The July issue of Flash Art (Italian Edition) features a short essay I wrote on how art is reacting to Youtube and other social platforms. Pdf scan here.

Below you can find some of the links that inspired the text.

Petra Cortright, Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009
Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11, 2009
Oliver Laric, 50 50, 2007
Oliver Laric, Touch My Body (Green Screen Version), 2008
Brody Condon, Without Sun, 2008
Alterazioni Video, I would prefer not to, 2009
Constant Dullaart, Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009
Jodi, Thumbing Youtube, 2009
Martin Kohout, Moonwalk, 2009
John Michael Boling, Guitar Solo Threeway, 2006
Curatingyoutube.net, 3 Hours in 1 Second, 2010

Jeremy Owen Turner is new media artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. He has been an online performance artist since 1996 and has performed in virtual worlds since 2001. Known as “Wirxli Flimflam” in Second Life, Turner has co-founded the group Second Front (est. 2006). He interviewed me for his MA thesis on avatar design.

Jeremy Owen Turner Interviews Domenico Quaranta about Medium Specificity and Avatar Design in Second Life. 2010

TURNER: How is Second Life a medium of its own and how is it a mix of media?

QUARANTA: I prefer to think about Second Life as an environment than as a medium. I know that, saying this, I’m making a choice – and quite a radical choice. Of course, Second Life is a medium as well, and being part of the computer environment, it is intrinsically multimedia. But I think that all the artists who understood Second Life as “just a medium” usually made really bad art. Actually, this happens every time somebody uses a corporate software platform in order to exploit its potential as a medium: web browsers, Flash, Photoshop, Second Life. None of them was created as an artistic medium. You are acting within the framework set up for you by programmers and software designers – which means that you are less free than a painter. In 1997, the English collective I/O/D wrote: “Software is mind control – take some”. You can do it either by designing your own tools or subverting the existing tools.

Formalist artists in Second Life are just making advanced 3D design on a community platform. It is bad as art because it is just exploiting the potential of a software tool; and it is bad as 3D design because Second Life is a bad 3D software platform, with many limitations and a defined aesthetics.

Something better came up when artists understood the potential of Second Life as a place and as a social platform. When weird people with little in common with those Second Life was meant for – net artists, activists, Fluxus-style performers – started gathering in communities such as Odyssey. When they started designing their avatars not in order to make a beautiful or impressive avatar, but to construct a social persona. When they started designing objects and environments, activating scripts etc. not in order to explore the aesthetic potential of their medium, but to challenge their audience, subvert their expectations, make things happen.

Of course, when you are using Second Life as a performative platform, you are still using it as a medium. Making performances still means designing objects, writing and activating scripts, etc. But the perspective is completely different.

TURNER: Have you seen evidence of avatars that were created strictly with visual/optical relationships in mind or with some other aesthetic consideration that seemed independent of a community/social discourse? If yes, please describe any one of these projects.

QUARANTA: If it happened, it’s completely uninteresting to me. If there is something in Second Life you can’t fight against, it is it’s visual side. You can play with its kitschy aesthetics, but you cannot be set free from them.

TURNER: If you were role-playing the art critic Clement Greenberg, how would you critique an avatar’s design in Second Life? For example, would Greenberg insist that an avatar’s form be distributed in order to mirror the 3-dimensionality of virtual worlds or be flattened in order to privilege the 2-dimensional characteristics of the computer screen?

QUARANTA: If I had to play a parody of Clement Greenberg in Second Life, I’d either choose one of the options you suggest. If I had to role-play him seriously, this is a different story. I think Greenberg’s formalism was widely misunderstood, mainly thanks to the way it was used by his followers. Greenberg wrote: «Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium».[1] Since Greenberg was a clever guy, I’m sure he would identify “what’s unique in the nature of Second Life” in code and theater, and he would set his rules according to it. Or, at least, this is how I understand formalism as applied to virtual worlds. A virtual world is not as simple as a canvas. At a first level, it is a piece of software. At a second level, it is a community platform, where everything that happens appears to be on stage. Thus, it seems that to be “formalist” in Second Life means to operate at both the levels of code and of staged performances.

But this is, of course, an interpretation like many others. Greenberg was also one of the harsher enemies of kitsch and pop culture. For him, kitsch was the opposite of the avant-garde, and was part of the cultural strategy of a totalitarian regime [2]. He never understood that the avant-garde may use kitsch in order to tell something relevant about it; thus, he never understood Pop Art. So, it’s even more likely that he would never enter a virtual world.

TURNER: To what degree does anthropomorphism have a direct and lasting influence on avatar design in Second Life?

QUARANTA: To a high degree. An avatar is a persona. You – as its puppeteer – have to identify with it; and the other people, as both the audience of the story you are telling and as the other characters in the story, have to identify with you and recognize you as part of their community.

TURNER: What kind of avatars have you seen “artists” rather than “designers” create, in Second Life? How are the outcomes different?

QUARANTA: Designers create interesting avatars. Artists create interesting characters.

TURNER: How essential is “narrative” when critiquing Second Life as a discrete medium?

QUARANTA: Fundamental. In a virtual world, there is no art without narrative.

TURNER: Have you critiqued virtual art in other worlds outside of Second Life? If not, why did you choose SL over others. If you have explored other worlds, please explain what the art was like within them.

QUARANTA: I’ve never been in other virtual worlds. I joined Second Life because, from the outside, I understood that a really interesting community was developing there. I’m not interested in virtual worlds per se, and I’m definitely not interested in “virtual art” – I’m interested in art, wherever it may happen. Art made in virtual worlds – actually, any art made out of the main art world – is interesting when people who have never been there get interested in them. African sculpture became interesting as art when the cubist started stealing African sculptures from anthropology museums. And art in Second Life became interesting when many people interested in art downloaded the client to see what was happening there. According to what I know, nothing comparable happened in other virtual worlds. There are, of course, many isolated examples; some of them – Lawrence Wiener’s Palace chatroom (1997), Joseph Delappe’s performances, Isbiter and Straus Sim Gallery (2004) – anticipated the Second Life burst; many others were a consequence of the development of the Second Life art community. Also, I’ve seen a lot of good art about World of Warcraft, or about The Sims Online; but no consistent art community seems to have developed into World of Warcraft, or into The Sims Online. Do you know any?

[1] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, in Forum Lectures, Voice of America, Washington, D. C. 1960. <<http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html>>

[2] Cfr. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and kitsch”, in Partisan Review, 1939. <<http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html>>

The last issue of the Mexican magazine La Tempestad features a short overview of net art I wrote, titled “El arte de los ciberdanos” (on the cover, Vai Avanti by Rafaël Rozendaal). You can read it online (Spanish, pp. 74 – 77) or buy the magazine.

Below you can find the original English version.

The Art of the Netizens

Domenico Quaranta

In the beginning was jodi.org, and jodi.org was within the Internet, and jodi.org was the Internet. Not joking. It was 1995 when jodi.org appeared in a still relatively small, slow and amateurish World Wide Web. If you were unlucky enough to get into it by chance, you would have never forgot it. Jodi.org was a trap, a black hole into an under-construction universe, a trash bin, a dumpster. It was a place that you had to navigate without a map, without directions, and without knowing how to get out. It was a place where all the history of the Internet collapsed into a dada collage, an overgrowing Merzbau showing us what the Internet has been, was and would be in the future.

This place was built by a Dutch-Belgian couple, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. Some of the people who were trapped into its sticky web thought it could be understood as art, and started thinking that a specific “Net Art” was possible. The term was, and still is, quite problematic. Along the Twentieth Century, we got used to terms such as Video Art, Performance Art, Land Art and so on. This may lead us to think that the term “Net Art” describes a practice defined by the medium it uses. Big mistake. The Internet is not a medium: it is a place. Thus, the term Net Art doesn’t describe a medium, but a citizenship. It is more similar to “American Art” then to “Video Art”. But, while terms such as “American Art” make little sense today, since we live in a global village where local identity has often to fight against a global mass culture; the term “Net Art” makes more sense then ever, because more and more people think about themselves as netizens, that is “citizens of the Internet”. Net Art is the art made by netizens. You make Net Art because you are a Net artist, not the other way around. Sometimes it takes the shape of a website, more often it doesn’t. This is not really important, however: what defines Net Art is not the medium used, but the cultural background and habits of those who make it. Thus, the term Net Art describes something more similar to Dada or Fluxus than to Video Art: not a medium-based practice, but a community sharing a common culture and a common approach to art.

Net Art

This is, by the way, the reason why the term was often replaced by other labels, such as net.art, Neen and, more recently, “Post Internet”. net.art was actually the first term adopted, in 1996, to define the practice. Even if it looks quite similar, the little dot in it makes a big difference. If Net Art is an art label, net.art is the parody of an art label. The dot refers to domain and file names, and thus to the computer culture shared by netizens; and turns the word “art” into nothing more than a file extension (like .txt) or a top level domain (like .com).

Neen was a term chosen by the former artist (since then, Neenstar) Miltos Manetas in 2000, in order to describe the work of a «still undefined generation of visual artists». According to Manetas, «computing is to Neen as what fantasy was to surrealism and freedom to communism. It creates its context, but it can also be postponed […] Neen is about losing time on different operating systems». Finally, “Post Internet” was born quite recently out of the same need that produced net.art and Neen: describe the art of the Netizens without forcing them into the straitjacket of an (apparently) medium-based definition.

However, both “net.art” and “Neen” ended up to be identified with a specific community of people; and “Post Internet” is too a bad term to work as an art label. So, I will go on using the term Net Art, meaning “the art of the Netizens”.

Pioneers

The first Net artists were, indeed, very similar to the first Mormon settlers going West in the Seventieth Century. It was a generation of immigrants: they came from a world were art was a product and they entered a world where art could either be a process, an action and a place. They came from a world of objects, and they entered a world of digital data. They came from a world with borders and they entered a free and wild West. They came from a world where copying was illegal, and entered a place that Cory Doctorow described as «the world’s most perfect and most powerful copying machine». No surprise that, in the beginning, they insisted so much on this: making art that can be experienced from anywhere in the world; making and copying websites, appropriating and simulating identities, coordinating events, playing with codes and inventing new codes. What they were doing was pursuing their own frontier, building places, and making things that were impossible in other places. Building places: black holes like jodi.org, open platforms like Irational.org, online galleries like Teleportacia.org, closed laboratories like Hell.com. Making things impossible everywhere else: such as hijacking thousand of people to your own place, as the etoy collective did in 1996; acting as if you were 200 different artists instead of one, as the German feminist Cornelia Sollfrank did in 1997; playing the role of the Holy See online for over a year, as the Italian duo 0100101110101101.org did in 1998; fighting against a giant corporation and winning the battle, as the whole online community did in 1999 in support to etoy; persuading the American media and intelligence that you were going to auction actual votes online, as the Austrian collective Ubermorgen.com did in 2000.

Neen

Of course, many of these early pioneers knew that it was possible to make Net Art out of the Internet, and even without using a computer. Thus, when invited to show in real venues, etoy came up with the Tank System, a large scale installation of pipes that worked as a metaphor of the digital space of the Net; and when, in 2001, Epidemic and 0100101110101101.org decided to use the Venice Biennale as a platform to spread a computer virus, they actually used t-shirts, not computers. However, they were too involved in building places and taking actions to fully explore this possibility. So, we have to thank Miltos Manetas for having stated that clearly, with the Neen Manifesto («computing […] creates its context, but can also be postponed») and his own work. Manetas made Net Art – or, in his words, Neen – in the form of websites, but also in the form of paintings, prints and videos. Other Neenstars made songs, buildings, installations, games, performances. Let’s consider Manetas paintings – something that a “radical” net artist would never have done: physical objects for a luxury market, made with a traditional medium and a quite conventional style. The subjects are cables, computers, videogames, people involved with computers and videogames, websites, navigators, GPS and, more recently, Internet icons such as the Pirate Bay logo. Paintings for a post-digital, post-internet age. On the other hand, his websites are graffiti for the streets of the Internet: instant, one-liner works often consisting in a single page, where a playful animation, or the relation between the content and the address, is enough to turn them into little treasures found out in the trash.

Manetas and the Neen movement are not alone in this process. In the same years the original net.art group starts making things that are not websites: Jodi subverts corporate softwares and makes installations with hacked hardwares; Alexei Shulgin turns an old 386dx into a pop star; Vuk Cosic makes ASCII movies. Other artists, such as Claude Closky and Cory Arcangel, never separated their online activity from their offline works.

Digital Natives

All this opens the path to a second generation: the natives. They are born in a world where any distinction between media and reality doesn’t make sense anymore. They are always online, not because they chose it, but because they don’t even know an offline status. To say it with a paradox: they wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the office desktop borrowed its name from the computer desktop. They always make Net Art, even if their personal homepage is usually built with Indexehibit or Tumblr, and their works are often installations, performances, prints or videos. Does this mean that all contemporary art is Net Art? No, it doesn’t. If digital nativity is a condition, Net Art is still a matter of choice. Or, to use Manetas’ words: «They are Friends of the information and not Users». Everybody is a user today, but just if you are a “friend of the information” everything you are going to do will bring the Internet watermark in its source code. No surprise that many of them gathered in the so-called surfing clubs: online communities that elevate browsing, copying and recycling to an art form. They are interested in the “digital folklore”, to use the term suggested by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenshied. They browse, copy, edit, share. They often make a professional use of amateurish tools, or an amateurish use of professional tools. To the clean, polished style of “users” they react with their dirty style and their conceptual focus on the tool’s basic features. Thus, Petra Cortright makes plain webcam videos of herself where the simple use of a filter is enough to turn them into something magic and disturbing. Harm Van Den Dorpel and Damon Zucconi often play with the layers of an image, modifying found material in order to generate in the viewer new associations and expectations. The duo AIDS-3D makes performances and installations exploring the spiritual side of technology. Rafael Rozendaal makes playful, apparently dumb flash animations turning interaction into a discovery device. Oliver Laric is interested in versioning as the driving force behind many Internet subcultures. The Italian collective Alterazioni Video turns popular online obsessions – such as making a stack of bowling balls – into sculptures, installations and performances. And Jon Rafman travels the world via Google Street View.

Jodi again

Of course, the first generation is still there and doing interesting things. I have no room for other examples, so I’d be happy enough to end up with Jodi, our starting point. The ineffable duo never stopped acting as a virus, commenting the world they are living in and cracking the polished surface of the corporate web, now turned “social”. Recently they started thumbing Youtube, replying to the most viewed videos with a simple thumb print. Think digitally, act physically: Net Art is nothing else, after all.

My set on Flickr.

On Friday, April 23 the Milan-based GLORIAMARIAgallery will open the first Italian solo show of Petra Cortright. Here is my text for the publication.

It Takes Strength to Be Gentle and Kind

by Domenico Quaranta

«It takes strength to be gentle and kind», the Smiths said in one of Petra Cortright’s favorite songs. It takes strength to take the usual, dumb, stereotyped, commodified imagery of prettiness and kindness and use it in a way that doesn’t look dumb or critical. It takes strength to adopt custom software effects, user friendly tools and vernacular genres and use them to make things that make you talk about art without apparently being anything more than what they are expected to be – a Youtube video or a Photoshop exercise. It takes strength to make art «about beauty and craft», as Ed Halter wrote.

Petra Cortright’s work has this peculiar strength. Take, for example, When You Walk Through the Storm (2009). In this video, a girl – the artist – is looking at you from the screen. Like you, she is sitting down in front of her computer. She looks sad – an impression enforced by the cold palette of the video. Slowly, she starts moving her hand up and down in front of her face. The movement activates a video effect that makes her appear underwater, fading her face in a myriad of pixels. At the same time, the intimacy created by the webcam gaze fades as well: she is close to you, on your computer screen, but the water effect makes the space in between you and her appear physical, and the sound – the song of the title – seems to come from the deep.

Most of Petra’s videos follow the same basic rules. In the diptych Sparkling I and II (2010) the artist wears sunglasses, walks through a garden and scrolls a tree, producing a beautiful rain of sparkling digital symbols; in Footvball/Faerie (2009) she plays football covered with a digitally-added pink cloud; in Das Hell(e) Modell (2009) she dances to the music of a Kraftwerk’s song, while a video filter alters our perception of time and makes her appear more angelic than usual; in Bunny Banana (2009) she eats a banana wearing bunny ears; and in Holy Tears (2009) she sheds digital tears ironically posing as a saint. All these videos are shot with a custom webcam, and use simple effects available to anyone. What makes them different from the amount of ego-clips we can find on Youtube? What gives them the power of a revelation? What makes them significant for the thousands of people that watched them online, but also for people that, for generational or other reasons, don’t share the internet and juvenile culture she refers to (in spare order, cyberpunk, psychedelia, kawaii, electronic music, sharing, exhibitionism)? Probably, the answer is: the way she is able to add all these levels, kindly and gently, to an object that doesn’t lose the authenticity of a teenager’s secret diary, or a student’s sketchbook.

Most of Petra’s gif animations and static images look like sketches, at first sight. They are, again, about beauty and craft. But beauty is unconventional and craft doesn’t mean that she uses image editing tools in the way a professional does. Quite the opposite. In her animated gifs, she either modifies vernacular material or explores animation effects and low-res aesthetics creating her own abstract gifs. In her still image pieces, she creates photo-collages where the complexity of the landscape is contradicted by the geometrical nature of the cuts; she employs different filters for different image layers; and she explores the liquid nature of the digital image literally liquifying found photographs of models, still lifes or landscapes. All this converges in The Infinite Sculpture Garden… (2010), her last and, up to now, most complex work: an abstract, suggestive landscape where geometrics, reflections, patterns, shadows and transparencies all conjure in the development of a hermetic, hyper-textual visual poem.

All these references to layers, effects and tools do not mean that Petra Cortright’s work is formalistic and medium-related. Petra belongs to the first generation of digital natives. For her, referring to internet culture and desktop metaphors is as natural as, for any aboriginal, referring to her traditions. She lives online. Let’s spend half a day on Google searching for her and we will know almost everything about her: that she loves pets and trees, that she hates New York, that her father died of Melanoma, that she had a wonderful love story and that she broke up. Her life is a continuous online performance taking place every day on her Twitter, her Facebook, her Flickr account. Her work is not about the medium: it’s about Petra Cortright. And it takes strength to be Petra Cortright.

Yesterday evening, Gerhard Mantz new solo exhibition Nach lautloser Explosion (After a soundless explosion) opened at DAMBerlin. This is my text for the catalogue.

Landscapes

Writing about the work of Gerhard Mantz is not an easy task. When I’m confronted with it, two different elements of our current visual landscape come to my mind: Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings and my iMac’s “nature” desktops and screensavers. Even if I used, for a long time, Friedrich’s Landschaft mit Regenbogen (1810) as a desktop’s background – for the first time ever in my experience with computers, the iMac’s screen seems to be the right frame for a painting – I know that these two things are pretty different: before entering our media-driven, post-industrial, post-modern, capitalistic culture that turns everything into a gadget – and thus, a Nineteenth century painting into a desktop wallpaper – Friedrich’s works were sublime visions conceived to make us think about the supernatural, and the divine that pervades everything around us.

On the other hand, a desktop’s background is just a stereotypically beautiful image conceived to make us forget that we are sitting down, in an unnatural position, in front of a machine, and make us dream about the outer world – a world that we increasingly see only through the lens of that same machine.

Gerhard Mantz’s landscapes seem to have something in common with them both. He looks back to the Nineteenth century tradition of landscape painting, but in doing this he is painfully aware of the destiny this kind of imagery encountered along the Twentieth century, in a way that makes it impossible for me to use one of his landscapes as a desktop wallpaper. But this may deserve a better explanation.

Simulated paintings

Gerhard Mantz made his first landscapes in the late Nineties. Born in 1950, he started working in the Seventies, focusing on the creation of abstract, large scale sculptural objects that he describes as “visual sensations in space”. Made with industrial materials such as acrylic and MDF, these colorful sculptures are themselves a significant contribution to the art of their time, addressing, on the one hand, the Modernist tradition of “concrete art” and, on the other hand, displaying the interest in redesigning the space and its internal dynamics shared by other artists such as James Turrell and Anish Kapoor. As it often happens in Kapoor’s work, some of these pieces are able to deform the space without actually touching it, only by means of shape and color. In particular, Mantz subtly exploits the emotional potential of color in order to affect our perception of the white cube.

Both this long-time career as a sculptor and this interest in the space around the work are very important to understand Mantz’s later work, and his peculiar use of 3D imaging. When, in the late Nineties, he starts using the computer, he is a mid-career artist, with a well defined concept of art; he knows what he wants to do and what he’s looking for. Moreover, he embraces the new medium at a time when it isn’t that new anymore, but it’s not yet a widespread device.

So, when he addresses the virtual, he knows that the spaces he is designing in the “real” world are already virtual as well. With this background, he is able to escape the fascination for the medium that ruined the work of so many artists.

He starts working with 3D graphics because they help him developing the “archetypal spatial situations” he is looking for. His first works are abstract objects and spaces, but soon he realizes that his images need more sensuality, more of the spontaneous adhesion that we often feel in front of a realistic, familiar image. That’s why he starts “painting” landscapes.

“Painting” may seem the wrong word here. Mantz’s landscapes are not “painted”, but constructed through a 3D design program, on a computer screen; and later printed on large canvases and hung to the wall. When they are still in digital form, the author – or the viewer – may be able to navigate them, walk through his forests, fly through his clouds, climb his mountains: the forests, clouds and mountains that he “created”, using 3D models and increasingly complex textures, without making reference to any “real” landscape. Yet, Mantz never released them as navigable 3D spaces. In between 2002 and 2009, he often turned his abstract 3D environments into video animations, but just in a few cases (in the series Shifting, 2009 and in the video Das Gesetz der Schwere, 2008) he did it with his natural landscapes.

Both the video animation and the print are means to document places that exist “somewhere else”; and they both are chosen for their ability to expand and deform the real space, rather then to give us a blink onto an outer space. Furthermore, the print on canvas is a mean to address the tradition of landscape painting. Thus, more than pictures of simulated landscapes, these works should be described as simulations of landscape paintings.

For Mantz, this reference is important to mark his distance from this tradition, rather than his proximity to it. As he said in an interview:

“The images distinguish themselves from the landscape painting of the nineteenth century through the absence of the idyll. There are no people who create a relation to all-powerful nature. No witness, not even anything, which would point to a civilization, to a present. Rather they are images, which represent a distant future or past. The paths leading into the image appear unapproachable. The horizon is barricaded by banks or undergrowth. Light from an unspecified point beyond directs the attention to central passages in which nothing can be seen. At least nothing particular. Passages where something is lacking or not yet there.”

This “hostility” is probably one of the reasons that makes these paintings so inadequate as desktop wallpapers.

Not afraid of beauty

Anyway, we have to admit that they are really beautiful, in a way that finds little space in contemporary art. Saying that contemporary art has a problem with beauty is a commonplace, and I won’t insist too much on it. Actually, aesthetic categories such as “beauty” and “sublime” didn’t disappear completely, but were powerfully redefined by contemporary art. What disappeared, with a few exceptions (mainly in photography), in contemporary art, but just in order to reappear in mass culture, are the traditional, conventional concepts of beauty and sublime, the ones shared by those who think that an orchid is beautiful, and a storm on the ocean is sublime.

When contemporary art addressed these conventional concepts of beauty and sublime, it happened in an ambivalent way, mixing celebration and criticism: think, for example, to Andy Warhol’s flowers, or to the whole work of Jeff Koons. On the contrary, if we compare Gerhard Mantz’s landscapes with the popular imagery of the sublime (let’s say, desktop wallpapers or the National Geographic reportages), we wouldn’t find in them neither criticism nor celebration.

Rather than appropriating and criticizing popular imagery, he is competing with it. He tries to enable the observer to have the same “spontaneous and affective access” as to Pandora’s wonderful environment while watching Avatar (2010). He does not only use the same tools James Cameron is using: he wants to produce the same feelings, even if in a different cultural context and for different purposes. The relationship between popular culture and high culture is definitely changing, and Mantz’s work reflects this evolution.

Stereotypes and archetypes

At this point, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Gerhard Mantz refers to his landscapes as “archetypal spaces”. On his website, he even did a list of the archetypes he is exploring: “the end of the world”, “the last part of the trail”, “the cave”, “the drowning”, “the paradise”, “the cities”. An archetype is a stereotype before slipping into the banality of the commonplace. In other words, it is the beauty of the sky before becoming a desktop wallpaper. It is the end of the world before being translated into the last catastrophic blockbuster. It is a classical Venus before inspiring the last eau de toilette advertisement.

This is, in the end, what Gerhard Mantz is doing with his landscapes: turning stereotypes into archetypes, bringing them back to their origin and giving them back their original power. And this is the second reason that makes these paintings so inadequate as desktop wallpapers: they are not stereotypes anymore, and they haven’t been banalized yet by entering the vicious circle of communication, as it happened to Friedrich.

Domenico Quaranta, “Reality is Overrated. When Media Go Beyond Simulation”, in Artpulse Magazine, Issue 3, March – May 2010.

Back in 1997, Arthur C. Danto wrote After the End of Art, asserting that, after the Seventies, art entered a “post historical” condition, leaving behind the usual art historical narrative – based on a linear idea of progress – of which Modernism was the swansong; and opening a new era in which “everything can be art”.

This position has been questioned, in recent years, by art critics who claim that Postmodernism is dead, replaced by an art which insistently sets out to explore some of the forgotten dreams of the Modernist project in the light of recent developments in the current socio-cultural landscape.

In 2003, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev made a first attempt with the exhibition “I Moderni / The Moderns”; and in 2009, Nicolas Bourriaud took up the cause with the exhibition “Altermodern”. While Christov-Bakargiev talked about project-based practices and utopianism, Bourriaud underlined creolisation, globalisation and travelling.

While their discourse is slightly different, both Christov-Bakargiev and Bourriaud seem to agree that new technologies and digital culture play a central role in this change. Christov-Bakargiev wrote: “The digital world is internationalist, as were the modernists (…). The digital mind is a project-based mind, encouraging a sense of ‘agency’, an ability to make choices and act.” And while the Altermodern Manifesto basically describes what Castells called “the information age”, Bourriaud’s previous critical statement explicitly indicates the programmer, the DJ and the web surfer as the cultural figures engaged in reshaping contemporary art practices.

On the other hand other critics are arguing that today innovation in art is taking place out of the fascinating yet limited box that we usually call “the art world”: in science labs, institutes of technology, as well as in public spaces and on the Internet.

If we compare these two different points of view, it is quite easy to see what they have in common: the idea that new technologies are consistently modifying the way we make art and our very notion of art.

This is quite obvious: Modernism itself can be described as the side effect of a revolution in the means of cultural production. At the time, some enthusiastically embraced the new media, some others had to reconsider the way they worked with old media, and some did both these things. Art changed dramatically.

The same is happening today, only amplified to a scale that is difficult to reduce to a theory. It is possible, and highly likely, that the digital revolution had a hand not only in the recent shift toward Modernism, but also in the end of that narrative that Danto identifies with modern art.

Having supported and shown art made with new media and technologies for more than ten years, the Expanded Box makes a seminal contribution to this process. Granted, we can’t be sure that the change will come from New Media Art. Maybe in the end traditional media will react to the challenges of the digital revolution in a way that more tech-savvy artists, too heavily focused on technology, would never imagine. In the meantime, however, we have to acknowledge that New Media Art is the best mirror of the world we live in. At least, I have yet to come across another form of art able to reflect the contradictions of our daily lives on the screen with the effectiveness of the Mattes’ performances; or show how language and narration reacts to the translation processes taking place in a computer as von Bismarck and Maus’ machine does. The other works look at advanced research (Gabrans), talk about chaos and complexity (Nepraš), explore artificial life (Boredomresearch), social use of technologies (Lozano-Hemmer), their appropriation and subversion (Jodi), the magic they can create (Vassileva). Isn’t it “so contemporary”?

I just posted the comment below on Gomp /arts, Will Gompertz‘s blog on the BBC website. Three days ago Mr. Gompertz, currently the BBC arts editor, posted an article where he claims that he “can’t find any net-based art of note”. No surprise that this article produced a lot of rumor on new media art magazines and mailing lists…

I had some funny time reading this article and all the reactions it produced, on this blog and around the Web (check out, among other things, Lauren Cornell’s contribution on Rhizome and the CRUMB thread). Personally, as an art critic strongly interested in Net Art, I don’t think that Mr. Will Gompertz just needs some links to “hot” web projects, neither informations of any kind. He doesn’t write “I can’t find any net-based art”, but “I can’t find any net-based art of note”. As the following statement suggests, Mr. Gompertz knows very well what Net Art is: “Duchamp and the Dadaists would have had hours of artistic amusement creating spoof websites, unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo.” Well, at least 50% of the best Net Art is “spoof websites, unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo.”

So, if I see a problem here, it isn’t a problem of ignorance, but of critical judgement. What we have here is a mid-career art critic – one who wrote for the Times and the Guardian and who ran Tate Online before joining the BBC as arts editor – who claims that, among the many net art projects he came in touch with along his brilliant career, he didn’t find anything that can be described as “a significant artwork”. This may mean either that Net Art, along the last 15 years, didn’t produced anything noteworthy or that Net Art, after roughly 15 years of existence, still challenges the evaluation criteria and critical tools available for a mid-career, traditionally trained contemporary art critic.

Both the options above can be right of course. My little experience in the field makes me believe in the last one. It may help us to understand why, among other things, important art critics not strictly connected with the art market (and thus potentially interested in critical practices), such as Hal Foster or Rosalind Krauss, were never able to get it. And I think that, if we’ll be able to focus the discussion on these topics – how Net Art challenges traditional criticism? do we really need “other criteria” in order to understand it and its positioning in the contemporary art field? – Mr. Gompertz’s remarks will turn out to be really useful.

“Playlist. A Reader”, my catalogue text for the exhibition Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art has been featured in Vagueterrain.

Domenico Quaranta (ed), Mediateca Expandida – Playlist, exhibition catalogue, Gijon (Asturias, Spain), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creaciòn Industrial, December 2009.

The second issue of “Mediateca Expandida”, the magazine published in conjunction with the exhibitions in LABoral’s mediateque, is out. It features texts by Matteo Bittanti, Ed Halter, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz and myself, plus about 30 artists and a music CD. You can download the full pdf from here.

On the last issue of Artpulse, a brand new art US-based contemporary art magazine, you can read an interview I had with Nicola Verlato about his interest in videogames and the way they are, or aren’t, influencing his work as a painter. You can read it online here.

Text written for the book Brice Coniglio (ed), Coniglioviola. Sono un pirata / Sono un signore, exhibition catalogue, Silvana Editoriale, October 2009. If you wish, you can buy the book (bilingual Italian / English) on the publisher’s website.

Alice makes Yoga

When Alice meets the white rabbit for the first time she is getting bored on a river bank with her sister. She follows the rabbit under the hedge, then down a deep hole into a room full of doors, bottles and cakes, and from there into a wonderland that with the help of Lewis Carroll, she ends up sharing with us.

When Alice meets ConiglioViola she is getting bored in front of a computer. Idly clicking here and there, like her namesake she is pondering what use “a book without pictures and dialogue” can have. It was 2001 and the internet was pretty much similar to a book without pictures and dialogue, a place devoted to serendipity but at the same time fairly devoid of surprises.

ConiglioViola pulls Alice into the vortex of a surreal experience, an online “meditation”. What appears is Yolanda, a strange robot sitting in the lotus position, with seven flashing chakras. Alice is invited to undertake a personal process of meditation using Yolanda’s chakras. Clicking on each chakra activates a series of hypnotic animations designed to aid meditation. When she encounters Yolanda Alice is unable to recognise Maria, the robot woman in Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927). Her film culture is limited to teen films and Dawson’s Creek, a TV series which was all the rage at the time. She doesn’t think the site’s aesthetics kitsch, or ponder the suitability of a computer screen for yoga meditation. And in any case Alice does yoga, or at least has taken a few lessons. She immediately forwards the link to her classmates and on the Saturday shows her instructor the site.

So was it that in 2001, ConiglioViola’s project acquired a cult following among devotees of New Age philosophies. La meditazione di Yolanda was used both in private and during lessons. ConiglioViola was not that surprised, having enough familiarity with the web to know that works online can meet with entirely unpredictable fates. Parodies can get mistaken for originals, and extreme provocations taken on board as practical suggestions that might just be good business ideas. In this context there is nothing strange about a discreet reflection on the computer screen as mirror for the self, a projection of its user and a place of life rather than a device for work, becoming a tool for meditation, and nothing strange about a subtle mockery of New Age philosophies actually eliciting identification from those seriously engaged in those philosophies.

In 2001, in any case, the identity of ConiglioViola itself was still in the process of forming. Established with the aim of creating multimedia works and reaching the widest audience possible, it did not take for granted that art would represent the best channel for this activity. In the meantime the internet appeared to respond to both of these expectations, and ConiglioViola enthusiastically embraced its promise. In 2003 Yolanda’s Meditation expanded to include a “temple”, a new, unsettling and surreal dimension that users can access after meditating on the seven chakras, and that enables them to contribute personal thoughts to a kind of online collective unconscious. In the meantime the group’s considerations on theatre and the idea of using the internet as a performative space led to the creation of another work on the web: The Secret Room (2004). The project sprang from a partnership with the Italo-Australian theatre company IRAA Theatre. The show The Secret Room was an experiment in interactive theatre divided into two parts. In the first part ten people are invited to the home of Roberta, the main character. Roberta and her guests get chatting, in a relaxed, intimate atmosphere. The guests are then invited into Roberta’s “secret room” to reveal their secret, distressing stories in private.

ConiglioViola’s web project is also structured in two parts. When you open the site a disquieting animation informs you that “the computer is your secret room” and “the browser is your director”. You are then bombarded with a barrage of pop-ups, each of which contains a video. The unexpected behaviour of the site (which recalls the spamming strategies adopted by porn sites), together with the size of the video clips, is a trial both for you – comprehensibly dismayed – and your computer, which may have problems dealing with all this material. If you both make it through, and if you have the patience to wade through around 50 pop-ups crowding the screen, you might come across a pop-up containing a gate with a bell. You ring the bell. If Roberta decides to let you in, you will be asked to leave an email address. A few hours or days later you will receive an email from Roberta, setting an appointment. If you still haven’t tired of it all, and if circumstances do not prevent you from visiting the website at that particular time on that particular day, you will finally gain access to the secret room.

Before revealing its contents, let us consider for a moment the subtle game staged by ConiglioViola. Intent on translating a theatre show into a “net.drama”, ConiglioViola carefully avoids the path of “augmented reality”, namely taking part in the real event via the internet. The group prefers to use the web to create a situation which reflects the original version of the show, but at the same time is closely bound to the language and dynamics of the web. In place of the concept of interactivity, which on the net means little more than clicking here and there in search of links, comes that of participation: suffered, sought after and obtained by the user amid delays and surprises. The real scene, filmed by ConiglioViola during its visit to Roberta’s “secret room”, is present in the video clips which appear in entirely random and ever variable order, making it impossible to reconstruct with clarity. The appointment mechanism generates expectations, but at the same time violates one of the web’s unwritten rules, that a visitor forced to return in order to gain access to content is a visitor lost. Everything is engineered so as not to grant us access to the secret room, or to ensure that visitors undergo a strict selection process (another violation of the web’s unwritten rules).

Those who were undaunted by the flood of pop-ups, and patiently sought out the way into the “secret room”, turning up on time at the appointed hour, will not be surprised to discover that the secret room is nothing more than the site’s root, the page in which the project shows not its interface, but its structure. As happened to Neo, the lead character in The Matrix (1999), the sight of the code, a routine vision for all those who programme the net, becomes a cathartic experience for common users, destined to render them immune to the allure of the web.

Neo brings us back to the White Rabbit, and in turn to Alice. In the following years the net remained ConiglioViola’s creative platform, the venue where the collective worked much of its magic: the legends surrounding the departure of the pirate attack on the Biennale, an inexhaustible source of imagination and post-production work on images. Other works on the web occasionally came into being, like Un’estate al mare (a vj-set in the form of a Flash game which acts as a teaser for the project Recuperate le Vostre Radici Quadrate) and Bertepolis, a glaringly camp Flash movie dedicated to Loredana Berté. But after being present for so many years, what now strikes us is the collective’s absence: in an era when sites long outlive their creators, the ‘interval’ message which now limits access to the ConiglioViola website spells more than just a break to mull things over, representing yet another theatricalization of the collective’s existence.

—

Quando Alice incontra per la prima volta il Coniglio Bianco si sta annoiando, con sua sorella, sulla riva del fiume. Lo insegue sotto la siepe, poi giù per un profondissimo pozzo, fino a una stanza piena di porte, bottiglie e dolcetti, e da lì a un mondo delle meraviglie che, con l’aiuto di Lewis Carroll, finirà per condividere con noi.

Quando Alice incontra per la prima volta il Coniglioviola si sta annoiando, da sola, davanti al computer. Procede svogliata da un link all’altro, pensando, come la sua omonima: “a che pro un libro senza le figure e i dialoghi”? È il 2001, e Internet, è, in buona parte, molto simile a un libro senza figure e senza dialoghi, un luogo votato alla serendipity ma al contempo piuttosto parco di sorprese.

Il Coniglioviola trascina Alice nel vortice di una esperienza surreale, una “meditazione” in rete. Davanti ai suoi occhi compare Yolanda, uno strano robot atteggiato in posizione di meditazione. Sul suo corpo lampeggiano i 7 chakra della tradizione Yoga. Alice è invitata a intraprendere con Yolanda un personale percorso di meditazione sui chakra. Cliccando su di essi, si attivano delle animazioni ipnotiche che facilitano la meditazione. In Yolanda, Alice non può riconoscere Maria, la donna-robot di Metropolis (1927), di Fritz Lang. La sua cultura cinematografica si limita ai film per teenager e a Dawson’s Creek, una serie TV molto in voga ai tempi. Non giudica kitsch l’estetica del sito, né si interroga sull’opportunità di portare la meditazione Yoga sullo schermo di un computer. Oltretutto, Alice fa Yoga, o quantomeno ha preso qualche lezione. Subito gira il link alle sue compagne di corso, e il sabato mostra il sito alla maestra.

Succede così che, nel 2001, il progetto di Coniglioviola diventa un oggetto di culto per centinaia di seguaci delle filosofie New Age. La meditazione di Yolanda viene usata, in privato o durante le lezioni. Coniglioviola non si stupisce più di tanto: conosce la rete quanto basta per sapere che lì, un’opera d’arte può avere un destino del tutto imprevisto. Le parodie vengono confuse con gli originali, le provocazioni estreme accolte come proposte concrete, su cui è possibile fondare un nuovo business. In questo contesto, non c’è nulla di strano se una discreta riflessione sullo schermo del computer come specchio del sé, proiezione del suo utente, luogo di vita più che strumento di lavoro diviene uno strumento di meditazione; o se una sottile presa in giro delle filosofie New Age sollecita l’identificazione di chi queste filosofie le pratica in tutta serietà.

Nel 2001, del resto, lo stesso Coniglioviola è ancora un’identità in corso di definizione. Nato con l’intenzione di dare vita a una attività multimediale e di rivolgersi al pubblico più vasto possibile, non dà per scontato che l’arte costituisca lo sbocco privilegiato di questa attività. Nel frattempo, Internet sembra dare una risposta a entrambe queste aspettative, e Coniglioviola abbraccia questa promessa con entusiasmo. Nel 2003, La Meditazione di Yolanda si arricchisce del “tempio”, una nuova dimensione inquietante e surreale, a cui l’utente accede dopo aver meditato sui 7 chakra e che gli consente di contribuire, con i suoi pensieri, a una sorta di inconscio collettivo online. Nel frattempo, la sua riflessione sul teatro e sulla possibilità di usare Internet come spazio performativo produce un altro lavoro in rete: The Secret Room (2004). Il lavoro nasce dalla collaborazione con la compagnia italo-australiana IRAA Theatre. Lo spettacolo The Secret Room è un esperimento di teatro interattivo che si compone di due momenti: nel primo, dieci persone vengono invitate sul palco, che ricostruisce la casa di Roberta, la protagonista. Roberta e i suoi invitati chiacchierano, in una atmosfera di intimità e rilassatezza. Quindi, gli invitati vengono invitati nella “stanza segreta” di Roberta, lontano dal palco, a condividere in privato i suoi segreti.

Anche il progetto in rete di Coniglioviola si compone di due momenti. Una volta aperto il sito, un’animazione al cardiopalma ti avvisa che “il computer è la tua stanza segreta”, e che “il browser è il tuo regista”. Quindi sei aggredito da una valanga di finestre pop-up, ciascuna dei quali contiene un video. Il comportamento inconsueto del sito (che ricorda le strategie di spamming adottate dai siti pornografici), unito al peso dei frammenti video, può mettere a dura prova sia te, comprensibilmente spaventato, che la tua macchina, che può far fatica a gestire tutto questo materiale. Se entrambi resistete, e se passi in rassegna con pazienza la cinquantina di finestre che ti si è aperta davanti, ti può capitare di trovare, in una di queste, un cancello con un campanello. Suoni. Se Roberta decide di lasciarti entrare, verrai inviato a lasciare un indirizzo e-mail. Ore o giorni dopo, troverai nella tua casella di posta un messaggio di Roberta, che ti fissa un appuntamento. Se non ti sei ancora stancato, e se i casi della vita non ti impediscono di recarti sul sito alla tal ora del tal giorno, avrai finalmente accesso alla stanza dei segreti.

Prima di svelarne i contenuti, può essere utile soffermarsi un attimo sul gioco sottile messo in scena da Coniglioviola. Interessato a tradurre uno spettacolo teatrale in un “net drama”, Coniglioviola evita accuratamente la strada della “realtà aumentata”, della partecipazione all’evento reale attraverso la rete. Preferisce, invece, usare il Web per creare una situazione analoga a quella reale, ma al contempo fortemente radicata nei linguaggi e nelle dinamiche della rete. Al concetto di interattività, che in rete significa poco più che cliccare qua e la in cerca di un link, subentra quello di partecipazione: una partecipazione sofferta, cercata e ottenuta dal visitatore tra attese e sorprese. La scena reale, ripresa da Coniglioviola durante la sua visita alla “secret room” di Roberta, si ripresenta nei frammenti video in ordine assolutamente casuale e sempre variabile, togliendoci ogni possibilità di ricostruirla con chiarezza. Il meccanismo dell’appuntamento crea aspettativa, ma al contempo vìola una delle leggi non scritte della rete, secondo cui un visitatore costretto a ritornare per fruire un contenuto è un visitatore perso. Tutto è congegnato per non farci entrare nella “secret room”, o per effettuare una severa selezione dei visitatori (altra violazione delle regole non scritte della rete).

Chi, senza farsi spaventare dai pop-up, ha cercato pazientemente la via per la “secret room”, ripresentandosi puntuale all’appuntamento, non sarà stupito nello scoprire che la stanza dei segreti non è altro che la root del sito, la pagina in cui il progetto non mostra la propria interfaccia, ma la propria struttura. Come per Neo, il protagonista di The Matrix (1999), la visione dei codici, di routine per chi la rete la programma, diventa per l’utente comune un evento catartico, destinato a renderlo immune alle fascinazioni della rete.

Con Neo torniamo al Coniglio Bianco, e con lui ad Alice. Negli anni seguenti, la rete resterà la piattaforma creativa di Coniglioviola, il luogo in cui si originano molti dei suoi incantesimi: la mitologia di partenza dell’attacco pirata alla Biennale, la fonte inesauribile del suo immaginario e del suo lavoro di postproduzione sull’immagine. Occasionalmente, nasceranno altri lavori in rete, come Un’estate al mare (un vj-set in forma di gioco in Flash che fa da teaser al progetto Recuperate le Vostre Radici Quadrate) e Bertepolis, un Flash movie smaccatamente camp dedicato a Loredana Berté. Ma, dopo tanti anni di presenza, è soprattutto la sua assenza a farsi sentire: in un’epoca in cui i siti sopravvivono di gran lunga alla scomparsa dei loro autori, quel “fine primo tempo” che da qualche mese chiude l’accesso al suo sito web non si limita a replicare online una fase di pausa e di ripensamento del suo lavoro, ma diventa l’ennesima teatralizzazione della propria esistenza.

]]> http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/10/alice-fa-yoga/feed/ 0 http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/text-expanded-box-curatorial-statement/ http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/text-expanded-box-curatorial-statement/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:41:07 +0000 Domenico Quaranta http://dom40.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/text-expanded-box-curatorial-statement/

Expanded Box – Caring for an Expanded Conception of Art

In the vast, variegated panorama of contemporary artistic experimentation there are various practices germinating that find it difficult to carve a niche for themselves in the official discourse and channels, despite the undeniable appeal they possess. The thing that makes them so precious, and as delicate as a flower growing under the snow, is not the fact that they use the “new media”, because everyone uses the media – and now they are anything but new. What makes them so special is the fact that like the aforementioned flower, they contain a new strength, and a new promise. The strength is that of those who go about their lives without a thought for the rules that govern the world they live in, and who create the conditions that enable them to live, successfully, in a radically altered context; the promise regards this radical transformation.

Everyone in the contemporary art field knows perfectly well that the context in which artists operate today was by and large established during the 20th century by Marcel Duchamp, and given structure and supported by a renewed museum and market system. According to this model, art no longer consists in the masterful implementation of a technique (painting, sculpture, music or writing) to present a world (the so-called “real” world, the unconscious world of the Surrealists, etc.). Anything can be art, if given a specific discourse and a specific conception, and if conveyed by means of a specific context. The aura of a work of art, which may be lost and found time and again, is now attributed by means of a precise process of consecration, which takes place on the market and in the museums. Without venturing into value judgements, it will suffice to consider the duration of this model to understand that what comes into being within it now is pure academicism. Murakami is to Duchamp and Warhol as Bouguerau is to Poussin and David. The gradual, unstoppable transition to the information society has radically challenged this model, nurtured in the bosom of the industrial society, but has not succeeded in destroying it altogether. It lives on as an act of faith, a consensual hallucination, a superstition boosted by the fear of what is to come. It survives, and continues to produce masterpieces, basking in the splendour which characterizes all periods of decadence.

The new world is there, just round the corner – or, to return to the cutesy flower metaphor – under the snow. It is in the art that exists outside the confines of the art world, rejecting the “contextual definition” of Duchampian origin which seems to persist, as Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito wrote in their book At the Edge of Art, purely by inertia; it is in the art that seeks out public space, media space, biotechnology labs and the world of information, communications and e-commerce as its operative environment; it is in the art that draws on other practices and other specific fields of knowledge, to a point where at times it has problems seeing itself (and being seen) as art; it is in the art that enthusiastically embraces technological reproducibility, the variability of data and the fluidity of information, abandoning – and radically challenging – the status of precious fetish, and it is in the art that is open to interaction with the spectator, that forges and develops relationships, that breaks down the wall which interrupts and conditions our mental and physical dialogue with a work.

This art exists, and it is at once strong and delicate, timid and aggressive, marginal and supreme. It is entrenched in the contradictions of all revolutions: it rebels against a world, but needs the cares of that world to resist. It has tried to escape, to open up new channels, but in the end it will succeed in changing our idea of art, defeating the academicism and opening the way to the future by means of dialogue and mediation. A future, which as the novelist William Gibson said, is already here, just badly distributed.

The historic function of Expanded Box, the last embodiment of an enduring attention Arco devoted to new media and languages, is precisely that of cultivating and redistributing the future, and supporting an ?expanded? definition of art. In the last ten years, and through different programs, Arco has done exactly that, hosting and offering market opportunities to a growing number of galleries that take up this challenge, at their own risk. When you see this compact block of eight galleries that offer their space to monographic projects – often decidedly ambitious – you could be forgiven for thinking that Expanded Box is one of those typical cultural initiatives increasingly staged on occasion of contemporary art fairs, with the idea of accompanying the dialogue and exchanges between galleries and collectors, but without attempting to compete with them. This is not the case.

Expanded Box, today, is the place where Leo Castelli would go to sell and Alfred H. Barr would go to buy. I am aware that this might sound rhetorical, and possibly a little ingenuous, but I cannot find a non-rhetorical way to say that there, more than anywhere else, the seeds of an evolution are germinating. They rest, well protected, in the machines of Lawrence Malstaf and the interactive environmental installations by Pors & Rao; in the sound installations by Manas and Moori and Thomson & Craighead; in the exploration of the dividing line between matter and the dematerialization of the media undertaken by the Korean Kim Jongku, and in John Gerrard’s 3D animations. They reproduce at the speed of a virus in the works of Joan Leandre, who upends the hyperreal interfaces that filter our rapport with reality, while they lurk in UBERMORGEN.COM’s media hacking activities, which uses low-tech tools to bring the giants of e-commerce to their knees.

For ten years Expanded Box has invested in this new current, the novelty of which, we should reiterate, lies not so much in the media that these works use, but in the culture they reflect and in the idea of art that they open the way for.

Eddo Stern: Flamewar

First published in the catalogue of the exhibition “Eddo Stern: Flamewar“, curated by Ilana Tenenbaum at the Israeli Haifa Museum of Art (January 24 – June 20, 2009). With texts by Ilana Tenenbaum, Ed Halter and Domenico Quaranta.

MACHINE ANIMATION & ANIMATED MACHINES
Domenico Quaranta

In the beginning, there is life. Or, better, another level of life. It’s the kind of life you can live on a screen, where your face and body change from time to time, according to the adventure you are playing at the moment. It’s a kind of life that implies gestures such as pressing furiously the buttons of a keyboard, speaking into a microphone, teaching all your muscles how they have to behave in order to make the movement of a joystick more fluent and responsive; and in which these gestures are translated into shots, curses, jumps, fights, runs. It’s a kind of life that usually has a soundtrack. It’s a kind of life that can be very similar to our daily life, or slightly different; but that, in both cases, mixes with the latter in a way that our brain, programmed for one life at a time, has some difficulties in making a clear distinction between the two. For example, if you are a soldier, it may be difficult for you to distinguish between your last mission in Afghanistan or Iraq and your last session of America’s Army.

Mixing two levels of life does not mean that, as an avid player of GTA, you would feel a irrepressible need to take a bat and walk down 5th Avenue smashing everything you find on your way; nor that you are going to experience performance anxiety because your Second Life avatar has a bigger penis, or your virtual partner seems more excited than your real one. It just means that probably, talking with a friend, you will sum up your last adventure in World of Warcraft with the same words, and the same enthusiasm, you would use for a real event; and that probably feelings, anxieties, fears and passions related with your real life experience will change the way you live your life on the screen.

I don’t know what Eddo Stern, who served in the Israeli army before moving to the States, feels when he plays a war game. What I know is that Sheik Attack (1999), Eddo Stern’s first machinima film, is probably the best take on Israel’s bloody history I have ever seen. One of the very first art videos using game footage to build up a narrative, Sheik Attack shows up an extraordinary maturity if compared with the novelty of its genre. The narrative of the Zionist utopia, from the dream of rebuilding the state of Israel up to the current tragic situation, is told through a soundtrack of traditional Israeli songs and the editing of a series of scenes shot in games such as Sim City, Delta Force, and Command & Conquer. The low-resolution footage is in stark contrast to the strong emotional impact of the soundtrack. Stern manages to transform the expressive limitations of the tool – the repetitive nature of the gestures, the lack of dialogue – into a powerful medium in itself. This transformation can be understood if we look at the way Stern uses the cinematics of the first person shooter: the main character’s point of view, used with some caution in traditional filmmaking, here is chosen to make the spectator identify simultaneously with the player and the narrative’s main character, making him co-responsible of their atrocious actions. So, when the tragically polygonal sheik’s wife, resting on her knees, is assassinated without a blink of an eye, we hold the gun in our hands.

Machine animation

Machinima is just a medium, neutral as any other medium. Yet, as any other “remix” practice, it has an enormous potential that emerges when the existing material is used to convey a meaning that conflicts with its own source. The video becomes a kind of prosthetic narrative, which extends the game’s narrative in an unpredictable direction. And that, sometimes, rejects the body it was designed for. From cut-up theory to culture jamming to Nicholas Bourriaud’s “postproduction” model, many great theorists have discussed this potential: what is interesting to me is that, when it comes to games, your appropriation is not only dealing with “existing cultural material”, or with a medium, but with your own life, the life you lived inside the game. In other words, making Sheik Attack is different from, let’s say, shooting October or a masterpiece of plagiarism such as Negativland’s Gimme the Mermaid (2002). The main difference is that Eddo Stern is, in the same time, the soldier who shot the helpless sheik’s wife and the documentarian who reports the crime.

Both Vietnam Romance (2003) and Deathstar (2004) display this kind of potential. In Vietnam Romance Stern forces us to take part in a war that we know very well, but just from one single point of view: the one adopted by Hollywood in a steady stream of movies, from Apocalypse Now to Platoon, from The Thin Red Line to Full Metal Jacket, from The Deer Hunter to Forrest Gump. American movies that, even when critical towards the war and the way the US conducted it, share a similar atmosphere and articulate a common imaginary, that has become, through these movies the imaginary we all have come to share. Videogames remediate this kind of imaginary; but at the same time, force us to see the war through the eyes of the American military, and remove the critical filter that cinematic narrative provides. In videogames, the Vietnam War becomes, in Stern’s words, “as clear cut as World War II”. The story is simple: you are the good (American) guy who has to kill all those dirty (Vietnamese) rats. With the complicity of a soundtrack that resamples the famous hits of the Sixties and Seventies into electronic MIDI tracks, Stern re-appropriates this material and uses it to create a melancholic “romance”, full of nostalgia for an age and a cinematographic genre that seems irremediably lost. The opening scene is phenomenal, with a prostitute parading through desolated outskirts on the notes of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walking.

Deathstar (2004) is a video in which the violence enacted against a single body, Osama Bin Laden’s, is so up and close as to seem abstract. The work edits a series of sequences shot in different games devoted to the assassination of the public enemy number one, together with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ soundtrack, as if trying to compare two different – yet strangely similar – versions of the iconography of violence and pain.

If appropriating game footage can be subversive, appropriating the game engine in order to force it to tell other stories can be even stronger (though it usually isn’t). Again, a feature of more recent videogames is turned into a powerful instrument of criticism by the very way it is used. Landlord Vigilante (2006) is a video that uses the engine of such games as GTA San Andreas and The Sims in order to do what games seem completely unfit for: design a character, give her a credible psychology and tell her story. The story of Leslie Shirley, is inspired by the artist’s former landlady, translated into a script in collaboration with the artist and writer Jessica Z. Hutchins. Ms. Shirley is a cynical and strong woman who, driving a cab in Los Angeles, has been saving a good sum of money in order to buy some real estate to rent. Persuaded that tenants are “defective human beings”, Leslie Shirley – the name chosen for her reassuring landlady’s mask – capitalizes on their “dirty habits”, trying to get the most from her investment. Stern and Hutchins use different games in order to exploit their peculiar aesthetics for the construction of the character and her environment: The Sims is used to design Leslie’s “kind old lady” mask and her comfortable, traditional, tidy “country cottage”; while GTA San Andreas puts the “real” Leslie – an old witch hardened by life – in her natural environment – Los Angeles’ slums. In the chapter “Mirrors”, Leslie describes her complex relationship with her own body – that is, her interface with the world – in front of a mirror, while holding a camera as if it was a gun and shooting a picture of herself. Referencing the iconography of first person shooters, Stern and Hutchins illustrate the psychological process of identity deconstruction and construction, using the game to talk about real life.

The same strategy is adopted in Stern’s more recent “machine animations”, Best…Flamewar…Ever: Leegattenby King of Bards v. Squire Rex (2007) and Level sounds like Devil: Baby in Christ vs. His Father (2007). The first of which is a two channel 3D computer animation diptych recreating an online flame war about degrees of expertise around the computer fantasy game Everquest. If in this case the contention focuses on the “shifting codes of masculinity”, in Level sounds like Devil… the discussion involves a teenager and his father, who believes that World of Warcraft is evil and tries to make him stop playing. Being himself a Christian, BabyInChrist contacts an online Christian forum for guidance in understanding if his father is right or not, and the community tries to help him, sometimes pointing to the differences between virtual and real, sometimes quoting the Holy Bible, and sometimes suggesting him to lie to his father. The faces of the characters are mapped with fan art and textures coming from online fantasy games such as Everquest and WoW, and become something in between an Arcimboldo allegory and a medieval standard. In this way, the characters become hybrid identities, summing up a way of life in which the two levels we described are no more separated – as, probably, they have never been.

Animated machines

I call these videos “machine animations” because this expression, more than its portmanteau “machinima”, makes clear what is at stake. If videogames, through photorealism and immersion, employ considerate effort to make the player forget the machine, Stern returns the machine to the forefront. This could be unpleasant for both gamers and non-gamers, but it’s the only way to escape the magic of so-called virtual worlds and start making works that are critical or self. As Eddo Stern, who spent 2,000 hours in World of Warcraft, knows quite well, the machine is the only frame between you and the game reality, and the only way to break the illusion is to make it more visible, in your face. So, if his videos can be described as prosthetic narratives, his installations can be described as prosthetic machines; both of them introduce a feeling of alienation, the first using the games in ways they a not meant for and inserting reality into them, the latter bring the games to reality, in a way that makes their fictional constructs apparent.

This alienating element can be seen in action even in Waco Resurrection (2004), a game designed by Eddo Stern together with the c-level team (Peter Brinson, Brody Condon, Michael Wilson, Mark Allen, Jessica Hutchins). Waco Resurrection is a “classical” first person shooter, at least in the way it is designed: immersive, violent, photorealistic. The main novelty lies in the narrative, evoking the Waco siege, and the point of view, that of the Branch Davidian’s leader David Koresh. While, in-game, a sense of alienation is created by the non player characters, which have the names and faces of the real individuals involved in the siege, it becomes stronger when the game is played in its installation version, wearing the voice activated, surround sound enabled, hard plastic 3D skin reproducing David Koresh. The player, through the Koresh skin, can hear Koresh’s voice singing or delivering a sermon. This device brings the player back to reality, and forces him to think back to the real event, with all its complex political implications.
In a similar way, works such as Runners (1999 – 2000), Tekken Torture Tournament (2001), Cockfight Arena (2001) and Dark Game (2006) provide the player with such “heavy” interfaces that one can not ignore and ever forget “reality”: head-gears, costumes, shocking arm straps, a triple mouse.

But it is in Stern’s self-standing installations that this alienating factor becomes more patent. In the God’s Eye series, Stern refers to a practice, quite common among avid gamers, of customizing their computer console, changing it into a unique piece of furniture – revealing something about their taste and personality. Here, computers are visible, yet integrated into huge sculptures that can be seen as monuments to the neo-medievalism so common in most fantasy games. Crusade (2002) transforms a computer ‘tower’ into a windmill. Alongside is a monitor on which we see, advancing towards us, five knights and a dragon (all to the accompaniment of a midi version of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir). The aggressive nature of western civilization is here cut down to size by the irony of these five strange avatars and a clear reference to Cervantes’ Don Quixote. This irony returns even more powerfully in Carnivore’s Cathedral: Whose Child Is This? (2003); “a neo-Christian Karaoke machine”, as Stern calls it. This time the customized PC becomes a cathedral, complete with gargoyle waterspouts which move to the rhythm of an imperial motif. USS Dragoon. One God to Rule them All … And in the Darkness Bind Them (2003) is an imposing installation of a modern warship guided by a computer that stands proudly at the helm. Along the bridge, crowded with knights in battle-dress, runs a text in Gothic Elven script, whilst the prow is adorned with two majestic dragons. Finally, Fort Paladin: America’s Army (2003) is a computer in the guise of a medieval castle complete with hexagonal towers, crenellation, banners and even openings from which to pour down boiling oil onto enemies. In the façade of the castle, the space that would normally be occupied by the drawbridge is taken by a computer monitor, which introduces us to the authorized violence of America’s Army, the videogame freely distributed on the American Army’s website for training cum propaganda purposes. The game is played by the machine itself, which sends a series of messages to a system of pistons that press down directly onto keys on the keyboard.

According to Stern, neo-medievalism is the last incarnation of what he calls “An American pathology”: that unceasing search for a glorious past, which in the United States goes hand-in-hand with the nation’s increasingly imperialistic aims. And again, this criticism is developed by leaving the game, bringing its aesthetics and iconography to the real world and building up monumental, heavy, aggressive interfaces that can’t be forgotten. When you hear Fort Paladin’s pistons banging and watch them control the virtual soldiers of America’s Army, looking at a game’s reality as a separate “level of life” becomes more and more difficult.

Difficult, but not impossible. Eddo Stern is, and probably will always be, an avid gamer. His criticism doesn’t prevent him, nor us, from enjoying and playing the game, and is not articulated towards this end. Stern’s work is meant to explore the complex dynamics between reality and media, and to improve our understanding of both – not to explain to us why we should not play America’s Army or World of Warcraft. So, his last series of “animated machines”, as described in the press release written for their first public presentation, mine “the online gaming world at its paradoxical extremes: on one hand, an untenable perversion of everyday life spent slaying an endless stream of virtual monsters, on the other, an ultimate mirroring of the most familiar social dynamics. The struggles with masculinity, honor, aggression, faith, love and self worth are embroiled with the game world’s vernacular aesthetics.” In works such as Narnia, Again (2007), Lotusman (2007), Man, Woman, Dragon (After World of Warcraft) (2007) and Tsunami (2007), Stern updates a technique with a long tradition: the one adopted in Chinese shadow plays and other proto-cinematic forms of spectacle. His Plexiglas, computer-controlled kinetic shadow sculptures use lions, dragons, snakes, Chuck Norris, and kung-fu to talk about conflict, violence, masculinity, fantasy, and cultural stereotypes. But also play, play, play, with all its pleasures and contradictions.

Maurizio Bolognini, Dep, 1992-1998. Programmed machines

Domenico Quaranta, “It Isn’t Immaterial, Stupid! The Unbearable Materiality of the Digital”, in Artecontexto, Issue 2, 2009, pp. 35 – 41.

I always had problems with the presumed “immateriality” of the digital. First of all because, in the years of the “new media” hype, it has always been sold as a novelty, and as a problem. Second, because it is not true. Hey guys, immateriality in art is all but new: I’m glad to inform you that Yves Klein’s Zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility belong to the Sixties, and that Lucy Lippard wrote about it in the same years (1973). And it’s not a problem. If we are talking about market and salability, well… Tino Sehgal’s works are immaterial, and they sell quite well; and if we are talking about preservation, when a museum curator is able to preserve a video, a neon sculpture or an installation by, let’s say, Mario Merz, he just need a couple of tips and tricks in order to preserve digital art. As Christiane Paul pointed out for new media art [1], digital code may be computable, process oriented, time based, dynamic, real-time, participatory, collaborative, performative, modular, variable, generative, customizable. But not immaterial.

“That’s ok”, you may say. “But why you say that a software piece, or a net-based artwork, is not immaterial? We can’t touch it.” You are right: we can’t touch a software. But a digital code needs a machine in order to be processed, and some kind of interface in order to be seen. The most “immaterial” piece of digital code I’ve ever seen is called unix shell forkbomb and was written in 2002 by the free software programmer and hacktivist Jaromil. It looks like this:

){ :& };:

It is a series of 13 ascii characters that, if typed on any UNIX terminal, makes it crash without any stirring of emotion. For Jaromil, “viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines ‘made to work’ and in representing the rebellion of our digital serfs.” [2] Apparently, it’s difficult to find something more “immaterial” than a computer virus. Most of the times, it is even invisible, hiding itself in some forgotten part of the machine. Yet, if executed, it crashes the machine, causing a really physical damage. As a “lyrical poem”, it can be written in a Web page or a txt file, and thus be seen through a screen; or it can be printed. For the I Love You [3] exhibition in Frankfurt (2002), for example, the ascii forkbomb was printed on a square panel, looking like some kind of visual poetry from the Sixties. With a similar attitude, the Biennale.py [4] virus, released by epidemiC and 0100101110101101.ORG at the Venice Biennale in 2001, was spread out through the net, recorded on a limited edition of golden cd-roms, printed on t-shirts, shown on a computer. Some years later, 0100101110101101.ORG created a series of re-assembled computers infected with the virus and intent on an eternal process of infection and disinfection, of hunting, killing and resurrection.

Of course, digital code can refuse any kind of visualization. During the Nineties, another Italian artist, Maurizio Bolognini [5], tried to do it in the most undervalued pieces of new media art ever made, Programmed Machines (since 1992). He basically programmed about 200 computers in order to make them generate a never-ending flux of images, ad infinitum; and then he sealed them, making impossible for anyone to see what these machines are programmed for. The works are usually shown on the floor, working; hiding the output, the artist makes us think about the process and the (not so) silent life of a computer, rather than the result. The core of the work is immaterial, but the installations are, indeed, quite heavy.

Examples such as 0100101110101101.0RG’s Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machines (2001 – 2003) and Bolognini’s Programmed Machines may lead us to talk about the so-called “rematerialization” of media art, but I’m little interested in the subject – or, maybe, I wrote too much about it. Yet, before moving to another issue, I would like to make a further example that I like a lot. It’s called Alerting Infrastructure! and was made in 2003 by Jonah Brucker-Cohen [6], moving, since then, from place to place. Alerting Infrastructure! is a “physical hit counter – actually a drill – that translates hits to the web site of an organization into interior damage of the physical building that web site or organization represents. In other words: the virtual is replacing the physical, but it’s doing it… physically.

Concrete Digits

But if saying that new media art is immaterial can create a lot of misunderstandings, often dangerous for the work of the artists; saying that the increasing presence of software, networks and interfaces in our relation with culture is making the latter more and more intangible and fluid is absolutely true. Today it’s almost commonplace that a work of art (digital or not) is not a closed, finished object, but it’s always changing according to the kind of interface we are adopting. And even if copyright laws are still working, objects (and artworks as well) are no more something that should be respected, but something that can be manipulated, appropriated, customized.

Yet, if digital culture is changing our relationship with physical objects, the opposite is true as well. What I’m trying to say is that the recent evolution of the digital medium is increasingly bringing reality and physical laws into the machine. In the last part of this article, I would like to focus on two works that show how two important issues such as identity construction and representation of time changed in the last few years.

“I’m always at home. I don’t go to exhibitions, I don’t make conferences – but, look: I will have two solo and three group exhibitions in a bunch of months”. In a way, Gazira Babeli [7] was able to live the dream of any hardcore net artist: to exist just on the screen of a computer. If you want to really know her, go to East of Odyssey – a land in the virtual world of Second Life – one of these days. At some point, your digital alter ego will start to be kicked around, more and more violently, by some mysterious meteoroids falling from the sky. Gazira became known in Second Life with works like this: storms of question marks, bananas and Super Marios; earthquakes and tornados activated by the wrong word; giant Campbell’s Soup cans persecuting the visitors; falling marble towers, a Greek temple playing pong with you guy, and scripts stretching your avatar as an used towel. Gazira Babeli is a constructed identity that we perceive as real: she has a body, she hurts our bodies, and she treats the world we both live in like a real world, with physical laws that she systematically violates. If we compare her with Netochka Nezvanova [8], the mythical cyber-identity appeared in the Net in the late Nineties, we can notice that something has changed in the construction of a virtual persona.

Recently Gazira started “exporting” her works from Second Life in the shape of a standalone software that, when launched, opens up a micro-virtual world inhabited just by the work. The visitor can go through it controlling Gazira’s body with the help of a joystick or a touch screen. Gaz’ of the Desert – Locusolus Lands (2009), for example, collects some narrative elements from the artist’s movie Gaz’ of the Desert (2007), but translates them into a completely new, absurdist, hallucinatory playground. All you can do is to walk around the desert, fall into an office-jail, sit down on a column as a bizarre, latex-wearing stylite and listen to the dialogue between the Boss and the President, two other characters lost in the desert and talking about art. The feeling is that of being suddenly hurled into a surreal dream, or in the Little Prince desert. The time is slow, and nothing happens.

Something similar can be experienced in front of John Gerrard’s realtime 3D landscapes, such as Sentry (Kit Carson, Colorado) or Grow Finish Unit (Elkhart, Kansas), both made in 2008 [9]. Gerrard reconstructs real places with a 3D engine, and makes them live in real time while a camera, moving around them very slowly, shows them from every point of view. The works focus on the American landscape, and on its unmistakeable mix of nature and civilization, peace and activity, freedom and control. The photorealism of videogames confronts with the American painting tradition, from Hopper to Sheeler [10]. Nothing happens, besides some repetitive, minimal actions. In Sentry, a red oil derrick continuously pump oil. In Grow Finish Unit we just see a large pig production facility with a lake of excrement all around it; every six-eight months, a fleet of trucks arrive at some point to silently remove and replace the occupants. Time moves on slowly, day after day, according to the timezone of the original place. Even more interesting is Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez, Richfield, Kansas), where Angelo Martinez, a tiny virtual character, is working from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, on a lifelong project: color a barn black using just stick oil. In 2038, he will finish his task and leave the scene.

Though very different, both Babeli’s and Gerrard’s virtual scenarios develop a new level in the representation of time. In this case as well, a comparison with an early piece of software art confronting the issue of time may be revelatory. With Every Icon (1997), American artist John F. Simon Jr. [11] activated a process that should work virtually ad infinitum (well, indeed just 5.85 billion years). The application (a 32 x 32 grid programmed to display every possible combination of black and white squares) looks very abstract, but doesn’t work so much differently from Babeli’s and Gerrard’s works: in both cases, a software controls an environment making some strange things happen through time. But while Simon’s grid displays just a process, Babeli and Gerrard build immersive environments, places we can enter and get lost, characters we can hate or love. Intangible, yet real.

Footnotes:

[1] Cfr. Christiane Paul, “The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media”, in Oliver Grau (ed), Media Art Histories, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) – London (England) 2007, pp. 251 – 274.

[2] Cfr. Jaromil, “:(){ :& };:”, in Digitalcraft.org, 2002, available online at the URL http://www.digitalcraft.org/?artikel_id=292.

[3] I love you – computer_viruses_hacker_culture, Museum of Applied Arts Frankfurt, May, 23 – June, 23 2002. Documented online at the URL http://www.digitalcraft.org/?artikel_id=244.

[4] Cfr. http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/biennale_py/.

[5] Cfr. http://www.bolognini.org/.

[6] Cfr. http://www.mee.tcd.ie/~bruckerj/projects/alertinginfrastructure.html.

[7] Cfr. http://www.gazirababeli.com/.

[8] Cfr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova.

[9] Cfr. http://www.johngerrard.net/

[10] Cfr. Roberta Smith, “John Gerrard”, in New York Times, February 19, 2009, available online at the URL http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/arts/design/20gall.html?_r=2

[11] Cfr. http://www.numeral.com/.

]]> http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/it-isnt-immaterial-stupid-the-unbearable-materiality-of-the-digital/feed/ 0 http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/a-ghost-in-the-screen-on-yorgo-manis-paintings/ http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/a-ghost-in-the-screen-on-yorgo-manis-paintings/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:50:20 +0000 Domenico Quaranta http://domenicoquaranta.com/?p=589

© Yorgo Manis

Domenico Quaranta, “A Ghost in the Screen. On Yorgo Manis Paintings”, in AAVV, Yorgo Manis. Metaphysical Safari, exhibition catalogue, CO2 contemporary art, September 19 – October 30, 2009.

I first met Google Street View in the words of a friend. He was sitting in a pub sipping his drink, when he saw a car carrying a nine-eyed hydra on its roof. After some days he found himself, and his drink, on a page of Google Maps.

After the first, spontaneous enthusiasm, some questions came to me. Is such a cool project enough to say goodby to privacy, and make it appear like an old-fashioned dress? Is reality more real when it’s shot by nine eyes and reconstructed by a software? Is there still space for imagination, when the symbolic representation of a map is replaced by a navigable reconstruction? How can we resist against this Matrix in runaway growth?

In Yorgo Manis’ work, I found out my same ambivalence – sentimental participation and critical detachment. He calls it “cynical romanticism”. What I like in this feeling is that it is shared either by the “system” and by its gang of fans, users and wreckers. When Google says it wants “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, its romanticism equals only its cynicism.

But the cynical romanticism is, moreover, the condition of the contemporary flaneur, who is moving nimbly across that huge data harvest that we call the Internet: contributing, voting, tagging, commenting, screen-grabbing or simply watching. At the top of this never-ending tsunami of informations and images, which mixes professional and vernacular, innovation, repetition and remix, I’m not surprised that many painters started working in the way this young greek artist does: depicting not the actual reality, but its clone on the screen (mediated reality) and even its synthetic alternatives (media reality).

Many described this phenomenon as a return of Pop Art. In fact, it’s completely different. Pop Art was an ambiguous celebration of commodities and media fetishes (Marilyn, comics, etc.) in an era that considered pop imagery kitschy and lowbrow. Pop Art invited us to consider its power, its appeal, its increasing self-assertion, and to think about it as part of our reality. Today, our reality is little more than that. Google, the free press you are reading in the underground, the news you are watching at lunchtime, the World of Warcraft session you are having after dinner are mediating our connection with reality. We are information addicted, and we need an ecology of the image. Something more similar to Ed Rusha than to Andy Warhol.

Yorgo Manis is working on this. He selects, decodes, manipulates and encodes the image. Street View, but also Youtube, Flickr, wishtree.com’s wishes and the hunters social networks. The result is that, among the hundreds of sets I visited on Street View, the ones I really remember are those, unreal, pictured in his Metaphysical Safari: softened visions of a Rome as you can see it on a postcard, where the functional design of the directional arrows meets in an improbable way a luxurious vegetation. The same ethical ambiguity can be seen in the installation 9 Books From Amazon, with its kaleidoscopic string of aesthetics: a minimal installation, a maximalist painting, a conceptual artwork. Its metaphysical truth is that, today and for many of us, Amazon is a website selling books.

But what is so surprising in these works is the way they are painted. Manis makes passionate, lyrical paintings, refusing the impersonal coolness of most Pop Art. “I prefer to work allegorical and create fairy tales or ghosts out of it, avoiding a functional and immediate dependence”, he says in an interview. Only in this way imagination can get the upper hand on documentation, and the subject can settle a score with the monstrosity of a nine-eyed hydra.

]]> http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/a-ghost-in-the-screen-on-yorgo-manis-paintings/feed/ 0 http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/matita-no-gps/ http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/09/matita-no-gps/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:33:38 +0000 Domenico Quaranta http://domenicoquaranta.com/?p=581

Thorsten Knaub, GPS Diary

Domenico Quaranta, “Matita? No, GPS”, in L’Unità, August 25, 2009, pp. 38 – 39.

In Guerreros (2007), ultimo romanzo dell’ineffabile William Gibson, un geniale pubblicitario mette una giornalista sulle tracce di un’oscura avanguardia, nota come “arte locativa”. Gli artisti locativi usano il sistema di posizionamento globale, o GPS, per installare sulla mappa del mondo delle simulazioni in 3D che possono essere visualizzate con un apposito visore. Indossandolo, ci può capitare di incontrare il cadavere di River Phoenix nell’angolo di Los Angeles dove è morto di overdose.

Finora, l’arte locativa (o GPS Art) ha seguito un’altra strada, che si fonda non sull’incontro, ma sul percorso. Il punto di partenza potrebbe essere rintracciato nella (finta) performance di un inesistente artista inglese, che nel 1995 scompare mentre sta tracciando, senza GPS, la scritta “ART” sulla mappa dell’Europa a bordo della sua bicicletta. Per la cronaca, l’artista si chiamava Harry Kipper, ed era un’invenzione del collettivo di burloni mediatici Luther Blissett. Alla sua scomparsa si interessò anche “Chi l’ha visto”.

Alle spalle di Harry Kipper, e di tutta la GPS Art, c’è la lunga tradizione della deriva psicogeografica situazionista, in cui la città viene esplorata non sulla base di un itinerario funzionale (e men che meno turistico), ma di un set di regole definite, basate sul caso, una funzione matematica, un disegno da tracciare.

Con l’avvento del GPS, che – con l’aiuto di una trentina di satelliti, consente di stabilire le coordinate geografiche del dispositivo con un buon grado di approssimazione – questa pratica è stata sviluppata, arricchita, deviata. Nel 2002, gli artisti italiani Eva e Franco Mattes hanno permesso a chiunque, per un anno, di seguire i loro movimenti attraverso il loro sito 0100101110101101.org, all’insegna di una totale rinuncia alla privacy. Lo stesso anno, a Los Angeles, si è tenuta una performance in cui la sceneggiatura veniva rielaborata sulla base della posizione e dei movimenti dei partecipanti. Nel 2003, il tedesco Thorsten Knaub lancia il progetto GPS Diary, un diario online in cui tiene memoria di ogni suo movimento, registrato dal dispositivo GPS che indossa. Qui, la riflessione sulla sorveglianza dei Mattes si coniuga con una ricerca sulla visualizzazione dell’informazione e sulla relazione tra noi e il mondo. Qualche anno più tardi, Knaub si concentra su alcune piccole isole, che percorre in lungo e in largo con l’intenzione di “cancellarle”. Frattanto, sin dal 2000 gli artisti inglesi Hugh Pryor e Jeremy Wood hanno messo online il sito gpsdrawing.com, dove caricano i disegni ottenuti registrando i loro movimenti con il GPS.

È questa idea di usare il GPS per disegnare, unita alla crescente disponibilità dei dispositivi – incorporati ormai nell’iPhone e in molti telefoni cellulari, e installabili su ogni automobile – a trasformare un’arte di frontiera in una pratica di costume, radicata, per ora, soprattutto in America. Una pratica divertente, ludica, aperta alle varianti più improbabili e insospettabilmente “fisica”. A tal punto che, come racconta il New York Times, alcuni ricercatori dell’Università dell’Arizona hanno avviato un programma di lotta all’obesità basato proprio sul GPS drawing, e sull’appeal che la tecnologia ha sui giovani. Fare un GPS drawing, infatti, può voler dire camminare, come fa Knaub, in un ambiente quasi intatto, correre in un parco, attraversare la città in bicicletta, ma anche percorrere chilometri in automobile o programmare una spedizione in modo che un pacco segua un itinerario stabilito. Anche il disegno è suscettibile di numerose varianti: ci si può limitare a rilevare una topografia o sovrapporre allo spazio un’immagine, sia essa uno scarabocchio, un disegno astratto, una scritta o il fantasma di Pacman.

In altre parole, il GPS drawing è sufficientemente geniale e sufficientemente stupido da poter diventare una moda. Lo provano piattaforme di “map sharing” come everytrail.com, e il suo successo sulle reti sociali come Facebook. L’interessamento di qualche geniale pubblicitario è solo questione di tempo.

Domenico Quaranta, “Pirati”, in L’Unità, August 20, 2009, pp. 32 – 33.

Pirata informatico. Pirata della strada, auto pirata. Pirata dell’etere. Il Pirata. Usi recenti di una parola divenuta inattuale all’inizio dell’Ottocento, quando la pirateria sembra scomparire come fenomeno sociale per risorgere, di lì a poco, come fenomeno letterario con L’isola del tesoro di Robert L. Stevenson (1883). È lì, con figure come Long John Silver, che il pirata diventa quello che conosciamo, entrando nell’immaginario collettivo attraverso un modello che ritorna da Emilio Salgari a Peter Pan, fino al Jack Sparrow di Pirati dei Caraibi (2003). Un pirata non è mai buono, anche se è dotato, spesso, di un personale senso morale. Ha una menomazione (un uncino, una gamba di legno, un occhio offeso), beve rum, cerca un tesoro, è esotico nel vestire e negli animali che lo accompagnano. Ed è, soprattutto, un emblema di libertà, che vive sui mari e risponde a poche regole che si è dato lui stesso. Proprio questo amore per la libertà rende nobili, alla fine, anche le figure più meschine e bizzarre: un pirata è sempre un signore, “a volte un bastardo a volte un buono”, come cantava Julio Iglesias; e vive, come scriveva il guru della controcultura Hakim Bey, la sua utopia, costruendosi zone temporaneamente autonome estranee al controllo di qualsiasi potere costituito.

In realtà, la pirateria non ha mai lasciato i mari, ma nonostante produca perdite annue di circa 15 miliardi di dollari, non riusciamo a evitare una certa indulgenza nei confronti dei pirati somali o indonesiani che compaiono, di tanto in tanto, sui giornali. Non dopo Capitan Uncino. Non dopo il Pirata Pantani, così chiamato per la sua bandana, la sua voglia di correre da solo e il suo grande cuore. Anche solo per questo, varrebbe la pena di ribattezzare coloro che, per paura, meschinità o cinismo, lasciano sulla strada i corpi che hanno appena travolto. Chiamiamoli codardi, idioti, criminali, ma non pirati.

Anche l’espressione “pirati dell’etere” suona impropria, a meno che qualcuno riesca a individuare alcunché di nobile in Emilio Fede, che da anni occupa abusivamente le frequenze di Europa 7. Più facile riconoscere lo stereotipo del pirata in chi vuole vivere lo stesso modello di libertà fra le maglie della Rete. Anche lì, del resto, persiste una certa confusione. Chi è il pirata? L’hacker buono, che vuole solo “seguir virtute e canoscenza”, o il criminale informatico? L’autore di software libero o l’utente abusivo di sofware proprietario? Chi condivide con altri un prodotto che ha acquistato o chi se ne appropria in modo illecito? Chi usa gli strumenti di condivisione, chi li mette a disposizione o il movimento di opinione che sta alle spalle di entrambi? Chi scarica gratuitamente o chi sfrutta una legislazione obsoleta per applicare prezzi irresponsabili ai prodotti dell’ingegno? La questione rimane aperta, anche se chi crede che l’informazione deve essere libera non ha esitato a far proprio di un termine che gli era stato appioppato a scopo peggiorativo, e a costruirci sopra una mitologia che guarda a Stevenson ma anche a Matrix e al cyberpunk. Così, ecco comparire il Pirate Party al Parlamento Europeo, e la Pirate Embassy alla Biennale di Venezia. Perché, come riassume il Governatore Swann alla fine di Pirati dei Caraibi, “forse nelle rare occasioni in cui fare la cosa giusta richiede un atto di pirateria, la pirateria può essere la cosa giusta da fare.”

Domenico Quaranta, “Virtuale”, in L’Unità, July 16, 2009, pp. 30 – 31.

La lingua è ricca di termini la cui utilità è inversamente proporzionale al loro utilizzo. Virtuale è uno di questi. Usato dai filosofi ma poco presente nel linguaggio comune, l’aggettivo “virtuale” deve la sua nuova giovinezza a un visionario rasta americano, Jaron Lanier, che negli anni Ottanta l’associa al sostantivo “realtà”. La realtà virtuale sarà il sogno futuristico degli anni Ottanta e Novanta, alimentato da Hollywood e dalla fantascienza: una realtà simulata eppure in grado di ingannare tutti i sensi. Tuttavia, la tecnologia corre veloce, ma fatica a tenere il passo dei sogni: presto ci si stanca di cave, caschi, data glove e delle noiose animazioni accessibili attraverso di essi.

A restare è il termine “virtuale”, che comincia a essere associato a tutto ciò che abbia a che fare con i computer e Internet, o al corrispettivo “in rete” di una entità reale, dalle comunità virtuali ai musei virtuali. Fino a quando, almeno, compaiono i “mondi virtuali”, il cui successo di inizio Millennio contribuisce a ricondurre il termine alla descrizione di una realtà parallela mediata dal computer. Questa realtà non è ingannevole, almeno a un primo stadio: nei videogiochi e nei mondi virtuali ci muoviamo tramite fantocci più o meno realistici, detti avatar, in paesaggi tridimensionali che ricordano più Shrek che le nostre città. L’illusione nasce, da un lato, dalla sospensione dell’incredulità che i videogiochi condividono con il cinema; e, dall’altro, dalla socialità delle situazioni e dai loro riscontri sul cosiddetto “reale”. Come raccontano le cronache, vivere in un videogioco può produrre relazioni, amicizie, denaro, carriere lavorative, malattie.

Questo uso del termine virtuale, limitato alle realtà artificiali visitabili attraverso una appendice tecnologica, è oggi una pietosa menzogna. Definire “virtuale” qualcosa vuol dire affermare la rassicurante realtà di tutto ciò che non si accompagna a questo termine. O, se vogliamo, disconoscere la crescente virtualità della realtà in cui viviamo.

“Vede, io so che questa bistecca non esiste… so che quando la infilerò in bocca, Matrix suggerirà al mio cervello che è succosa e deliziosa. Dopo nove anni, sa cosa ho capito? Che l’ignoranza è un bene.” Matrix (1999) sta esattamente a cavallo di queste due concezioni. Per molti, non ha fatto che rispolverare, e rilanciare per qualche tempo, l’immaginario prodotto dalla fantascienza degli anni Novanta. Dopotutto, il mondo di Matrix non è reale, ma una simulazione informatica così realistica da illudere tutti. Ma Matrix è anche la traduzione pop della filosofia di Jean Baudrillard, che non parla di simulazioni informatiche, ma del reale. È alla luce della realtà odierna che è necessario, oggi, ripensare il virtuale: alla luce dell’11 settembre, della guerra in Iraq e delle prove fabbricate che l’hanno causata, dell’ultimo G8 e del modo in cui l’ha raccontato il TG1, di Noemi e del modo in cui non l’ha raccontata il TG1; dell’influenza suina, della crisi e del terremoto in Abruzzo. E, perché no, della bistecca che state mangiando.

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