Apsolutno
Absolute Sale
1997
With dark humour and an unbearable lightness, Apsolutno launches a
virtual auction of lots from the former Easter Block countries. It all seems
to go fine as we read the rules of the auction which are plain and clear,
follow the instructions, choose a method of payment. At one point however,
we find out that the items for sale are human individuals, mostly artists
from this region. The sale of being is indeed an "absolute" one...
Once a street sign with word HUMAN (in English and in the language of the
country from which the "lot" comes from) inscribed into it appears in
the middle of the screen, and then there is the map of Europe always present
as a big reality full of questions. The silent, unchangeable, expressionless
image of the map acts as a sponge silently absorbing the information about
the lots and other sales details from a separate window in which the auction
is taking place. As the information in the auction window accumulates, the
map invisibly turns from receiver into transmitter, confronting us by simply
being there, sending unwritten questions and messages toward us. The map,
motionless, hangs onto the screen as a constant, pending reality and becomes
imbued with meanings. Its initial weightlessness transforms into a significant
weight thrown into the hands of the viewer. Its silence becomes a
wake-up call. Viewed in the context of Absolute Sale, the words, "I've never
seen the face and that's what I have always wanted. I've never seen the face
and that's what I fear the most." (found in the About section for the
Apsolutno collective) sound as an alarming signal pointing at the Internet
as a yet-unexplored magnifying glass through which we can view reality in
new, revealing ways that can find us unprepared.
The use of cold, to-the-point words is kept throughout the whole project,
including in the identifications/descriptions of the lots. With the presence
of only two visual signs (the map and the street sign), this overall
controlled rendering prevents the project of falling into a higher doze of
dramatization to which the idea of the project is susceptible. Furthermore,
the "lots" are semi-fictitious characters, who are artists from the Former
Eastern-Block. Buyers need not worry because they will not have to face
their purchase until after twenty years because most of the "lots" are
born in 2001 and will not be available until they reach the age of eighteen.
The clever net.art kind of shift in handling this identity/non-identity
saves the project from sinking into self-indulgence and cynicism.
Absolute Sale revolves around the issues of divided/united Europe and points
critically at ideas, ideologies and geopolitical and economic aspirations
which are taken as absolutes and leave no room for human identity. From a
post-totalitarian, post-communist, ex-Eastern Block perspective, the artists
are questioning not only absolutes but also the sales activities spread over
the Internet space. A particular battleground of interests and beliefs, the
Internet is revealed in this project as a critical tool and as a mediator,
balancing between destructive tendencies of globalization on the one hand
and ethnocentrism on the other. The destructive tendencies are those which
disconnect the individual from his humanity that is embodied in an identity
anchored in life.
Within the framework of the "auction", there is also a
post-net.art-ex-Eastern-European vision to the work. As Lev Manovich
brilliantly points out in Artmargins , "Roundtable Ten Years
After": "As it
turned out, these countries have something to contribute to this global
society in a few areas: new consumer markets, cheap labor, superbly trained
musicians and sportsmen (in the case of Russia), and millions of "Internet
brides" who would marry anybody just to leave the East. However, in the area
of the arts, the long-term isolation of the East from the West has had a
negative effect. As a result, its art turned to be by and large excluded
from a global cultural marketplace. One exemption to this general inability
to compete in a global art culture in the 1990s was the new area of net art,
where, due to the lack of an established institutional Mafia in the West,
and to the financial support from the Soros Foundation, a number of artists
from the East were able to quickly become brand-name international players.
However, today, we are witnessing the rapid institutionalization of net art
in the West, which will probably marginalize the players from the East once
again."
R.D.
Vuk Cosic
contemporary ascii
1998-
Having abandoned net.art creation ("net.art is dead"), Vuk Cosic, with
his interest in history (history of art for airports, compressed
history of films, etc.), archeology (first the archeologist by education,
then, an archeologist of the new media), and archiving (copy of the
Documenta X
site), started to document the world and to translate it into ASCII
characters.
The desire to historicize the world which lies at the heart of this big
project is a reaction to the rapid revolution of new media and the
necessity of continually producing their history, with the attendant
risk of seeing large swaths of it disappear.
The use of ASCII characters in this artwork comes from Cosic's bias for
low tech and to the origins of art created on the computer and to the
foundations of communication on the Internet. It reminds us of some
ideals, such as the desire for universality associated with the
constitution of the ASCII code and the promise of accessibility afforded
by this
technology. Such a return to the past is also a critical response to the
frenetic course of new technologies and to the ceaseless consumption
they demand from the people who use them.
What differentiates contemporary ascii from a tradition of ASCII art
dating back to the beginnings of computer (even if we must point out the
virtuosity and even the humour
with which some of the artists used these symbols to create images)
is the historical consciousness at core of this project and the
distance taken in relation to the multimedia environment that the Web
has become. Over time, the Web has become something quite different than
a
communication tool. It is a conduit for the most varied audiovisual
documents, layers of
information of different kinds that are superimposed on a basic
instrumentation which ensures the fundamental operations that are
specific
to this technology. Reintroducing the code into the universe of the
image,
Vuk Cosic's contemporary asciileads to a reflection on the new
environment
and on the progressive disappearance of its origins. As Lev Manovich
points
out in one of the excellent texts accompanying these artworks, Vuk
Cosic’s use of ASCII renders both the image and the abstract code,
offering a double visibility. His work invites us to reconsider the
relationship between language and the visible, and to eschew the
dominance of the
visual over the written, such as is increasingly evident on the Web.
What characterizes this series of artworks is the mix of many techniques
and means of representation, the artist’s passage from one, the other ,
all brought together by the use of ASCII characters, as if this project
could resolve their differences and wed "ancient" technologies with the
new ones. He refers to the ambition of the digital universe to take the
entire
world into account and demonstrates the utopia of seeking to achieve the
ultimate
convergence of different media within this universe.
The obsessive aspect of the project, however, takes it into the sphere
of the implausible, as this extravagant undertaking touches on the
absurd, and highlights the illusoriness of attempting to reduce all
modes of representation to an outdated form.
S.P.
Petko Dourmana et Pavel
Metabolizer
1997/1998
In his video and performance production Petko Dourmana often works with his
own body exploring the possibilities of its transformations. Metabolizer is
a peculiar pseudo-chemically generated lesson of anatomy .
Deformations and mutations are enacted in front of our eyes while we choose
proteins, narcotic analgesics, hormones, anabolic steroids and vitamins and
click on them altering the shape of the body. It is significant that it is
the artist who appears in front of us naked, placed in the center of the
frame as a passive object that we can manipulate and engineer a
mutant creature with the aid of a palette of chemicals.
The viewer discovers details about Metabolizer in the process of interacting
with it and gradually a web-specific eccorché of the idea of the body is
revealed. It all depends how far one is prepared to go and what level of
intoxication one wishes to reach. In some cases, the body melts into the
black background and disappears, in others, endless possibilities of
metamorphosis open up and the body can be altered to infinity. Free from
centering, the body expands, capable of growing infinitely into tremendous
proportions. Hyperbolic, the body parts with its human definition and forms
large abstract structures which break out of the frame. Our intervention in
this space-dance is a voyage from the physical to the metaphysical which
testifies to the fact that Dourmana experiments with the notion of virtual
shamanism. The unfolding of the work acts as an initiation into the
dimensions of the human being as a life form and a cosmic one.
In the Summary to the book The Impossible Body (published also in the
Slovenian contemporary art magazine Maska),
author Bojana Kunst states:
"It is a product of a traumatic desire for the ideal body, and in quest of
its realization its flirts with God and it flirts with the Devil. It is the
longing for the body without limitations, without the threat of death,
spatial and temporal boundaries, without definiteness and gravity, where the
artificial most often proves to be the mode in which the body could exist
and function...Today's use of technology and collaboration between science
and art offer the body unimagined performative possibilities, the body is
becoming the locus of different locations and physiologies, it is neither
bound to the epidermis nor to thought, it exceeds the limitations of space
and time."
Within this exalted movement from a naked human body to its mental and
cosmic projections with the help of intoxication, there is also the artist
in the middle,who is anchored into a net.art framework who is searching for
invisible expressions of his body and unknown manifestations of life. To a
certain extent, Metabolizer also parallels art with artificiality, while
acting as a symbolizer which gives signals of different approaches
of working with the naked body throughout the history of art; for example,
modernist deformations and contemporary body art and performance art
practices. It is very possible that, having completed his studies in the
National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia in which traditional methods of art
education rule, Dourmana experiments in this work with the possibility of
the artist to grow out of it and to play with the idea of a simulated
organic link between contemporary art practices and traditional ones.
R.D.
Tiia Johannson, Raivo Kelomees, Virve Sarapik et Nelli Rohtvee
Cybertower
1997
A collaborative project, Cybertower is based on an idea by Raivo Kelomees. A
micro model of the Internet, this artwork is a view of it as a space and as
a construction, be it societal or even esoteric. We can find in it sites of
all kinds: ISPs, commercial and porno sites ("The #1 Pornosite on the
Internet")
, search engines like yahoo, sites in unreadable for some foreign languages
(moslty Estonian), as well as art institutions' (the Re-lab in Riga, the E-Lab in Tallinn, The
Estonian Academy of Arts, etc.) and artists' sites of
course. One of the artists present in the Tower is "Net.lover" Tiia
Johannson and her "Self.Museum"
in which we can find a project called Skyscraper.net.
Most self-loving however is the
Cybertower itself because on one of the floors one finds a link to it.
It is suggested that for Cybertower, sky is the limit because as
Kelomees points out "this project can grow to infinity." Not only that we
can click on the little button, having the impression that we ring the bell
of an apartment, and peek into another world and get a net-specific
voyeuristic pleasure, but we can also get in, play and participate. The
artists are inviting us, making the Cybertower an open space: "Everybody can
submit an address of her/his/its page, site or project." The chat area emphasizes
accessibility. The inhabitants can meet and discuss about the
Tower's life. The artists inspire in the viewer a typical on-the-edge
Internet thrill of being semi-invited or invited and uninvited at the same
time.
Combining ancient and new, this cyber-construction works both as a tower and
a skyscraper. At the same time Cybertower suggest an organic construction
such as a beehive. In the introduction to the project, Raivo Kelomees
comments on the mythological background and the metaphorical branching out
of the project: "We happen to be in an ironical situation - while multitude
of languages is typical for mankind (and it was an endpoint of Babel), then
in cyberspace we can see erasement of differences and return to lingua
franca or English. We are moving into the pre-Babel situation."
In Cybertower the artists juggle with the idea of the Internet as
immaterial, while referring to its particularity of being monumental and public on a very large scale. Ironically, the structure is
simple and uniform, resembling a cabinet, and we enter into it through tiny
drawers. These contrasting aspects of the project lead to net.artists'
persistent exploration of the Internet's liberating potential: "You can
leave your bodies behind when entering the Tower, just like entering
Paradise and Hell... These are huge upgoing buildings mankind has
established and erected themselves into the eternity with. To free
themselves from the heaviness of gravity! Every tower like an arrowhead to
the heaven and suggestive command to the viewer - go! arise! change!"
R.D.
Olia Lialina
The Last Real Net Art Museum
2000
After having established Teleportacia, net.art’s first gallery, Olia
Lialina has gone on to create its last museum - The Last Real Net.Art
Museum -, an extension of her constant and active promotion of the art
form, and yet another expression of her desire to avail herself of it
while sustaining it with an appropriate framework. This initiative
results from her experience as invited artist to numerous events and
exhibitions in various contexts and a long reflection on the ways in
which net.art can be presented and curated. In fact, a few years ago
museums started to present and even to acquire art created for the
Internet, sometimes awkwardly by decontextualizing the artworks and by
taking away their essential character (see another project of Lialina
related to this subject, Location=>Yes>). In this respect, The Last
Real Net.Art Museum is an attempt to re-appropriate and affirm the
independence and the autonomy of this art, outside of the traditional
museums' circuit.
The Last Real Net.Art Museum is as credible as any real museum with its
collection, its archives and, even its store... Nevertheless, this
museum totally differs from the imposing institutions which reside on
the big avenues of our cities. Although purely virtual, it distinguishes
itself also from the virtual exhibitions which these institutions have
started to organize in the last few years. Yet, Lialina's museum also
provides the occasion for an aesthetic and historic overview on the
subject of art on the Web...
This "last" museum - "last" having all the weight and dramatic and/or
ironic charge of finality - refers to net.art as a form of creation
which many artists and critics call "bygone" (see for example Alex
Galloway's text "net.art Year in Review: State of net.art 99", in Switch
quoting Tilman Baumgartel: Net-dot-art is dead") This is how artists from the
first generation of Web creators designated art created for the
Internet, an art leaning on the very structures of this medium of
communication, the protocols, the connectivity, the collaboration, and
often bringing a critical, even an activist, perspective to the
environment of cyberspace.
The last museum of "real" net.art is based on a "historic" work by the
artist, one which belongs to a category of art created for the Internet,
the same "net.art" which now belongs to the past... This work, My
Boyfriend Came Back From the War,
produced in 1996, and one of the most important projects in the short
history of Internet art, acts as a starting point and as anchoring into
the Museum. The collection includes different versions of the original
artwork in audio, video, Flash and VRML formats, among others. These
"artworks" no longer belong to real net.art, they are now compared to
the "original”, substituting it more or less successfully but certainly
with some humour... These versions are also hommages produced by
artists/collaborators, individuals who are part of Lialina's history
(most of them appear in the Will-n-testament project). Thus, when they occur, the
dispossession and reappropriation of the artwork by other artists are
authorized and even sought. They coincide with the spirit of
collaboration, of making things common, in which many artists work on
the Web, including Lialina herself. The decontextualization of My
Boyfriend Came Back From the War which is made by Lialina's museum
remains faithful to the spirit of her work.
S.P.
Calin Man
The Last Man Standing
1999
Designing an interface in which the two major browsers Netscape and Explorer
are set up in a face to face combat in cyberspace, Calin Man shows the role
and the place of net.art as a particular kind of mediator in the world of
the Internet. Actually, the artist creates a space for net.art by doing the
impossible, merging the two competitors and placing them next to each other.
In The Last Man Standing, Net.art is bravely viewed not as a buffer or judge
between the two but rather as a redeemer of the Internet space and a
shamanic mediator sanctifying cyber territories.
Part of The Golden Virus and Other Web Site Stories project, which was presented in the exhibition Through the Looking Glass curated by Patrick Lichty and at the FCCM 2000, The Last Man Standing also won the second price at INFOS 2000 (off-line)
net.art contest in Ljubljana.
Derived from filmic tradition in its framing and imagery, as well as in its use of narrative, The Last Man Standing is endowed with an iconographic
semblance to Olia Lialina's net stories / net films such as My Boyfriend Came Back
from War
and Lev Manovich's Little Movies Vol.1. The style of the project is based on film montage theory, while bordering
on the idea of a classical net.art beauty, that is authenticity.
While split in two, the frame within a frame in this work puts together two
separate and irreconcilable units referring to the no mercy battle waged
between Netscape and Microsoft. Framing each other and yet framed by the
artists, divided and united at the same time in their new dwelling, these giants of the pixelized world are dwarfed within the frame
and turned into two fictional characters in a baseball-bat duel. Calin Man
takes the real-life fact of the largest Internet war and as in previous
works plays with clichés of the cyber language and experiments with its
symbolic potential. Similarly to the sentence "The Golden Virus c'est moi,"
in The Last Man Standing, Man's signature can be recognized in a subtle
personal touch as the artist replaced the English word in the "home" icon
with the Romanian one - "a casa." He transforms the Net space from within by
inventing two characters who are fighting for "spiritual" supremacy over the
Internet in name of a "just" cause: who is going to be the Saint protector
of the Internet?
With subtle irony, the artist transforms the content of the "icons,"
evidently designated as the Saints' rightful hypostases. Humour, subversion
and authenticity are in the core of this net.artwork in which a desire to
render the Internet space sacred comes forth. The work appeals to art's
transformational, ritualistic powers of exorcising sinister forces. The
simple construction of this dramatic space serving the net-specific
narrative grows into a polymorphic semantic space. Are we in front of a
gladiators' battle field or simply a sport's field? Is this a courtroom, a
projection room, a net-like camera obscura? Are we in the middle of the
Wild West, a gold rush, a Virgin Land, a cyber war zone, or in a cyber
church? Who is the Last Man Standing, the winner and the survivor? If there
is a Holly War, one of many, who is the soldier fighting it. Finally, who is
the real Net warrior-saint, protector and "saviour" ? Perhaps, just as in
the Golden Virus, it is Man himself, both Communicator and Explorer, a manipulator driven by a will to truth and authenticity, The Last Man Standing in the Scape of the Net.
R.D.
Slobodan Miladinov
Dibidius_Straight
2001
One of the most prominent typographers in Serbia, Slobodan Miladinov, whose
main concentration is type design and visual identity systems, made his
first net project, Dibidus, in team with well known
Serbian book illustrator Dusan Pavlic. It was created on the occasion of the
1998 Creative Techno Week festival in Belgrade as a whimsical presentation
of the font which the author, Miladinov, called Dibidus Italic (later
developed and released as ITC Coconino). The font was produced with a
"freemouse" technique combining the use of computer technology in drawing
and the experience of hand-writing.
Dibidus_Straight is a strange blend of socialist propaganda art and the
Russian Sots Art movement with recourse to constructivism and supermatism.
Added to this concoction is a juxtaposition between socialist propaganda and
advertising techniques of manipulating visual signs and text , as well as a
dialogue between visually-specific design for print and that for the web. In
an interplay between aliasing and antialiasing different levels of control
are excersized over the image in relation to the pixel. It is all a game
between the hidden and the obvious, the opaque and the transparent, not unlike a
game of cards. Yet, the apparent linear navigation of the project turns out
to be not as "straight" after all. The viewer finds him/herself in a
wonderland of hidden links and surprising turns. The questions emerging are:
where is the link, where is the catch, what is the difference, where is the
way out and why?
The artist hints at comical cultural misunderstandings and some language
struggles on the Internet. For example, the page EAST is designed as a
Newsletter for Cyrillic users with the promise to be "available soon in
Glagolic" (the old Slavic alphabet). The twofold identity is shown in the
title EAST which is designed so that it can be read both in Cyrillic and
Latin. The page is covered with arrows, predominantly pointing toward the
upper-left of the frame confusing the viewer even further because the arrow
signs replicate the actual arrow searching for the right target on the
screen that could open the next page. Here, the arrows replace the multiple
question mark signs one gets on an Internet page written in Cyrillic.
Caught up in the game, moving forward from catch to catch, from trap to
trap, the visitor is finally lead to the star of the show: a non-bendable,
flickering Mickey with pseudo-pixelized appearance is welcoming us to the
third millennium. At this point, Miladinov reveals one of the principal aspects of
visual manipulation in the project: the fact that the bitmaps were
generated through vector software. Dibidus_Straight (the word dibidus means in Serbian
completely, entirely, totally, absolutely) confronts the viewer with a comical
coercive language, forcing us in one direction and not letting us out of a
situation easily, keeping us trapped in a frame maybe until the content of
the page has absolutely become imprinted on one's memory or until one turns
"completely" claustrophobic.
Miladinov explores the language of signs playing them out alternately as
weak and powerful, big and small, while stimulating the same game with the
viewer's ego making it shrink and expand. It is an easy step to
associate the viewer's voyage in the Internet with Alice in Wonderland.
Another aspect of the work is the critique of absolutes, and as such
Dibidus_Straight stands for an exercise in mindful movement within the
Internet space. Some of the most intriguing layers in the project hint at
to aspirations toward a total artwork or a total design work combined with
constant ironical recourse to totalitarian modes of thinking.
R.D.
Alexei Shulgin et Natalie Bookchin
The Universal Page
2000
In the past, Alexei Shulgin initiated numerous highly esteemed projects
in which many artists were involved as participants; examples of such
works include Desktop is and Form Art. More recently, he completed
several artworks in collaboration with Natalie Bookchin. One these is
Introduction to Net.Art (1994-1999), with which The Universal Page, a product of the
same duo, shares some common traits. In both projects the artists take a
twofold look at the present situation, whether it is with the aim of
revisiting art on the Web (Introduction to Net.Art) or the environment
the Internet has become (The Universal Page). These two works draw
portraits with which to assess the current situation on the Web, for,
while the Web and the practice of producing art on it have a short
history, it is nevertheless time to examine its present state. The
portrait created by Introduction to Net.Art (1994-1999) results from a
temporal discourse, whereas that created by The Universal Page derives
from an analysis of a spatial nature and transgresses the framework of
the art realm.
Their predilection for collective work has led the artists to produce a
special device developed with the help of programmers. This instrument
promises nothing less than the possibility for totalizing, synthesizing
and, visualizing the Web environment. Its purpose is to give concrete
expression to "the single largest collaboration ever known to
humankind." In these respects, the project manifests a desire to reach
the universal, to eliminate frontiers and distances, whether
geographical, cultural or other. This is the desire which has inhabited
the history of the Internet and that of other telecommunication tools
which came before it, as Randall Packer states in a text about this
artwork published by the Walker Art Center.
The outcome of this synthesis, however, is constantly renewed to "really"
keep track of the Web's unstable environment, offers a rather
unattractive image of the universal entity that has finally been
achieved. The information gathered and treated melts into a definitely
muddied magma which is definitely brown ("the brownification of
information", says Randall Packer), which shows no prospect of "clearing
up", of returning to light, that is, leading to a lucid vision and, by
extension, to an understanding of this space. Moreover, the pieces of
"texts" form an indecipherable chain of letters. The accumulation of
elements, constantly digested and restored, does not succeed in
expressing anything; it remains empty of meaning, insignificant. The
continuous change within this formless mass does not help and the change
itself becomes a source of a profound disillusion.
With The Universal Page, Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin seriously
test the big, persistent utopian desire to fuse with cyberspace, gather
all individuals and unite them to reach the universal. The project warns
against a process of homogenization in which identity becomes
indistinct, individuality and individual difference lost for the sake of
a totality that can only be unintelligible. Amused and critical at the
same time, and while failing to lend it a crystal-clear image, the
artists take a shrewd look at this utopia.
S.P.
Igor Stromajer
zvrst3
1999
A true seeker of the emotional, intimate and personal aspects of the
Internet and a militant striving to infuse this space with human warmth,
Igor Stromajer is known as the author of a virtual base, called intma.org,
which is welcoming and alluring, and yet non-lavish and non-seductive in its
appearance. One of the most versatile artists on the Net, and the first
cantor of HTML (Oppera Teorettikka Internettikka), Stromajer
surprises us once again with the low-tech, minimalist trash-sound project,
zvrst3, awarded 1st prize at Trash ART, Moscow, Russia, 1999.
In this work the artist continues to make room for the individual and to render
complex ideas with simplicity. As many other net.artists, especially from
the former Eastern Block, Stromajer is a non-believer in seamless expression. He exploits the aspect of transparency of the Internet medium to the
maximum in order to convey a healing message and sow a liberating seed.
Therefore, the trick and the manipulation in the work are made so obvious:
the sentence, "Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country!" which John F. Kennedy pronounced fourty years ago
(January 20, 1961) on his inauguration as President, has been edited and
reversed to - Don't ask what you can do for your country, ask what your
country can do for you!"
In an interview with by Tilman Baumgaertel,
published in Telepolis (Germany, April 1999), Igor Stromajer says:
"Being faced with the computer is like going to the very deep process of the
most intensive self-communication. It is a kind of art that puts you as a
user/participant into the co-creators position: you have to be active to
survive in this kind of digital environment."
In these respects, zvrst3 is a manifestation of the syntax of
"self-communication" enabling the individual to turn a powerful, imperative
sentence into a question or even more precisely into many question marks.
This is how an empty space is created in which human identity can dwell and
being can unfold. As the artist says, "this is space democracy." In zvrst 3
(zvrst means species in Slovenian) he encrypts the beginnings of the
democratic experience in our civilization as Aristotle's sentence "Man
is a political animal" and Socrates' "Know thyself" carved into the Delphi
oracle come to mind and blend into each other.
The artist transforms the computer box into a dwelling of the human inner
voice. He goes further than simply reversing the sentence by multiplying it
and giving the opportunity to the viewer to replay them in different order.
The statement goes out of control. From very small series of gestures
performed both by the artist and the viewer, the deconstruction grows into
monumental (better yet poly-mental) proportions. The voice of a leader
breaks into many voices and his words splinter into many sounds. Then, comes
the silence... The multiple silent cells on the screen constitute the
magnified greed of the microphone conspicuously handed to the person in
front of the computer. It is our turn to speak. The multiplicity of echoes
and other sound effects, that the listner co-creates, reverberate and
penetrate the viewer on a subliminal, almost organic level. The message
instills an inner revolution, becomes healing, empowering life.
From a post-communist point of view, the artist, who belongs to a generation
that has lived the traumatic effects of totalitarian thought and practice
shows that imperatives could easily be taken to the absolute and turn into
dogmas. Perhaps with zvrst.3, Igor Stromajer has the grand task of preparing
the individual for a life in a community capable of reaching a higher level
of democracy, yet unknown, and co-creating a 3rd millennium democracy. Or is
it simply the distant voices of a species of a third kind that the Net has
accidentally caught and brought down to us?
R.D.
Teo Spiller
Nice Page
2000
The ironically superficial title of Nice Page, is deeply rooted in Teo
Spiller's previous projects Hommage to Mondrian and the banner art
competition. In Nice Page the parallel drawn between net.art and
neo-plasticism in Hommage to Mondrian is taken a step further right into the
depths of the creative possibilities of the Internet. By layering and
meandering of pages from
Alta Vista's "bitch search" with 313,375 pages found through Barbie's world,
to Ljudmila and the Guggenheim Museum, the artist takes a hermeneutic
approach to unraveling the hidden-yet-to-be-discovered world of net.art or
net plasticism.
At first glance, Nice Page is a provocation toward the superficial flipping
of pages and the over saturation of the Internet space. Above all, it is a criticism toward
a superficial attitude in the approach to it. Referring to the practice of
leafing through web pages, the artist positions himself against an easy way
out in dealing with the phenomenon of protecting our mind from being
constantly bombarded and cluttered during our cyber journeys. Weaving a
medieval tapestry of "illuminated" pages, the artist interlaces them into a web
demonstrating clearly how it could easily turn into a net for catching
"butterflies." The Internet is shown as a beehive with fatal attractive
powers as we spot here and there a queen bee or two, and of course much
honey. However, the Page has two sides: the viewer is not seen as an
innocent victim but rather as a thirsty-nice-page-hunter, aiming through the
viewfinder-like frames within the frame.
At the same time, Nice Page constitutes a filtering grid, a critical module
of viewing. It brings us back to antiquity and takes on apotropaic
functions. Its appeal acts as a protective shield against seductive and
debilitating invasions of "nice pages" into our consciousness. The
pleasant-looking mosaic acts as a bate leading the visitor to probe deeper and
see what lies underneath the pavement, understand what is the hidden,
underlying structure. In this strange mix of marbles (ital.), net.art is
shown as a forum, an agora where questions can be asked and dialogues can
take place.
Surprisingly, as we navigate, there are moments when caught in the labyrinth of
pages we loose track of the grid. Suddenly, there arises a desire to go back to
the nice page and contemplated it further. Solving the riddle and
deciphering the rules of the game which is about to unfold on this
checkerboard seems to be the threshold to finding the essential links
between the one traveling in cyber space and the journey itself. Spiller
guides the viewer to a symbolic level of interactivity, where, by putting the
pieces of this intricate puzzle together, one can arrive at touching with
his/her own mind the contours of net.art as a whole. Probing the ground of
net.art in intriguing and meaningful ways, Nice Page is a reflection on this
art form, its true primary and neutral colours, tools and materials. It
demonstrates Internet and net.art manners of "pulling the strings," in one
case to find an erring victim, in the other to arrive at a composition which
can only be held by the mind because the artwork is only a springboard to
our own, infinite imaginary world. Therefore, infinity, transparency,
totality, interactivity, immateriality of the Net are illusory without the
alert participation of the mind.
R.D.
Reviews by Rossitza Daskalova and Sylvie Parent
