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[pdftitle={What is new about net art?},
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\begin{document}

\title{What Is (still) so New about Net Art?} 

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{Nov. 3, 2004}




\begin{abstract}
A comparison of traditional digital art and newer net art along the examples
of Jeffrey Shaw's ``Legible City'' and \url{http://www.jodi.org}.
\end{abstract}

\maketitle

\section{What is wew about Net Art?}

Net art could be technically described as the conjunction of two
practices, digital art and networked art. Neither of them was new per
se. 

Digital art has its own tradition since the 1940s when
computers were invented and, for example, the John Whitney brothers made
abstract films with computer graphics [no pictures available], 
John Cage and Lejaren Hiller composed algorithmic computer music, and
Brion Gysin and Theo Lutz computed algorithmic poems on
computers. 

Networked art itself has a history independent from computing and
computer networks: Futurism, Dada and Surrealism already were
international networks; networking also became a topic of art in Fluxus,
the New York Correspondence School of Ray Johnson and Mail Art. 

images

So what is different then about Net art since the 1990s in comparison to
computer art since the 1940s and networked art since the 1920s and
1960s? In comparison to Mail Art, the difference is clear. Mail Art used
analog technology, like photocopiers, rubber stamps, newspaper collage
and the postal network to copy and distribute itself. That necessarily
limited its reproduction. It worked with originals as opposed to copies,
material objects as opposed to data streams. And its reproduction and
distribution was much more significantly limited (due to having to pay
postage and limited analog copy generations). When ``Festivals of
Plagiarism'' were celebrated by mail artists, the plagiarism was
rather metaphorical because the technology wasn't there yet for
large-scale clone reproduction and distribution of work (such as in
peer-to-peer file exchange networks). 

Examples:

\begin{itemize}

\item Lewis Carroll, Innuendo
by Xexoxial Endarchy: Limited material quality, no access to same
institutions / spaces as plagiarized work

\item vs. Yes Men, gatt.org vs. wto.org
same symbolic hierarchy/space, equality of technical means, infinite
reproduction and collaboration through automated tools: Reamweaver

\end{itemize}

Difference between Internet-based net art and older analog networked art
is clear, what about the difference between previous digital art and
Net.art? My examples: Jeffrey Shaw, jodi.



\section{Jeffrey Shaw, The Legible City}

Developed in 1989-1991, permanently installed at ZKM media arts center
in Karlsruhe, Germany. Interactive installation, or game: Abstract 3D
representations of cities of New York, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe.
Spectator sits on a bicycle and cycles through the cities. The
cityscapes are made up of letters and words, based on writing by Shaw's
artistic collaborator Dirk Groeneveld. 

Film.

Description: Alternative reading interface. Immersive / virtual
reality 3D space, seemingly intuitive navigation (through bicycle). 

Typical for the idea of digital art as interactive, virtual reality
simulations, high-tech, installation-based.

``Legible City'' has been called, again and again, a seminal work of
digital art. I quote from a critical essay on net literature and net
poetry by the German philologist and critic Stephan Porombka:

\begin{quotation}
Nothing that was written for the computer in the 90s could match 
an installation like Jeffrey Shaw's ``Legible City'' -- neither in its
level
of technology, nor in its level of concept. After all, Shaw had used a
several ten thousand dollar-worth Silicon Graphics Crimson computer to
achieve the right effects. Only with such a machine it could be
communicated to spectators that their own activities were equalized to
the movement of the digital picture on the screen.\footnote{Nichts, was
in den 90ern für den Computer geschrieben wurde, konnte sich mit einer
Installation messen lassen, wie sie etwa Jeffrey Shaw mit Legible City
realisiert hatte - technologisch nicht und auch nicht konzeptionell.
Immerhin hatte Shaw einen mehrere zehntausend Mark teuren Silicon
Graphics Crimson Computer eingesetzt, um die richtigen Effekte zu
erzielen. Nur mit einem solchen Gerät ließ sich dem Rezipienten
vermitteln, dass die eigene Aktivität mit der Bewegung des digitalen
Bildes auf der Leinwand gleichgeschaltet war.}
\end{quotation}

I entirely disagree with this opinion. The ``Legible city'' is a technology
gimmick, at best a design study for alternative user
interfaces. Its title brings up associations of Campanella, universally
valid depiction of knowledge and science on the walls of the utopian
``City of the sun.'' Just as Campanella's utopia is naive, so is Shaw's
if it was intended to be one.  It is not, as critics wrote, liberating
the letter like concrete poetry. Concrete poetry and Marinetti's
``parole in libertà''were about liberating type and language from their
previous typographic and grammatical constraints. Shaw's system howere
is restraining as it forces letters from their abstract-symbolic space
of the page into the artificial anthropomorphic space of the city. It's
not taking apart the letter and reinventing it from scratch, but puts
letters into a pseudo-interactive human kitsch world, comparable to
letters in Victorian children's books:

Images: Alphabet fabric, alphabet locomotive

- Nothing is be criticized in these toys and the children's
literature tradition of grotesque alphabets. Shaw's
installation however suffers from the fact that it does not think of
itself in this tradition, as a grotesque tech toy, takes itself
seriously as a hightech ``interactive'' art work. I quote from Jeffrey
Shaw's project page:

\begin{quotation}

Travelling through
these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the
path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous
juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.

\end{quotation}

The text doesn't reflect that these so-called
``spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions'' are not spontaneous at
all, but only exist within the set of possible combinations within the
software. There is no possibility, for example, that a word appears that
was not pre-inscribed into the software, and no conjunction can be made
that falls out of Euclidian space constraints of the visual simulation.
So it's an illusion of interactivity which this piece sells, just like
most works of so-called interactive art -- none of which even remotely
match up to the interactivity and spontaneousness of 
performance art, for example.

Shaw further writers:

\begin{quotation}
The handlebar and pedals of the interface bicycle give the viewer
interactive control over direction and speed of travel. The physical
effort of cycling in the real world is gratuitously transposed into the
virtual environment, affirming a conjunction of the active body in the
virtual domain.
\end{quotation}

Of course the anthropomorphism of the interface is a fake. It is a
trompe-l'oeuil because the work does not present itself
as something programmed, as an artificial behavioral system,
but really thinks that its restrained, dumbed-down concept of interactivity
leads to an interaction of bodies and the ``virtual domain''. Which, of
course, is utter bullshit.

If one compares ``The Legible City'' to the alphabetic toys, it becomes
obvious that the have 

\begin{itemize}
\item a much richer interactivity, because they don't force their players into
a restrained brick world, but on the contrary allow players to
integrate their bricks into their own world[
\item an infinitly more humble and humorous
understanding of their own limitations at the same time, simply by calling
themselves toys. 
\end{itemize}

Since ``The Legible City'' obviously are not aware of their own limitations
and contradictions in concept -- quite in opposition to what Porombka
find in the piece --, they are a naive piece of art. (And one, if this
remark is allowed, nobody would take seriously as contemporary art
except those in the ghetto of ``media art''.)

\section{Jodi}

\url{http://www.jodi.org} is the joint project of Dutch-Belgian net
artist Joan Hermskerk and Dirk Paesmans, form whom jodi is an acronym.
If one opens the site in a web browser, it doesn't present itself as
-- superficially -- accessible as ``The Legible City'', but makes a
hostile takeover of the user's browser:

(Demonstration OSS)

It is a hack, and punk-like aesthetic and technological hijacking. But
this simple hack alone provides enough fuel and insight to reflect it as
an antithesis to an ``interactive art'' aesthetics as represented by the
``Legible City'': There is no simulation of beautiful, anthropomorphic
surface, no cozy virtual reality city and no bike, but the pure alien
techno aesthetics of software as such. It does not require
multi-ten-thousand-dollar high tech, but is low tech running on any
computer. The whole source code of the web pages takes up less than 10
Kilobyte, i.e. has the average size of a short E-Mail note and works
without problems over a slow modem connection. It promises no false
human-machine interactivity, but ultimately shows how interactivity is a
scam, a reduction of users to clicking slaves. It does not create
pseudo-realistic images and doing so does neither limit the
imagination of the viewers, nor force them into a merry prison of an
artificially restrained pseudo-world. 

At the same time, it is much closer to a true concept of interactivity
because it forces computer users to quit their point-and-click
interactions and think up a solution outside the box -- shutting
down computer for example, or perhaps even throwing it out the window. It is, for
the first time, a computer art whether the machine is not conceived of
as a transparent tool, a black box existing outside the perceivable
work itself, but where the computer, its contingency of codes and 
crashing operating system software themselves make up the aesthetics.
Needless to mention how ironic and humorous this understanding of the
computer is. For the first time, the computer and its software is being
treated as material itself, not as a device that processes material
(like computer-generated music or computer-rendered graphics). 

If Shaw's work is naive, jodi's work could be called, in a terminology
borrowed from Friedrich Schiller, ``sentimentalist''. What Schiller 
described in his late 18th century essay on ``Naive and Sentimentalist
Poetry'' was an aesthetic clash of classical and modern
art: Classical artworks, Greek tragedies for example, rested in themselves,
had a unity and smoothness of form, whereas modern art had lost its
unity, and in the desperate attempt of regaining it,
ended up internally broken, reflecting, ironic, like Shakespeare's
Hamlet. 

The ``OSS'' start page of jodi.org alone brings up these issues. The rest
of the web site has to be found via World Wide Web search engines, or
critical writing about jodi.org which in turn pointed to its sections
hidden from the front page. It is another refusal of
presenting a smooth, pseudo-simple interface. It also
locates jodi's art in the net, since visitors of the site have do their
own investigative networking to find the site in the first place, thus
becoming true interactors with the art. With the piece \url{http://map.jodi.org}, the site refuses to stand
only for itself, but identifies itself as part of a larger artistic and
cultural network.  Consequently, this idea has been
adopted, plagiarized and transformed by other net art workers:

\begin{itemize}
\item \url{http://www.thething.it/netart/net_map.htm} 
\item \url{http://www.ecn.org/aha/map.htm}
\end{itemize}

More peripheral in jodis work are their poetry-like code writings which
they typically post to mailing lists and set off a whole net art genre
of ``codeworks''.:

[Projection untitled game / war.c]

Code becomes a ready-made artwork here.  It is no longer something
hidden from the actual artwork, like in the ``Legible City'', but being
pulled out from inside. What previously was a hidden and unresolved
contradiction between textual programming and an illusionist surface is
now becoming the center of a new aesthetics.  Software and code for the
first time in the history of electronic arts become an artistic
material. Unlike in earlier computer arts, artists do not construct it
from scratch in a laboratory work approach, but they take the abundance
of code ``out there'' on any personal computer and floating in the
Internet, and treat it like Dadaist and Pop art painters treated the
found objects in their collages. 

The aesthetic effects of course are similar, disruption, anarchy and
noise. But how is jodi's noise different from the noise and randomness
in previous avant-garde arts? The difference lies in the media and in
the rhetoric.  In Dada poetry, Hans Arp's chance painting and John
Cage's random music, randomness occurs structurally within a work, not
in its transmission.  Even where www.jodi.org doesn't randomize its own
transmission by unstable addressing schemes, it reads and behaves as if
it contained intact data disturbed only by faulty net transmission or
computer crashes; but in reality, the line noise is mocked up within the
data itself. Unlike Nam June Paik's visual noise manipulations of TV
sets in the 1960s, jodi's disturbance is not done in hardware with only
partly predictable results, but is a clever simulation of
unpredictability done in software.

ANd while the chance poetics of Cage and
Fluxus conceived of disturbance and randomness as means of radical
freedom, their implication is much more ambivalent in jodi's work. They
inspire and liberate the viewers' imagination all the while locking it
into deception, mazes and dead-ends. The naive Cagean ontology of chance
is replaced with a tricky rhetoric of simultaneous anarchy and
entrapment, a neo-baroque conceit and discordia concors of surface chaos
with inscribed discipline and vice versa. 

\section{Conclusion}

I hope to have made a point why 
net art as it was co-invented by jodi was different and more
sophisticated than previous computer art. Digital net art also differs
from the pre-digital net art like Mail Art because I think it has simply
produced better art. Mail Art was largely a harmless rehash of
Fluxus collage aesthetics, without the edge and radical implications of
the former. [\ldots]

\begin{verbatim}
Older digital art vs. net art 

installation              |   performance
high tech                 |   low tech
constructivism            |   eclecticism
artistic naivite          |   artistic sophistication

Net art vs. Mail Art:

aesthetic rehash          |   aesthetic experimentation
appeasing                 |   confrontational
only community-oriented   |   artistic + community-
                              oriented

\end{verbatim}



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