: http://www.yhchang.com/
MH:
Can you talk about the project that you have done for the New
Museum New York and your other recent
projects overseas? Are your themes changing? How does the "global"
context of working outside the Asia
Pacific "region" affect your content parameters if it
does?
YHC:
Well, BUST DOWN THE DOOR was originally a splash page for rhizome.org.
Rhizome is showing it and
other Rhizome splash pages on monitors at the New Museum. There
is a more complex version on my site
http://www.yhchang.com/BUST_DOWN_THE_DOORS.html.
Notice the plural. I originally made this longer
version for an exhibition organized by the artist and curator
Sean Kerr at The Physics Room
http://www.physicsroom.org.nz in Christchurch, New Zealand. Yes,
I think my themes are changing.
BUST DOWN THE DOOR, short or long version, definitely takes the
viewer out of the safety of the Internet
and into the horror of daily life. I did a German version for
a festival of Flash movies, and I would be interested
in knowing the reaction of the public, because the story line
might have a special meaning for it. I am very
conscious of working on the World Wide Web.
Often, I first make my pieces in English, which is synonymous
with globalism.
It's a reality of life in Asia. But I'm also aware that people
around the world are curious about
specific aspects of life in a foreign country. And the Internet
can bring bits and pieces of another country to
your door. I often make specific references to Korean life in
English, and I'm sure they are no more difficult
to grasp for a foreigner than a similar life translated in a book,
or subtitled in a foreign movie. And then there
are Web pieces that I do for a specific venue in a foreign country.
The German piece, for instance. I also made
a piece in Bulgarian, although not in Cyrillic, if you see the
nuance, since I didn't have any Cyrillic fonts.
The organizer of the festival told me English was fine, but I
felt that the Bulgarian public deserved something in
its own language. I'm now doing a Web piece in Italian because
the curator's Web portal is in Genoa.
All of these situations may or may not affect the content of the
piece. Although I'm not a writer, I think
I think like one sometimes, or like a character actor who thinks
she can play any role. Both the writer
and the actor create lives and situations that can be close to
or far from the reality of their own lives.
One of my latest pieces seems to be taking place in India, although
it's not certain. What is certain is
that the main character is a stick. I like the contrast here between
the new media form and the
traditional setting.
MH:
When did you know you wanted to become an artist? Who are your
influences?
YHC:
I wanted to be an artist when, in a confused way, I realized I
preferred to express myself rather than to
understand myself, but didn't know how to express myself nor what
to express. And when I realized that
expression of ideas or disciplines often took an inordinate amount
of skill, I fell back on art as the ultimate
easy expression of what I consider to be the opposites of ideas
and discipline -- emotion and disorder.
In art you can more or less invent everything in the most cockamamie
way, and with absolutely no justification
or explanation at all. Of course, many artists, especially in
Korea, think there's a need for explanation.
I've never felt the need to explain my art, which I see as mostly
pontification. I prefer to just express emotion
and disorder. This is why I like Marcel Duchamp. I see him as
the ultimate purveyor of the freedom to do
everything wrong and have everything come out right. I also prefer
him to Joseph Beuys, who has been a
beacon for most of contemporary Korean art. Beuys has captured
the Korean artist's desire to create
incoherent art that has a coherent explanation. But since art
is by definition perfectly subjective, nothing,
especially whether art is smart or not, is verifiable. Duchamp
always knew this. He said that "Everything
I say is stupid and wrong." I agree. That's the beauty of
it all, his art and all art. And since I take this
attitude too, an enormous intellectual burden slips off my shoulders.
Maybe it was never even there.
But Duchamp helped me to feel free to express myself. Thank you,
doctor.
MH:
Did you study art? Are you self-trained? What is it like to study
art in Korea?
YHC:
I learned Web art during my two weeks in Brisbane for Multimedia
Art Asia Pacific in 1999.
MAAP 1999 is the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm grateful
to Kim Machan, the director,
and to her team, which at the time included Beth Jackson and Jeff
Sams. I also learned a lot just
from being around Feng Mengbo, Tina Gonsalves, and Rick Vermey,
who were the other three net.works/
artists in the residency. Studying art is probably a necessary
evil in Korea -- as it may be everywhere else.
It's during art school that the student makes her first contacts,
does group shows, etc. It's fun, but it's
also all a waste of time, as with most higher learning in Korea.
The Korean education system, whether it
be art education or another, is at the root of most of the prejudice,
conceit and intellectual laziness in Korea.
A Korean diploma usually signals the end and not the beginning
of thinking. The same goes for a Korean
art diploma. Artists with diplomas from the "best" art
schools see themselves and -- how strange --
easily make everyone else in Korea see them as the best Korean
artists. It's all very pitiful looking at it
from the outside in. And now that I make Web art, I'm an outsider.
Phew.
MH:
What other mediums have you worked in? Software?
YHC:
I've done installation and video. Everyone knows that I use Flash
to make my Web pieces.
Even with all of its bugs, Flash satisfies me for now, maybe in
the same way that a musician
sticks to one instrument.
MH:
You use Macromedia products in your art...how closely do you actually
work with the corporation
in terms of working out bugs and designing? Is this a direction
you feel artists have some influence in?
YHC:
I use Flash only, and only about 10% of it. I got it free during
MAAP99, and again I am grateful to Kim Machan
and the MAAP team, and to Macromedia. Software developers think
first about the commercial artists and
design firms who make up the vast majority of their clients, and
second, if at all, about Web artists. I think Picasso
once said that if "I don't have green, I use red." This
is the artist, an adaptable creature who doesn't worry too much
about what might drive others crazy. For it's one thing to have
a client say she needs this or that on a Web site --
this is the headache of Web developers and designers. But the
Web artist really doesn't have to deal with problems.
There are no headaches in art.
MH:
Have you always been a writer?
YHC:
I'm not a writer. I'm an artist who uses text in her work. I don't
think my texts could stand the scrutiny of a good writer.
But I don't say that I'm not a writer just out of modesty. An
artist who uses language is free to write poorly.
There is such a thing as bad art that succeeds in becoming good
art. There is no such thing as bad writing.
Or rather, bad writing is writing that just doesn't exist for
our consideration. There is a text that Marcel Duchamp
created -- and not so much wrote -- called "The." He
wrote it, if I remember correctly, on his arrival in New York
from Paris right before World War II. "The" can be seen
as the personal manifesto of an artist who, without knowing
English, decided to not let a minor language problem get in the
way of his going about getting things done.
In other words, Duchamp decided that he would use the English
language artistically. I try to do the same thing,
to embrace his attitude, and the concept of the ready-made: even
language can be a work of art.
MH:
What inspires the Heavy Industries web work? The stories...
YHC:
The Web and the Internet inspire them. The vast majority of Web
sites communicate textual information.
The Internet is the information superhighway, remember? So all
I do is eliminate the fluff: the interactivity, the graphics,
the design, the photos, the illustrations, the colors, the different
fonts. I try to exploit the essence of the Web,
which is textual information. I like movies. I started in video,
and then when I graduated to the Web I realized that video
is video and the Web is the Web -- no use trying to put video
on the Web. I like the idea of a spectacle, whether it be
a movie or a video, and I wanted to create something on the Web
that is just as entertaining as TV.
People have compared my Web pieces to poetry, but in my mind that's
incorrect. Poetry, even poetry on the Web,
is a contemplative, thoroughly thoughtful lecture. My Web texts
don't permit the audience to contemplate the words
in a poetic way. They move too fast for that. The stories or texts
I invent are just ideas and images that come to me
and that I develop, just like all artists and creators do.
MH:
Where did you get the idea to have the web site "talk"
at the viewer in the way it does?
YHC:
You're right. My work talks at the viewer. I think the way it
does it, that is, the artistic style, is a mystery.
Style is personality, they say, so it must be just my way of doing
things. It's just my taste plus certain chance
encounters, for instance with Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, which
gave me a certain software that I was able to learn
how to use. I guess I'm interested in text art, but my work is
more just a question of what I'm capable and not
capable of doing on the Web, whether out of temperament or talent.
I like the idea of text art, but I've always
pooh-poohed the work of text artists like Lawrence Weiner and
Barbara Kruger, or On Kawara and Ben. I just find
their statements either pompous, cute, or forgettable. I decided
I would try to be entertaining.
MH:
What kind of culture is there for new media artists in Korea?
YHC:
Well, the best and most recent example is Media City Seoul, an
extravaganza of so-called new media that is
going on right now. Except that there's really not much new media
in the show. There's certainly no Web art.
It's actually a multimedia exhibition, mostly installation and
video installation. I have a friend in it who even
did a slide show. This misnomer, Media City Seoul, is merely Korean
desire for new media, but without the
appropriate cultural attitude. The cultural attitude that Media
City Seoul really expresses is that of monumental multimedia installation,
ˆ la Centre Georges Pompidou, with its huge ground-floor
installations, or the Venice and other biennials, Documenta, etc.
The most creative use of new media, especially Web art, is essentially
intimate, or the opposite of what Korean
artists love to create. Our cultural attitudes, maybe all cultural
attitudes everywhere, but especially here in Korea,
are dictated by politics. By the government. And as everyone knows,
many third-world countries, developing countries
and newly developed countries like Korea, like to make big, international,
eye-catching statements, whether it be
in sports, tourism or culture. Of these three areas, big culture
is by far the easiest goal to achieve, because big art
only takes money, not Olympic gold-medal talent, or Eiffel-towerlike,
Statue-of-Libertyesque genius or luck, and if
there is no local artistic talent, it can be imported. But because
Korea is a conformist culture, it is easy to see that
in no time, new media will take its place in the Korean art world,
coming in on the shirttails of big business --
I mean the digital revolution.
MH:
What roles do artists play in communities in Korea? Do you see
yourself as part of any traditions even as you work digitally?
YHC:
I take the attitude that art has no important place in society.
Or rather, professional art is less essential to our lives
than the personal esthetics of day to day living, the unconscious
art that everyone creates in their minds and with
their hands, and that is the real, profound manifestations of
culture. This is the important art, yet the art that, especially
for all of us who create it in our homes, offices, cars, on our
persons and even on our cell phones, is completely
disregarded as the opposite of art. That's why I like being an
artist. Because it's unimportant.
To me, artists who consciously try to play a role in society,
who try to make art important, are creating something
other than art, and sometimes even with dire consequences.
A successful Korean artist is invariably one who works with the
most powerful capitalistic and governmental
institutions in Korea. And although this artist may never do something
with dire consequences, I most often
see this artist's work as being something other than art. What
is this something?
Bad art, of course.
Most everyone in Korea sees art as having an intrinsic link to
education. As I said, the best
artists are seen as those who went to the best schools. This prejudice
creates a terrible intellectual burden not
only for these artists, but for all artists who want to show that
they too are smart. That's just about everyone.
Art becomes something important, because Korean culture has an
absolute esteem for education and intellect.
(This is also absolutely hypocritical, for education and intellect
are nothing here if not the foundation of money-making.)
The result is that artists willingly become important players
in the community, because they are convinced that their
education and intellect have prepared them for these roles. The
most important role is that of the artist who becomes
a university art professor. This is an artist's dream come true.
Since I believe that art holds but a minor role in society, I
haven't tried to follow the traditional Korean artistic path
to professorship. I don't worry about tradition, either. Traditions
will take care of themselves -- or they won't.
That's not my personal attitude, but the attitude of the entire
Korean society. For although Korea likes to think
of itself as maintaining traditions, artistic or other, in the
end modern life takes over. I myself create Web art
not because I'm for or against any Korean tradition, and I certainly
would never rationalize my work as being
at once traditional and contemporary. I create Web art because
new media fits into my lifestyle. It's cheaper
than any other art form I've ever worked with. I don't need a
studio, and there are fewer materials to buy.
And in terms of the financial investment, the returns -- the automatic
international artist status, the
automatic international audience -- are infinitely greater than
if I used another medium.
MH:
Thanks. Best of luck to you and your many projects. I've used
your website for teaching and students love it.
(c) mollyhankwitz2000
Molly Hankwitz is a curator of new media, architecture, film,
and video.
She was part of MAAP's Forum 2000 in Brisbane and is teaching
at QUT School of Visual Arts and School of Architecture.
mollybh@netspace.net.au
MAAP01 Festival Review
November, 2001
by Douglas Leonard (courtesy Real Time Magazine)
“MAAP is a concept and a vision, not a place or a time,”
according to Kim Machan, speaking eloquently and indefatigably
as director/curator of Excess, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival
2001.This vision has seen major partnerships developed with regional
new media organisations in China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the
Philippines and Australia. Making her stand on behalf of the immediate
cultural exchange of artistic voices, she warns that the developing
economic rationalist rhetoric in Australia seeks to divide the
arts and cultural community into those who make money and those
who don’t, stigmatising the latter as ‘elite’ and
out of touch. Thoroughly embracing an internet mentality, the
seeming lack of traditional infrastructure becomes a strength
that allows MAAP to be whatever it wants – international,
cross-cultural, transportable.
The actual presentation was accessible, funky, including the
opening night artists party and Art Rave with dj Jimi Chen (Taiwan)
and Toy Satellite crew from Melbourne. The three-day event took
place throughout the public spaces and galleries of The Brisbane
Powerhouse which, has not only established itself as the alternative
venue, but is building a broad community base. Two other events
took place on the weekend: a farmers market and a Community Aid
Abroad foodfest brought new audiences to new media, families in
tow. The mirror-maze like, funfair atmosphere was seductive, not
cultish; exploring the different spaces became a physical metaphor
for exploring the internet; sheer contiguity morphed and processed
responses. Delightful Di Ball (she who herself has morphed from
country & western send-up singer to new media diva) was on
hand as psychopomp to the uninitiated, acting as MC and facilitating
user-friendly guided tours through CD ROM art works and online
events. In the end, you drew your own MAAP, and comparing your
map with others was an added pleasure.
MAAP 2001 installations were as varied in form as in their conceptual
concerns, sometimes savagely sardonic or wittily confronting.
Ruark Lewis’ video installation, Untitled 1, deconstructed
the written word (Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed
the Paper, a notoriously fake historical reconstruction) by physically
ripping up the book. Golden Time, by Japanese artists’ collective,
Candy Store, projected repeats of a televised aerobics class from
Australia to an empty wheelchair located directly beneath a glitzy,
suspended noose made from display cable lighting (“we move
domestic boredom into different media, to show exactly the same
program people are bored with...”). Korean artist Oh Sang
Gil’s comment on excess and waste seemingly dripped blood
into a toilet bowl until the flushing revealed it as the formalised
“minimal aesthetic of an everyday motion”.
My point of entry began at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary
Art, where, meditating upon (being meditated upon by), Gong Xin
Wang’s triple-screened My Sun (previewed RT Oct-Nov), an
unquestionable master work which “convincingly achieves a
most heightened sense of sublime humanity” (Kim Machan),
coloured and toned subsequent encounters. The fallen jacaranda
blossoms while walking to the Powerhouse experienced as psychedelic
tessellations. The pure Zen task of ‘sitting’ in the
AO: Audio Only sound art gallery curated by Andrew Kettle. Yan
Zhenzong’s I Will Die 2001 completed this trio of contemplative
exercises.
Zhenzong’s work relentlessly and fascinatingly presented
ordinary people, young and old, their humanity amplified by their
framing environments and facing into the camera, speaking the
words of the title in their own languages. Sometimes with embarrassment
or evident disbelief, sometimes with authentic solemnity –
inducing a cumulative effect of stilling the mind from asking,
Western style, cooler aesthetic questions.
Viewing the Excess Chinese video program curated by Wu Meichun
and Kim Machan, I particularly liked Yang Fudong’s Backyard:
Hey the Sun is Rising! which decontextualised traditional eastern
martial arts into an absurd choreography with, at times, a Buster
Keaton-like wistfulness for a more innocent version of masculinity.
It was also a privilege to see an earlier work of Wang’s
(1990), Myth Power, which, in a ‘worked’ anthropological
documentary style, demonstrated his ongoing investigation into
belief systems and post-Communist tensions between individualism
and the masses. With an underlying sense of loss of community,
the sun here is sometimes shown in negative (the black sun alchemists
took to symbolise the unconscious in its base, ‘unworked’
state prior to individuation?). Wang’s new work for the Powerhouse
site, Prayer, continues this line: visuals pan from a pair of
hands praying before an eastern alter, continue up through the
temple architecture to the sky and descend again into a ‘cityscape’
of uniformly replicated stone plinths. Antennae of wires open
and close in systolic fashion to an invisible sun, duplicating
the praying hands. The suggestion is that even the endeavours
of modernity are supplications.
By introducing the notion of ‘sublimity’ in her essay
on Wang, and with the Blakean intimations of Excess, Machan reveals
an extant neo-Romanticism. Certainly there are more than echoes
of ‘70’s ‘happenings’ in Post Sensibility:
SPREE 2001 - documentation of a wild underground event held in
Beijing. Machan considers that Chinese artists have been digesting
the whole of Western art history in less than a decade (installation
art was still banned in China 4 years ago), and are pushing limits,
searching for individual expression. This new wave of protestantism
in the arts invites comparison with our own, relatively staid,
practices.
For me it was Sydney-based Melinda Rackham’s interactive,
computer-generated cosmos empyrean that chimed on a different
front, particularly with Wang’s preoccupation with the human
desire for transcendence and ambivalency about traversing a non-referential
universe. At once ‘charming’ (like the quark), and terrifying.
And there was so much more…
MAAP lived up to the "excess" label and we can only
wonder what the next installment of this growing Asia Pacific
event has to offer the world of contemporary art and new media
mania.
Cinderella and the Machine: Reviewing
an On-line Art Festival - MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) 2000
Anne Kennedy
In a recent article discussing 'Kismet', MIT's new robot designed
for 'social interaction with humans', Steven Shaviro contends
that the 'rational choice' view that underwrites so much digital
culture, from humanoid robots to 'people simulator' computer games
like The Sims, leaves out everything that goes beyond subsistence
and reproduction; everything that is, that makes life interesting.
It leaves no room for all those feelings, gestures and behaviours
that are whimsical, impulsive, arbitrary, imaginative, obsessive,
beautiful, or otherwise excessive. In short, it leaves out love,
poetry, and madness, together with all else that makes for richness,
diversity, and unpredictability of human culture.1
If you wander around MAAP 2000's on-line exhibition of new media
art, making fleet-footed links or stumbling into gaps, waiting
for klutzy downloads or springing in a heartbeat to the site of
your desire, then you are bound to bump into these human elements
to which Shaviro refers.
For three days during September MAAP (Multi Media Arts Asia Pacific)
2000 ran in real time and on-line. MAAP's on-line information
pages spoke of upcoming 'interactive exhibitions' from Seoul,
Beijing, Tokyo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand;
of 'forum, chat and discussion'; and of WebbJam (including an
email conversation facilitated by media theorist Geert Lovink),
where panels would be netcast and streamed through the MAAP web.2
Organizers also explained that this year's festival moved beyond
last year's 'Collapsing Geographies', 'where issues of new media
space dissolving traditional geographical and hierarchical space
were examined'. Instead, this year's festival addressed the reality
'that art and ideas are made "somewhere" and that local
and specific environments are still at the core of how artists
perceive and express their ideas'. MAAP 2000 also addressed the
following questions:
What is the identity/persona of the creator? Who is the work talking
to? How is it perceived? Where is the work seen? Who owns the
place and identity of power? What is the sense of place in a global
and local reading? How do we name the new places emerging?3
On opening night my Internet connection crashed - a mishap which
coincided with MAAP's concern with issues of locality and access
and my own square assumptions about 'opening nights'. Who gets
to go to the ball? Those with the slick glass slipper connections,
those with the beautiful bandwidths? And what about those who
cannot get there? Stuart Moulthrop questions the global efficiency
of the World Wide Web in his article, 'Error 404: Doubting the
Web'. He asks:
To whom is the Web visible after all? Or to turn the question
the other way, even for those who have ready access to the Internet,
how much of the Web is visible from moment to moment? What about
the pages that are very hard to find - or impossible to find at
all? Perhaps this, after all, is the most representative aspect
of anyone's Web experience: Error 404: The object you requested
could not be found on this server.4
MAAP artist Young-hae Chang addressed related subject matter
in one of her displays (best to be seen and heard), Artist's Statement
No. 45,730, 944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site (2000):
THE BIGGEST ART SPACE: THE WEB. THE GREATEST CHANCE TO SAY SOMETHING
OR MAKE SOMETHING DUMB. OR, BETTER YET, BORING. BREATHTAKINGLY
BORING. DEATHLY BORING: ART. YES, UPLOAD FOR A LONG LONG TIME
…WAITING FOR REPLY … STILL WAITING … AND WHILE
WAITING, ISN'T THIS THE PERFECT MOMENT TO REFLECT ON LIFE AND
DEATH …5
Reflections about the World Wide Web's imperfections, inequities,
gaps, and rips (which link to the theme of presence and place)
are evident in many of the exhibits and occasional technological
glitches provided a serendipitous commentary on these themes.
In a festival which focused on identity and place it seemed fitting
that artists sometimes experienced technical hazards during digital
delivery due to their geographic locations. Viewers like myself
faced the question: who is permitted to do the looking?
Probing the myth of the virtual and global cyber-tribe (although
sporadic cheery global-family rhetoric did turn up), artists turned
their attention to their own hyphenated and ruptured identities.
In '"Where Do You Want to Go To Today?" Cybernetic Tourism,
the Internet, and Transnationality', Lisa Nakamura refers to Microsoft's
slogan which 'rhetorically places the consumer in the position
of the user with unlimited choice; access to Microsoft's technology
and networks promises the consumer a "world without limits"
where he [sic] can possess an idealized mobility'. For Nakamura,
the ads sanitize and idealize their depictions of the Other and
Otherness [Africa, the Amazonian rain forest, or the Egyptian
desert, for example] by deleting all references that might threaten
their status as timeless icons. In the camel image, the sky is
an untroubled blue, the pyramids have fresh, clean, sharp outlines,
and there are no signs whatsoever of pollution, road kill, litter,
or fighter jets.7
MAAP's millennium festival artists inventively utilized software
(sometimes provided by MAAP) in ways which often pried open the
notion of an idealized and timeless cyber-world seamlessly connecting
beautifully turned out web sites. In both structure and content,
festival artists sometimes reflected upon our expectations of
a dream woven or flashy web body - the web site equivalent of
American Beauty's Angela Hayes (Sam Mendes, 1999).8 K. Shunmugan's
No Worry Chicken Curry (2000), for example, an experimental video
from Malaysia, includes a shot of a woman beginning dinner preparations
by wrapping up live chickens in newspaper and tying them up with
string - different from the more typical media depictions of KFC
or san-wrapped, dream chickens.9
Other self-reflexive sites which provided ironic commentaries
on traditional notions about cyberspace and the World Wide Web
included MYeMAIL.com (Shilpa Gupta, 2000) from the Candy Factory
in Yokohama, near Tokyo, a tongue-in-cheek support group for those
distressed by email anxiety.10 This site offers links to SnailMail.com,
which offers 'controlled ambiguity' for email receivers, and KillEmail.com,
a service which will burn unwanted emails onto CDs and crush them
under tractors (other destructive means may be selected by scrolling/highlighting
options on a form).
In DaYs oF JavAMOn from Vietnam (Duc Thuan, 2000) the poetic
and the technical collide.11At first glance this looks like Java
Script but the commands contain poetic meditations on a maze of
themes - insanity, flowers, skin, sex, eating disorders, cats,
and so on. This is not how poetry is supposed to look. A similar
complaint was heard at the beginning of the Twentieth Century,
when 'the old dualist concept of image versus text was visibly
shattered … [by] the Cubist painters [who] introduced printed
letters into their paintings'.12 The history of art is scattered
with works that expand our conceptions of various media.
Both Linda Carolli and Lan Gen Bah reflect upon the link, the
click, the split, the rupture - all characteristics of digital
culture and identity. The link from Linda Carolli's 'The Foreigner'
(part of a Hypertext essay, Speak) leads us to this: 'The foreign
body is at once transitory and not rooted to any place, yet inextricably
linked to a place of origin. The place is no
