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The Body of Michael Daines, 2000 (CANADA)
When Were You Told That It Was Really Art?
INTRODUCTION:
"Michael Daines is a [18] year old artist living in Calgary, Canada. But
his precocious mastery of code and underhanded satire has earned him
respect in his own right. His most popular work, "The Body of Michael
Daines," was one of the first auctions on Ebay that crossed the line
into conceptual art. Not often does a kid from Canada get a chance to
have his work in Artforum, no matter how talented he might be. But this
is the utopian vision of the web at its best, the classic story that
always seems theoretically possible but doesn't seem to happen often
enough. If you have the talent, you don't have to do the networking, the
paperwork, and the hob knobbing that have plagued the "real world" art
scenes for years. Do something right, and it catches on- no one has time
to check your resume. This is his first in depth interview."
(Eryk Salvaggio)
ERYK SALVAGGIO: So, for starters, how did you get into Internet art? What appeals to
you about the media?
MICHAEL DAINES: The best answer is that I just found myself to be "in" Internet art
at some point. It wasn't a well-defined decision that I made, or
anything like that. I think to do that, I would have had to have
considered myself somehow "artistic" beforehand, and I certainly didn't.
I'm still very uncomfortable with the notion of being called an
"artist". I'm also glad there is no overwhelming proliferation of
"net.art" programs for teens. Had I participated in something like that,
I don't know what would have become of me.
ES: Why not call yourself an artist?
MD: I think it has to do with a certain teenage politics, actually.
Because there is this demographic in high school that thinks of itself
as "artistic", the kind of people who take art classes and do things
like psychological self-portraits, that sort of thing. The kind of "art"
that I really wouldn't consider art, because it says nothing to me, is
all clichés, is unoriginal, that sort of thing. These are all
generalizations. But because what I've done isn't associated or directly
the result of any institution, I feel that it might be seen as less
legitimate, certainly there is no paint on the canvas in the loose form
of one of my friends for "The Body of Michael Daines."
ES: We're both part of a generation that saw net.art early enough for it
to be the only media we work with. Whereas other people came from
photography or the visual arts and applied that aesthetic to the web, a
lot of your work deals in a very fresh way with some of the classical
net.art techniques. Do you think that being a part of the "Internet
generation" has affected how you approach your work?
MD: I have grown up with computers, I have literally grown up
programming them. When I was fairly young we had this Atari and this
manual for BASIC that was geared towards kids. My father had some idea
that it would help me be able to think well later on, that it would be
good for my intellectual development. I think it affected my artistic
mind set or values or whatever a lot. I sometimes like to mention that I
used Lynx on a UNIX account over a 2400 baud modem at one point, I feel
it separates me from my peers.
ES: What do you consider to be the disadvantages?
MD: There is one major disadvantage I can think of: the possibility of
the apparent ease of creation somehow undermining the value of the
artwork. I feel like I have accomplished something quite monumental if
I create something I am proud of in the "real world". The ease of
net.art is something I have toyed with, though: "The Body of Michael
Daines" was created in less than half an hour, and it got me a mention
in the magazine "Artforum". I felt guilty and smug paging through my
copy, looking at all of the advertisements for exhibits of sculpture and
oil paintings and Andy Warhol prints. But what of the following-up of
the auction, what of the creation of the concept?
ES: Isn't that true for any media though? I mean, look at Jackson
Pollock.
MD: But isn't Jackson Pollock's work very complex and doesn't it not, as
the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon goes, just involve pouring chicken
gizzards onto canvas?
ES: I'm not too sure. But either way, you get people saying "I could do
that."
MD: I think I tend to believe in the conception that it is too easy,
though I don't know where I would have possibly got this from. Probably
some net.artist somewhere. I feel that what I am doing is less, shall we
say, "heroic" than something equivalent might be in another medium, but
does that make it too easy? It depends on what you value in art- the
execution, the pure beauty of form, or in the extended meaning, the
subtext, the concepts. I think my work focuses mainly on the latter,
though it is certainly possible within the medium to do the opposite.
ES: Have you had any formal training in art?
MD: As so-called "artistic" education goes, I have never taken a high
school art class. I have tended, on the whole, towards organization
rather than visualization. I have far more talent in design as opposed
to drawing. The images that appear in my work are almost never drawn or
created directly from some pen, they are taken from pre-existing images
(usually found on the Internet, and stolen, I admit) and modified, or
they are created with standardized and random processes developed by
experimentation. I see myself as part of the sampling generation. It's a
kind of quoting that you can do covertly.
ES: The tendency toward organization is probably what makes your work
look so classic "net.art" for me. Really concerned with presentation and
organization of data, as opposed to the "web art" style which focused
pretty much on formalism and aesthetics. Organization is really the
"net" part of "net.art," which is missing from the newer schools, I
think.
MD: And the lack of organization. Because net.art happens on websites
and networks, and networks are organized or disorganized or in a state
in between the two.
ES: How have people reacted to your age? When I saw "The Body Of Michael
Daines" and a lot of your other work- particularly from the mastery of
code- I assumed you'd be much older. I actually imagined you to be an
alter ego of Mark Napier.
MD: That's flattering, though I've only read briefly about "Shred the
Web". I have been referred to as a "17-year-old" and a "high school
student" when being talked of, and I'd like to think that my age isn't
actually why I get the attention I have. I used the Internet when a lot
of people hadn't heard of it, and therefore I think I have a slightly
more refined view on it, one that is uncommon for someone who is just
turning 18. I guess that, in some small way, I would like to be
recognized as "precocious" because it's nice to be described as that,
but I wonder how important that really is to the artwork.
ES: Any comments on the idea of a net.art "brat pack?"
MD: I think that's an amazing idea, especially if it involves me
obtaining a new, snappy suit, lecturing, and drinking martinis.
ES: There's also a definite literary undercurrent to a lot of your work.
MD: My work is literary by nature because I think literature and
romanticism are important to me, and define my basic idea of "art". I
was exposed to Internet art works involving narrative and text early on.
There were a few hypertext works, there was entropy8zuper, and so on.
I've come to think that straight forward short stories aren't quite
enough my strength to support an entire site. I think text is very
important to the Internet. It's absolutely everywhere on the Internet,
and it literally wouldn't exist as it does today without it. While I
don't create "texts" like NN does, writing is very important to me.
"Cloudless Nights" includes no text whatsoever, and I think that if it
did, it would be ruined. Sometimes we must say nothing at all.
ES: NN is the net.art brat pack's Molly Ringwald.
MD: Who is Molly Ringwald?
ES: She was a part of the Hollywood brat pack back in the 1980's.
MD: I'm really only familiar with that in its most basic concept....
ES: No worries. Part of the appeal of your work is its romanticism, but
at the same time there's an element of satire. The use of technology in
exaggerated or redundant ways. In "An Excerpt From Hamlet" you use CSS
to carry a conversation on between actors- somewhat brilliantly I might
add, but in a pretty redundant fashion. Then there's "It Is Now Safe to
Turn Off Your Computer", which exaggerates the standard windows closing
screen to make it into a kind of plugged in nightmare. What are you
trying to say about technology?
MD: I suppose that, in some way, these and other works represent a fear
of the elimination of all but "technology" in the world, the perfectly
clean future or the dark and dirty future. "It Is Now Safe To Turn Off
Your Computer" would have you never leave your computer, except for
something like two specific hours of the day, and sometimes I find that
this exaggeration is not as wild as I would prefer it was. On the other
hand, I have very often tried to create beauty in these spaces, here I
must be optimistic in hoping we will all be in control of our beautiful
chaos.
Eryk Salvaggio
N.B.: This interview was previously published in Rhizome, in 2001.
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