WEB PROJECTS no.13

Steve Cannon
Text.ure
1999
In text.ure, assisted by producer Nam Szeto and graphic designer Jeffrey Piazza, Steve Cannon (author of the text and a programmer) presents a complex work that redefines the act of reading while making it proliferate.

The reader is here invited to "transcend," to go beyond the traditional vision of text as unitary and continuous, whether from a spatial point of view - on the page or screen, flat, black on white - or from a temporal one - unfolding its (single) meaning during the reading of the book or cursor's traversal. This transcendence is brought about by getting the reader to explore a "non-linear narrative," (Steve Cannon, "About the Work") - that is, beyond the horizontality of the text, to take a vertical plunge toward other worlds. To make use of the site, readers are called upon to use the tools made available to them, which they must learn how to manipulate and whose purpose they must discover - by reading the description and instructions, examining the illustrative diagrams and, especially, through practice.

"TEXT.URE functions as a series of panels that inform one another of the user's actions" (Steve Cannon, "Diagram 01: structure"): these panels are respectively identified as "terrain," "altitude," "history," and a "text display" where a superimposed frame functions as "text magnifier," magnifying the snippets of passing text. The reader must set out to restructure the "text-source" given as raw material by making a "path" through the terrain with his mouse. This terrain is not an ordinary page; it is quite broken, with "peaks" and valleys of various pixel heights, which values are constantly displayed, updated and mapped in the panel of the same name during the reader's exploration of the text. The "story" will record this data, providing the reader with an image of his sinuous path; similarly, the textual passages that he traverses gather into different "levels," layers of reading - the same passage may be "browsed" in several ways - to finally give him "his" text, the production of which he will have followed all along.

According to its author, for the production of this new reading experience, text.ure draws from two sources, art and science. From art, major abstract artists Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian influenced the visual appearance of the work: Malevich for texture, with his "white squares on white background" where painting is bereft of all illusion of representation and revealed as pure "texture," given shape by strokes of the brush; Mondrian for the structure, with his strictly geometric arrangement of square or rectangular panels delimited by horizontal and vertical lines, where only primary colours (red, blue, yellow) come into play. S.W. Hayter's works have also had an influence, with their energy and crisscrossing lines.

Science, finally, has of course provided models for the creation of the precision tools made available to the reader for navigating the terrain and delineating his own text. One also recalls that Steve Cannon studied science and physics. And one can't help observe that text.ure presents the reader with an interpretative and replicating apparatus reminiscent of new conceptions of the world in physics, in which the universe becomes a "multi-verse," where many possible worlds are said to coexist in parallel, each with its own space and time, like so many versions of the same world undergoing different chains of cause and effect. Thus, beyond the two-dimensional page or screen, and beyond the three dimensions of classic physics, one can now see, with the addition of the fourth - time -, that dimensions proliferate, their tiered levels constantly accumulating, opening out vertically, dizzyingly, from the text as from the world. "In some way, I am trying to go even beyond 4 dimensions with the piece (new string theories suggest 27 dimensions as possible) to create highly interrelated structures. I think that is an artistic goal that requires exposing the inner workings of the piece. The screen is only a view onto the structure. The real work of art happens at the data level." (See the interview with Cannon in this magazine.)
A.-M.B.

Arcangel Constantini
123456789px
1999
In the pixelized world of Constantini's 123456789px the net.artist/trickster reveals a paradoxical digital environment that is controlled and going out of control at the same time. It is also not that transparent, open and infinite. Separate windows for each number from 1 to 9 emerge and accumulate on the screen one after the other. The artist magnifies what is behind the interface. What has been hidden suddenly comes to the surface. Each number is enlarged and endowed with a different background, a sound and a colouring of its own as suggestions for its specific character. Digits project themselves into cyber-scapes. They are viewed as autonomous agents influencing and shaping cyberspace.

The imagery replicates grids of pixels joined by discordant and repetitive sound effects. They function a lot as 'noise' and form an opaque surface through which voices spell out the numbers. This curtain of noise distorts the words. The voices are altered, while they seem to be struggling to pierce through the grid and reach the viewer. They can be identified as the voices of the digits themselves, speaking about themselves. While uttering auto-referential words - one, two, three… - the inarticulate sounds suggest that there is much more behind the numbers and their language is yet unknown to us. It is in a stage of becoming, it is to be discovered, decoded and engaged into communication.

The universe of 123456789px appears closed and dehumanized. The work does not allow much interactivity. The feeling of claustrophobia collides with the repetitiveness which instills a meditative techno-mode, bordering on the psychedelic, more like a trance or some other exalted hypnotic state. Paradoxically, this digital atmosphere Constantini portrays can be both imprisoning and liberating. A digit is not only a number. It is no longer abstract. In the digital environment, the digits have an actual role. Although the digit imposes itself on the page in a blunt, abrupt and domineering fashion, as the relentless ruler of the cyber world, the most significant points in this project are revealed through the fact that the artist brings forth the role of the elements of the Net medium. The openness of 123456789px is in the mediation itself which becomes a reflection on the effects of the inherent qualities of the medium that defies 'framing' and cogitations.

What we actually see is the artist's vision of the armature of the page or the window. In this respect, 123456789px is a mise-à-nu (or "baring") of the digital environment. As such it represents an irrational or rather il-logical model for de-ciphering it. The power of the word clashes with the power of the digit, a fundamental conflict in the paradigms of communication int he digital world. The language of the pixel merges with that of the spoken word, yet both have their resistance and each one strives to impose itself on the other.
R.D.

Lisa Hutton
Victorian.NET
1997
A surfing in circles within the dark womb of stifled desires striving to pierce through the occult shroud of codes and 'commands,' Victorian.NET plunges into the universe of intimate communication on the Internet. In the first encounter with the work, the visitor will inevitably collide with the 'physical' wall of this closed world of scattered and unfinished romantic messages. However, it is precisely the disclosure of the phenomenon of hermeticism which makes the net.work open.

The metaphor for a blindfolded search for intimacy on the one hand, and for a blindfolded 'handwritten' text, on the other, drowns the 'white page' in the void. Is it possible that this background is seething with something which is about to see the light of day? In fact, the white page has been destined to annihilation. It seems to have vanished along with the first touch in the act of creation. The image revealed to the viewer's eyes can be related to the film negative which is one of the examples of conceptually crafting the net medium as matière brute.

Lisa Hutton constructs the work in Java script with texts / e-mail messages appearing on the screen in intervals. Waiting for the page to change, in-between the texts, the viewer falls into empty spaces. The messages are composed in folds and fiction as stolen moments, whispering, love letters handed in the dark. In the secrecy of the exchange of messages, the stream is broken up by interruptions in which silence conquers noise.

The underworld of codes is paralleled with the underworlds of being. The impenetrable, the inaccessible and the controlled melt into the void: a place of total opening. The folding matter of the piece makes it very tangible. The idea of creation from the void is introduced in the work with the fingers that emerge in the middle of the screen, touching the darkness, evidently a reference to the etymology of the word 'digit', which means finger in the Latin language. This emblematic gesture also connects net.art with the history of art (from Lascaux to the Sistine Chapel) and ritualistic practices.

An additional reference to the past is the interface of Victorian.NET (green characters on a black background) linking the work to the history of the computer. With this project the artist also delves into the tradition of the epistolary genre and associates the coded language of the computer and the Internet with the codes and conventions of the Victorian age. This is where the negative/positive analogy with photography becomes the clue to the mystery. While in Victorian age the real message is behind the words on the page, in e-mail communication the real message strives to impose itself over the codes which underlie. One thing however remains unchanged: for those who seek it, the authenticity of the message is perhaps between the words, within the words, but always beyond words, because it is essence.

Open communication and intimacy are confronted with control and distance. The interference of the computer codes breaks the free flow of inter-relating on the Internet. Hutton demonstrates the frustration in the lack of possibility to really touch the other in communication through e-mail. At the same time she raises an important question: throughout the history of human civilization different codes and barriers impose themselves on intimacy. It is our role to understand the impediments characteristic of our own times. In this respect, Victorian.NET is not nihilistic because it affirms the immensity of intimacy and values it as a great art. With all its constraints, Internet communication offers an importunity of enriching our capacity for intimacy and for touching the other and being touched. Perhaps, in the hands of artists its etherial touch could be rendered in ways that mimic the ineffable inner life of human beings..
R.D.

JODI
404.jodi.orgg
1997
The concept of computer malfunctions is at core of JODI's net oeuvres. It offers a fresh, humourous and liberating outlook on computer technology and human interaction with it. The viewer realizes that an error whether it is made by a human or by a machine could actually be a way out from a vicious circle in a master/slave relationship instead of being just frustrating. 404.jodi.org shatters the rather grim illusion that everything can be always totally controlled. For a while we have the feeling that the machine takes over and everything human disappears. We lose control because the computer seems to have more information than we do and to perform better without our intervention. However, once the element of interactivity is introduced, it becomes clear that the individual could make choices and take possession of his/her own actions. Then, the only issue is that the computer also makes decisions. It always knows where we are.

Through interactivity the text is perpetually altered into a long scroll because JODI's epistles exclude finiteness. Their content suggests that at the foundation of the Internet lies the text which is a result of a collective input into a structure created by the artists. The opening Error Page or File Not Found leads to three other pages through each separate digit of the number 404. There is a streak of anonymity to the work as if it is untouched by the human hand or will. The lack of human presence suggests that the computer is acting on its own, in secret. As we write a word, a phrase or a sentence, the computer is swallowing the vowels in the page accessed through the first 4-entry; in the second, it devours the consonants. 404.jodi.org illustrates the capacity of computer technology to alter language. In addition to the transformed words, strange signs and codes appear on the page. The computer is speaking its own language by processing what the individual in front of the computer puts into it and sending it back to him/her. The delivered text is a result of obscuring the invested language through the processing performed by the computer. JODI establishes a particular perspective on Internet writing and reading based on the notion of the text as liquid.

The 0 links us to a less colourful page that functions as a moment of truth. Once we participate by writing something at the bottom of the page, our own location is revealed and we can read the locations of the previous visitors. This recourse to the self indicates the involvement and responsibility of the user. The viewer is placed into an in-between situation. It is up to her to juggle between different kinds of excess and lack, misinterpretations and errors. Looking back at 404, the viewer might feel cheated or, in a less dramatic interpretation, might experience discomfort as she finds herself at the 0 point. Does this suggest passive and mindless use of the computer technology, chattering away mindful communication, or is it just that the computer does not hear well sometimes? In any case, JODI sends signals for alertness which raises questions. In a recent interview with JODI by Tilman Baumgaertel for Rhizome the artists point out: "We make abstractions of existing popular code, and we dress/ undress this code with graphics we believe express the underlying code better. A formalist exploration of reduction, opening up a view to the underlying codes to better understand our own user/player behaviour."
R.D.

Vannina Maestri
Poezie 2000
2000
Vannina Maestri's work for Poezie 2000 first strikes us by its purity and simplicity: on a black background, is a poem, the animated lines of which undulate under the reader's passing cursor in slow, fluid movements, to and fro, left to right, top to bottom. In the constantly moving and displaced writing, signs signal, although they may not signal any meaning; dazzlingly, "they pass by without answering," explains Maestri in her presentation of the poem. But their very motion and projected radiance draw the reader into a play of reflections, where the area through which the lines pass - which is first the screen, of course, and the page on the screen - appears metaphorically and by turns as black sky, as space traversed by light where the lines travel like comets, as "waterscape," where verses float, and as double mirror reflecting the sky in the water, the reader in the poem, the reading in the writing - all surfaces where depths and chasms are apprehended.

While the poem may intentionally lack a single meaning - always dispersed and drawn elsewhere by reader-instigated surface motion and by the "immediacy" and "speed" of the writing itself (as Maestri describes in the presentation) - the text has a structure, nevertheless, an order formed and reformed to counter the disorder, an orientation and an objective. As such, it is open to interpretation. Elliptically and self-reflexively, the poem describes its own movements, illustrating and illuminating itself in the heat of its own metaphors, which unfurl and scatter it like rays of light reflected and dispersed in rough water. Doing so, it also highlights the machine-generate text processing with which it is infused.

One can begin by identifying two parts of eleven lines each, separated by a line set in italics ("vers l'unité de la méthode" (toward unity in method)) that acts as a bridge between one and the next, as a fold as well, of one in the other. With an injunction in its first line - "accéder librement aux richesses de demain" (freely obtain the riches of tomorrow) - and with terms like "lumière" (light), "brillants" (bright), "images" or "imagent" (loosely, imaging), "fenêtre" (window)), the first part begins, in a weightless "cosmic" space, to allude to a vision of the course of curved light progressively drawn by the presence of matter; in the second part, the sky reflects in a "waterscape" (paysage d'eau) and this reflexivity draws the reader from the vision into the interpretation, from the reading into the writing, and the rewriting, where disorder can give way, little by little, if not to order, then at least to the desire for order, for recollection, understanding (as suggested by terms like "perspectives," "série," "renforcement de l'inertie" (strengthening inertia), "grandes lignes génératives" (broad generative outlines), "centre," "faire aboutir le projet" (bringing the project to completion), "redéfinir les rôles"). The second part thus carries the poem and its reader in a centrifugal movement, a mise en abîme, under the surface, where, perhaps - one encounters many "if"'s - it becomes possible to "reinvest lost realms" (rinvestir des domaines perdus).

A.-M.B.

Mez
Datableeding Texts
2001
The Internet, a powerful offspring of computer technology, seems often overwhelming to its human creator and even threatening. In its unknown and therefore dark sides, this medium can be perceived as anemic and cold-blooded, as well as be demonized to the point of qualifying it as vampire-like. Flatness and chaos, emptiness and waste or impenetrable opaqueness and total control invading personal freedom and interfering with individuality, are all characteristics attributed to the Internet as a result of oscillating between uninformed rejection and blind acceptance of this relatively new tool. Without addressing these issues directly through a who-dun-it plot, Mez redeems the Internet which is one of the hottest topics in the society of today. Her 'mezangelle' language installs a non-linear and imaginative order into the seemingly pointless gibberish of e-mail communication.

In the beginning of the navigation through the Datableeding texts, Mez playfully takes a symbolic blood sample from the viewer, who is invited to confide in her and write down his/her childhood nickname. With the viewer's nickname becoming part the verses on the following page, he/she is initiated into the communication process as an act of creating culture. The syncopated recital of enchanting verses written in this personalized synthetic 'mezangelle' language combines pieces of collective and anonymous e-mail chatting.

Mez composes the texts by inter-penetration of different layers of writing, codes and signs which have become the vernacular of communication through e-mails. The language is enticing and onomatopoeic. Its refreshing quality recalls the ways in which a child learns to speak, freely making up names for the things she observes, and making sense of the universe or simply repeating in peculiar ways what others have said. The artist breaks the stereotypical categorizations of Internet communication by placing the viewer in the position of the child who is learning a new language. Another aspect of the strangeness of the ingenious 'mezangelle' is that it makes us think twice when we say that English is the language of the Internet because the Datableeding texts project suggests that the wide use of English on the Net is transforming the language and the innovations are rapidly spreading off-line.

No longer obeying the rules of grammar, linear language in this project goes out of control and splinters into words and codes governed by a new syntax. The use of the Internet is a practice which engenders idiomatic expressions of its own. In the extensively popular analogy between the Web and the human blood system the texts are seething with life and the pixels are 'stirred,' infused with energy circulating in a flow just as blood cells. The grand finale of cloning angels, the mythological messengers inhabiting the ether, reverberates over the texts as echoes of angelic voices. The artist 'channels' the 'blood' stream of the Datableeding texts, gently carrying the viewer from the Net codes toward the codes of the next so-called revolution: that of genetic engineering.

R.D.

Talan Memmot
Lexia to Perplexia
2000
Creative Director and Editor of Beehive Hypertext Hypermedia Litterary Journal, Talan Memmott investigates the possibilities of creative new media writing on the net. The borders between scientific/critical/theoretical investigation and metaphorical expression in Lexia to Perplexia are blurred. Many disciplines such as psychoanalytic, philosophical and literary theories serve as tools for the artist's investigation. The artist experiments with new conceptual devices of textual visualization. He seeks specific formulas for articulating/integrating texts into the space of the Net and its frame while creating movement. With the aid of different means, Memmot provides Web technology reaches far much beyond hypertext.

Exploring this project, one comes to realize that the language of today is changing. It is all happening before our eyes and it seems that soon we will be writing and reading differently. The renewal of language found in his work shows this process of transformation as (r)evolutionary. There is no actual dilemma if the origins of this renewal stem from the pixel-based medium or if the development of ideas in our times simply cannot be contained by the classical logos, as Jacques Derrida pointed out in L'écriture et la différence in 1967. Prophecies and meditations of the birth of a new language can be found in many other pre-new technology sources such as Roland Barthes' meditations on the desire for an unknown language in The Empire of Signs and Julia Kristeva's Revolution of the Poetic Language, where she points out that such revolution is possible only in an expression which goes beyond the inter-personal.

Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia is a sample of the mechanisms of the birth of a new language refreshing and enriching the forms of communication. In fact in Mark America's active/on Blur - an interview with Talan Memmott (1.16 2001, Rhizome ), the artist defines his work as rich.lit. Lexia to Perplexia is a laboratory experiment in the field of new media writing, a cross-section of codes, signs, formulas, ideas and media and above all a method coming together to dissect the pixel. The artist examines the continuity of the mythos and its transfer / transference into a pixelized grid. It is a search for the origins and the nature of cyber-mythos exemplifying a new and unique way of idea formation in movement which is different from that of cinema or poetry. In his study, Memmott alters words by unveiling what has been concealed in them and exposing the meta-morpho-genesis of language as a cultural process. Ancient meanings resurface along with new: 'Face to Face' and 'I to eye.'
R.D.

Mouchette
Wattle
1997
In Wattlechick, Mouchette presents visitors with texts in three languages: English, French, and Dutch. These texts are the result of a collaboration, one might say, of artist with machine. Words are first generated by a program called the "chainer" and later assembled by the author. Mouchette instructs us in an accompanying text, "How I wrote some of my texts": "The chainer generates text by reordering in a random way all the chains of 3 characters in a given text. Although the language is immediately recognizable, the original text cannot be guessed. The chainer takes all characters into account: all the letters but also the spaces, the punctuation, the returns and everything. My fly-texts use the production of the chainer as raw material, but all the rest is hand-made: the rhymes, the repeated words, the dialogue effect, and everything that makes the text readable."

The chainer "can be accessed on the Net," Mouchette explains in a "Letter to a friend," but she "won't give the address, otherwise everyone could do like me." The chainer, like Mouchette herself, is at once a creator and a creature of the machine and of the Web; derived from the latter and otherwise unreachable, one cannot locate it anywhere else. Mouchette, in fact, does not "exist," and for two reasons: first, as she explains on the opening page of her site, the name "Mouchette" does not "belong" to her. It is the name of the main character that appeared in French movie-maker Robert Bresson's 1967 film Mouchette, and before that, in Georges Bernanos' book, Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, published in 1937. Second, Mouchette's existence is all the more questionable as she declares at the very start to have committed suicide at age 13 in 1967, like her namesake at the end of Bresson's film. Web artist Mouchette is an avatar, dead from the start, existing/dying solely on the Web.

The texts that we read on the site (and also hear, as Mouchette recorded them on an audio CD, in "Dutch") issue from the conjunction of these two creators/creatures, and their author(s) (?) call herself/themselves "wattlechick": "You might know it or not, but I'm a real text specialist, a poet and a manipulator, in one word: a wattlechick." The word itself is hybrid: it's the title of the poem created in English that we can hear on the front page by clicking on Mouchette's image/avatar.

The texts resulting from this hybridization of already hybrid creators/creatures are all the more hybrid themselves. The three originally natural languages find themselves split apart, manipulated, fiddled with, and reassembled in three new, incomprehensible languages, but are immediately recognizable (one identifies the original language, its sound and its rhythms), offering to the reading: poems, stories, and dialogues that are highly "insignificant" but readable and audible nevertheless, the combined product of chance, of the necessity of the computer program, and of the rewrite by an ungraspable artist/avatar who is already dead. In all this, of course, humour, distanciation and irony always come into play, as in the best chance poetry experiments of the Surrealists and Oulipiens, as in sound poetry, like that of Claude Gauvreau.
A.-M.B.

Mark Napier
The Shredder
1998
One has to make an effort to remember that the texts and images we see on our screen while surfing and interacting on the Web are illusory and temporary, not real or permanent, as the entirely metaphorical assimilation of screen space with the printed page in the ever more accessible information flow would lead us to believe. True to its central metaphor, the web takes on the aspect of a web structure: well connected, methodical, and organized. The apparition of these texts and images on our individual screens is purely and simply the result of a translation into standard readable code (HTML) and of the interpretation of that code by ordinary browsers, making it transferable from one machine to another.

Hence the illusion of permanence: from time immemorial, have we not considered that what is visible and exchangeable is, as such, also tangible? On the contrary, with Shredder, Mark Napier tries to destroy the “illusion of solidity and permanence in the Web” (Mark Napier, “About the Shredder”). For behind the page momentarily conjured onto the screen, so many other pages bearing code to be read by the machine and not by the reader exist only virtually, and only by way of interposed of images.

The basic principle of Napier's work is pretty simple: since all interpretation rests on conventions, the means for revealing and thus for subverting their conventional character is to modify them; different rules of interpretation necessarily propose different interpretations and result in different texts, displayed differently on the screen: “By altering the HTML code before the browser reads it, the Shredder appropriates the data of the web, transforming it into a parallel web.” (Mark Napier, idib.) The Shredder is first presented as a browser, and is given a mock version number (“1.0”), like Netscape and Explorer. Users click to launch the “shredder” and are then invited to either enter a URL of their choice or select one from the “favorites” already presented (mostly sites by other net artists, or online museums and galleries, chosen for “the aesthetic beauty of the shredded output, or for the conceptual relevance, or simply for revenge,” as Napier himself admits). The selected page then goes through an interpretative filter that no longer focuses on hiding the code (what “must not” be seen), on serving the luminous self-evidence and apparition of a page magically “materialized” on the screen. Instead, the Shredder frankly presents itself as a filter, showing precisely what other browsers must block out at all costs, a filter that interposes more than it transposes, willfully incorrect, brazen, letting through strands of the sense of the code, on the one hand, and of the text, on the other, partly revealing what was not meant to be read and partly obscuring what was. As Sylvie Parent said in her commentary on the Napier's work (published in issue 7 of the Magazine), “what was organized and separate suddenly gives way to anarchy. The work highlights the possibilities of appropriation and of manipulation (cutting, copying, pasting) afforded by an abundance of accessible and open computer tools and source code.”

Thus: “Content becomes abstraction. Text becomes graphics. Information becomes art.” (Mark Napier, “About the Shredder”). In this role playing — for that is what it is, replete with playful possibilities and effects —, in the end, the signified wavers, to the advantage of the signifier that circulates.
A.-M.B.

Netochka Nezvanova
Eusocial
2000
On her site, www.eusocial.com, "Netochka Nezvanova" presents her last-born software program, NATO.0+55+3d modular, the "marketing" of which began in 2000.

Note: Netochka Nezvanova ("Nameless Nobody") is also (above all?) the main character in one of Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novels, his writing of which was interrupted by his arrest for having links with small, allegedly subversive political groups.

Another note: the software on eusocial.com is presented in "m9ndfukcese," a nova lingua, one might say, that mixes letters and numbers, English, French and German, Web acronyms and bits, a language invented and often used (on web forums and lists, like nettime, for instance) by the artist (or artist collective) of the same name (i.e., "m9ndfukc"). On its own, this language, which is at once playful and dreadful, poetic and political, is capable of conjuring an environment infused with the machine and, ineluctably, with fiction. Reminiscences, connotations, and metaphors are strung together and piled up: one thinks of the poetic language of the literary innovators and of the utopian political diktats of the twenties. A new world is dreamt of. The new world is dreaded as well. Along with the presentation of the software, Netochka Nezvanova gives us "komentari" and "propaganda," and a "netverk" that provides links to m9ndfuk works, interviews, essays and political, poetic, social and linguistic views, in fragments, mixed with snippets of codes, whether genetic or computer-derived, a mirror image of our world of information split into "bits" and in which the program figures as an apostle and pioneer - as well as a caustic, biting, and devouring critic.

Third note: the potential "customer" wanting to know about or obtain NATO.0+55+3d (one can do so simply by clicking on "just 1 klik") will first have to undergo a barrage of unnerving effects on first entering www.eusocial.com, and will witness the seeming devastation his screen by chaotic malfunctions that are less a demonstration of the said program than a warning: what follows has no "user-friendly" intentions.

Yet, the program itself is presented and appreciated as a flexible and adaptable tool (as evinced by eloquent testimonials from its users, mostly artists; see "komentari"). The fluidity promised and provided by the program for processing/manipulating data (mostly visual) contrasts markedly with its presentation on the site. Paradoxically, one finds no images there: black text scrolls across a steel blue background, sometimes explaining the capabilities and technical requirements of the program (in terms of required platform (MAX), minimum memory, and so forth), sometimes gratifying the visitor/enthusiast with comments, quotes, reflections and biological/social/economic/political "flights of fancy," sometimes still - a desire quickly controlled! - stringing its letters into an attempted figure. Yet it is precisely that contrast that makes the promotion of NATO.0+55 both a political and a poetic and literary gesture. For it is especially remarkable that the marketing of this software is the work of an artist and not that of a "korporation"; that a singular entity beat the corporations at their own game: the reproduction/manipulation/creation of code.

In this discussion, I certainly mean to bring attention to "NATO.0+55+3d modular," a Quicktime image editing and processing program (for images, video, 2D, 3D, and so on) that appeared in 2000 as an improved version of the "non-modular" 1999 version (its main difference from the earlier version, besides the addition of functionality and objects, is that it processes images "off-screen"); however, I would also and especially like to underline the online presentation of this software at "eusocial." This presentation can in fact be seen/read as a work onto itself, one that underscores linguistic presuppositions, narrative possibilities, and the economic and political ramifications of the program in question.

What is NATO.0+55+3d?
"NATO.0+55+3d modular is a set of QuickTime externals for MAX. NATO.0+55 allows MAX users to deal with any sort of QuickTime media (films, images, sound, QuickTime VR, QuickDraw 3D, Flash movies, etc.) within the MAX environment (Ircam/Opcode/Cycling'74) the same way it is possible with MIDI or audio data using the built-in functions or MSP. NATO.0+55 interfaces with MAX in the same direct and simple manner that MSP does." - Ircam

As it is impossible for us to go into details and to describe the hundreds of objects available through NATO.0+55 in this short commentary, I will only mention that NATO.0+55 and its objects allow for entering data, for analyzing/manipulating/transforming it, for breaking it down and recomposing it into a modified product created from a data bank rearranged/copied/mixed/split apart (in a predetermined or chance way).

For a detailed account of NATO.0+55+3d's operation and possibilities, I recommend Jeremy Bernstein's commentary at http://www.bootsquad.com/nato/nato03.html. At the end of his article (http://www.bootsquad.com/nato/nato14.html), Bernstein provides links to several sites at which one can find other commentaries and, especially, online examples of various works already created with NATO.0+55+3d, as well as information about the MAX environment (note: many of these works require QuickTime).

Language is a cipher - and, as such, it may confuse us. The machine plays and toys with us, enfetters us. We depend on it; little by little, these tools have become - and, with the advent of the digital world, the process has reached its culmination - a double of the "real" world, which has not consistently appeared as such to us in a long time - if ever. In other words, our world is virtual. "Netochka Nezvanova" questions precisely the control exerted by this mass of data, confusing and unsettling the visitor/customer while also offering the possibility, through the purchase of NATO.0+55+3d, of playing with this data in turn. What this software and its presentation on eusocial bring to light is the operation of language - and its ease of handling, its mobility, its logic, founded on discretion: indeed, as Netochka emphasizes, NATO.0+55 functions syntactically, that is, it allows one to manipulate and create an infinite variety of works from finite means, through reassemblage and reassociation. Reduced to the cipher of language, everything becomes possible: all transitions, all exchanges, are assured.
A.-M.B.

Reviews by Anne-Marie Boisvert and Rossitza Daskalova