Let’s get loud ! INTERVIEW WITH HELEN THORINGTON
Let’s get loud ! INTERVIEW WITH HELEN THORINGTON, DIRECTOR OF TURBULENCE.ORG
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 5, 2005, pp. 12 – 17, © Cluster 2005
They began with the radio, producing over 300 projects in 15 years. Then while it was still the dawn of a new genre, they started with net art. Today TURBULENCE.ORG has around eighty net projects running, many of these making history in net art. With an enthusiasm and energy that’s hard to compare, they continually enrich their collection, in which one of the most important and most visited blogs of those dedicated to the relationship between creativity and new technology can be accessed. It doesn’t have a physical space, but it doesn’t need one, considering it can boast to be one of the most interesting places on the web.
We asked the artist and co-director of Turbulence.org, HELEN THORINGTON, the projects backbone right from the start, to tell us the story, enlighten us on the structure and the problems it has had to face and to take a glimpse at what the future has in store.
DQ. Turbulence.org started out as an extension of New Radio and Performing Arts (NRPA), that since 1981 has produced over 300 radio and sound art works. Do you see continuity between the radio and the web?
HT. New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) is a not-for-profit media organization, founded in New York City in 1981. Its initial focus was on the development of new and experimental work for radio and sound arts. It extended its mandate to Net Art in 1996 and launched its Turbulence website. It is one of the few organizations in the US whose core mission is to commission of Net Art and whose service includes the exhibition, archiving, and promotion of net artists’ work.
The switch to a focus on Net Art had little to do with any perceived continuity and almost everything to do with the failure of the support system for radio art in the United States. Funding declined; air time diminished; by 1998 there were not enough stations airing the series in the public radio system to justify continuing. I was interested in the World Wide Web; and particularly in the end-to-end structure that allowed everyone with a computer and access to the Internet the opportunity to participate in the medium, which contrasted so deeply with the one-way structure of radio and its control of content.
From the start, Turbulence was for artists who wanted to explore the characteristics of the World Wide Web and networked space; it included emerging and established artists and even debut artists; and if it favoured anything at all, it was variety. Looking back, I can say that as an artist coming to the web in 1996, my background in radio was useful. Particularly useful was my familiarity with the mass media and the disembodied experience that characterizes working in both radio and on the net.
DQ. Has your interest in radio conditioned the type of net art projects commissioned over the years (focusing on networking, communication and sound)?
HT. Turbulence has not favored sound or sound/musical works. In 1996, sound quality on the Internet was so poor – it was RealAudio 1.0 complete with static, dropouts, and other artifacts of the developing technology – that the one composer we did commission swore she would never do it again.
It is only recently – in the last three years, I’d say – that artists in general, recognizing both the importance of sound – how it communicates, what it does for a work – and that the technologies are vastly improved, have begun to incorporate sound into their work. To answer your question more directly: no, my interest in radio has not conditioned the type of net art projects chosen for Turbulence commissions. Turbulence is eclectic. Our commissions cover a diverse array of projects, including the moving image, literature, poetry, and the visual arts. No one discipline has been favored over another, if anything we have encouraged the dissolving of boundaries between disciplines and between the arts and science.
DQ. Since 1996, the year Turbulence was founded, you have commissioned at quite a frenetic rate, commissioning more than 80 works and also developing curatorial projects, etc. How do you manage? What kind of support do you offer artists?
HT. For six of the nine years that Turbulence has been in existence, I handled it pretty much by myself. We had a limited budget, which supported my efforts modestly and allowed for an average of 6-8 commissions per year but little else. Funders like the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts stipulated that funds go to New York artists, and so for those first years our commissions went largely to New Yorkers, a strange restriction when working in a borderless environment like the Internet.
The limited budget hasn’t changed, indeed if anything, securing funds for Turbulence has become increasingly difficult, due largely to the decline in government support for the arts in the US, particularly for the contemporary artist, and the subsequent stress placed on private funders.
But about three years ago I was joined in NRPA by Jo-Anne Green, a visual artist and arts administrator. It was with and because of her largely unpaid efforts and interest that we were able to expand Turbulence’s activities to include:
1. The Spotlight section, which presents artists who usually fall outside of the geographical range of our funders.
2. The Guest Curator’s section, which was developed to enable independent artists and curators to introduce fresh perspectives on net art and culture, both in their choice of works and critical commentaries.
3. Artists’ Studios, which provides visibility for net artists and provides users with the opportunity to view a body of work rather than a single work.
Neither artists nor curators are paid. We simply offer them a high profile, well-trafficked venue for their work and we promote them as energetically as we do our commissioned artists.
We were fortunate in 2003, to receive a two-year grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts that has allowed us to run two consecutive juried international competitions. We also opened a second office in Boston, Massachusetts in 2002 that has allowed us to raise funds to support New England artists. We ran the firstever net art competition in Boston in 2003.
DQ. Once the net art hype died down, many institutes stopped commissioning or sustaining online projects. Together with the Dia Center of the Arts, that has a considerably smaller collection, Turbulence is one of the few organizations still resisting, maintaining the same level of enthusiasm. What is it that makes you believe that net art is still something worth working on?
HT. There are many practicing net artists who need support, and need support more than ever because other institutions are no longer sustaining them. There are directions that have yet to be explored, and possibilities yet to be developed – separately or in conjunction with newer wireless developments.
But the real reason net art is not being supported is not that the “hype” has died down but rather this decline reflects the inability of the art world/art market to commodify Net Art. The gallery and the museum become superfluous when an unlimited number of individuals can view the “original” in the privacy of their own homes. There’s also a widespread fear of not being able to preserve net art because both hardware and software become obsolete, the latter very rapidly. Collectors are not willing to invest in an art form that will not appreciate in value and has no re-sale value. Unfortunately the Net Art community has not yet found an economic alternative.
DQ. Does Turbulence exist as a website only or does it have a physical space as well where works are proposed as installations? How do you face converting a net art piece into a real space piece?
HT. Turbulence exists as a website only. We often wish that we had a physical space. I think if we did it would be a studio space, for the development of work, rather than an exhibition space. Or maybe it would focus on the studio idea but include exhibitions as well.
But we have been involved in exhibitions of net art in physical spaces. And when doing this, I think it’s enormously important that the artist be involved in deciding how a net work will be exhibited, as yanking it off the Internet and setting it up as some form of installation, alters the artist’s intent. On one occasion – at the Moving Arts Gallery in New York City in 1999 – we exhibited 4 artists. One insisted that her work had a home on the Internet and no place else – we showed it in a browser as it was intended. The other three artists adapted their works to the space (and to a degree the space to them), modifying and, in at least one case, altering the meaning of the work.
DQ. What does Turbulence have in mind for the future?
HT. Right now, we are taking a new direction (1) and developing a new project (2).
1. We are beginning to commission hybrid works – works that take place both in virtual and in physical space. This means we must partner with organizations that can provide the physical space. The last work by Teri Rueb is a case in point. Teri works with GPS and other wireless technologies to create large-scale sound installations in public spaces. People wishing to access her work must have certain mobile devices, which the artist makes available. In the case of Itinerant, those devices will be available at a Boston art gallery – the Judi Rotenberg Gallery – which agreed to work with us in presenting and promoting this work. But Teri’s work will also have a networked component. You will be able to go to turbulence. org, and read about the work, navigate its locations, and hear its sound compositions.
2. We’re developing a conference on networked_performance. On July 14, 2004, NRPA, in partnership with Michelle Riel, chair of Teledramatic Art and Technology at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB), launched the networked_performance blog to explore the shifting paradigms in performative cultural practice. Our goal was to take the pulse of current network- enabled performance practice, to obtain a wide range of perspectives on current issues and interests, which we feel are under-examined, and uncover common threads that might help shape a symposium in 2006. With over 750 entries in its first eight months the networked_ performance blog reveals an explosion of creative experimental pursuits, as artists explore the migration of computing out of the desktop PC and into the physical world, the continuing advances in the internet, wireless telecommunication, sensor technology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Equally important, the over 110,000 visitors since the blog’s inception demonstrate a keen interest in this emerging practice.
LINK
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA)
Turbulence.org
The networked_performance blog
