feature
NET ART V1+2.0. GENESIS, FIGURES, SITUATIONS
A more "expressivist" form of communication is apparent today in a range of media - in the flourishing growth of the means for self-production and the production of the self in the form of personal web sites, blogs and their attendant technology (syndication, tags, podcasting, videoblogging, etc.) and the networks for communication among Internet users and their associated practices (fansubbing, fan films, etc.). Since the late 1990s, net art has been guiding and prefiguring these "mass" technologies and practices by multiplying the ambivalence of our relationship with the Internet, which is both intimate and dreadfully solitary. As new dialogue interfaces grow and expand, we withdraw from the real world, which is both more collective and community-minded. Today, the term net art refers to interactive works of art designed by, for and with the Internet, as distinct from more traditional forms of art which have simply been transferred onto the web sites of art galleries and other virtual museums. In the art world, the originality of the Internet lies in the fact that it is simultaneously a medium, a tool and a creative environment. By medium I mean a vector of transmission, in the sense that the Internet is its own broadcaster; by tool, the way it is used as a means of production, giving rise to different usages and generating new artistic products; and by environment the fact that it is a space both inhabitable and inhabited. In this context, artists seek at least as much to design interactive devices1 as they do to create settings for communication. Using all the means at its disposal-the Web (HTML FTP, peer to peer) but also e-mail and chat-net art encourages the production of works whose relational and collaborative aspects have turned the relations between art and society upside down. Internet sites, home pages, blogs, mailing lists and discussion forums have become the new forms of sociability. Net art, by associating itself with this dynamic, can take the shape of specific forms of interactivity but also of the production of on-line lifestyles and communication strategies. The Internet has become both an on-line artist's studio and a gallery space: a space for artistic creation and for communicating and receiving artistic practices.
As a result, the works of art produced there are multifarious-environments to be navigated, programs to be executed, forms to be altered-and sometimes go so far as to include the possibility of adding to or altering the initial artistic material. A close examination of net art clearly reveals this slippage through which the work of art is less what is on display than the process that brought it about. Visibility on the screen is only the face of an entire technological and communicational infrastructure, making the work of art, more generally speaking, the entire range of structures and rules underlying it. All works of net art are made up, in fact, of a proscenium (the interface), a stage made up of the various elements drawn on to create the work (text, sounds, images) and the wings (where the program and fragments of computer applications are housed). This fact, and the analytical distance provided by ten years of experimentation and artistic creation on the Internet enable us today to distinguish three principal forms of net art: works of media contamination, works of algorithmic generation and works of interactive communication. The first kind is based principally on the (media-based) interface through which the work is conveyed: use and communication. The second is focused on the (algorithmic) program of animation objects or environment objects which may or may not provide the web surfer with the possibility of interaction. The third is centred on interactive content, from the arborescent object (taking a reticular path) to the object in the process of creation (granting an alterative path) to the relation object (which distributes an inter-communicational path). From this perspective, the subject of the media art work is digital material, while that of the algorithmic art work the software program and that of the interactive art work (formal) communication and what arises from it. The artistic manipulations by and for the Internet thus have as their goal the medium's structure and architecture, the software codes and programs generated, the creation of hypertext links and paths and, finally, the forms of communication and artistic content (sounds and images) deployed.
The purpose of this article is not to provide an exhaustive description of each of these forms (for this the reader is referred to my recently published book ) but rather both to provide an overview and sketch the evolution of net art by highlighting two principal trends: the convergence of technological innovation and artistic creation by means of "creative hacking", on the one hand, and the hardening of the relational aesthetic and creative social networks on the other. None of this is without links to the typology mentioned above, on the contrary. For it appears that recent work, while still part of what can be called net art, radicalises the spirit and form of that art by putting technological innovation and the social practices and uses which derive from it into tension, on the one hand, and on the other by inventing new cultural and media relations and practices. By hardening these artistic logics and methods found on the Internet, by continuing to develop in an original manner, net art has succeeded in contaminating the other arts and in influencing relational exchanges and practices off the Internet. To accomplish this, net art re-materialises in the objects or performances most frequently linked to the physical or institutional spaces of artistic consecration (museums, galleries, artists' centres) while at the same time drawing out of this re-territorialisation technological ways of using and doing that can be transposed into the real world. The present article, taking the opportunity afforded by the tenth anniversary of net art to cast a glance back at its history and take note of the influence of its major works, will also survey some recent work and the issues they address.
THE ARTIST AS HACKER: INVENTING SOCIO-TECHNOLOGICAL WORKS OF ART AND COMPUTER PROGRAMS
The enquiry into the medium which marked the earliest Internet-based works of art2 has become radicalised today in new forms of artistic creation which adopt the most recent technological advances. The pioneers of net art often denounced the strength of the almost exclusive language for organising hypertextual data, HTML, which, they claimed, contributed to the uniform nature of most web sites, both in their structure and the appearance of their interface. Artists at the time proposed to get around these prescriptions for the use of web sites whose aim was to discipline the way they were used: links highlighted in blue, clickable images, title and body zones. Net artists proposed alternatives to strictly functional options such as point-and-click as the convention of navigation and the constrained distribution of information and its fixed reception, with no possibility of intervening in or transforming it. A growing number of net artists are calling for this kind of parasitical involvement.3
Their early forms of artistic action aimed at contaminating the Internet with artistic viruses which borrowed the deviant logic and behaviour of the hacker4. Some artists devised a system of infection and communication, with the goal of creating incidents, bugs, technological discomfort and the loss of bearings. Jodi's pioneering works5, for example, acted upon the structure of HTML language by altering the transformation code which enables a web site's structure, whether on the level of the page layout, the integration of multimedia components or the sound, image or video. By intruding into the very root of a site, on the level of its language and computer code, these works generated basic errors and contradictory commands: in this case, the system error 404 they displayed became a form of creative leitmotif. Jodi thus brought the user into the rhizomatic maze of a hare and hounds game from which it was often impossible to escape; their jamming interfaces confront the visitor with the constant apparition of warning messages and cause them to lose control of the computer, which ceases to respond to any command.
Other net artists, paying closer attention to the Internet's back rooms, have designed subversive navigators and search engines; Mark Napier's Shredder6 and Maciej Winiewski's Netomat are the emblematic examples of this genre. These works appropriate Internet data by altering HTML code before it is interpreted by navigation software. They are anti-search engines which give back to the Internet its potential as a dynamic and modifiable archive. Netomat, for example, responds to web surfers' requests with a surge of texts, sounds and fixed or moving images taken from the web. It is up to the user to combine or recombine this information without worrying about the arborescence of the site or the structure of the page it has been taken from. On the border line between a navigator, a search engine and a data extractor, Netomat offers an active form of access to and recovering information on the Internet. Its program, the open-source Netomatic Markup Language, is itself modular and adaptable. It can be appropriated and improved by its users or serve as a platform for other applications.
TraceNoizer7 also defends a mode of artistic production based on the development of open-source applications and computer tools used in ways not intended. This generator of informational clones crosses the functions of a search engine with the statistical tools of indexing and tracking used in Internet links. The work generates false personal pages and disseminates them on the web to obscure participants' identity. Users are invited to use TraceNoizer to create their own web page out of their names. The system creates an intimate portrait of the person by locating and re-arranging sources connected to them on the web. The project exploits the idea that everyone using the Internet, sometimes without wishing to, leaves a number of digital traces of their passage (traces derived from the name in their e-mail address, from order forms, electronic signatures, software user agreements, etc.). TraceNoizer then works up this data, multiplying it and transposing it to other contexts. This creative application covers tracks and mixes the true and the false, thereby rendering it difficult to assess this (mis)information. The result is a fragmented identity which places the user in an algorithmic nether space between traces gleaned on the web and those generated by TraceNoizer, which are constantly cut up and altered in the way they are displayed and organised.
This first wave of net art has social and technological implications for finding and using information on the Internet. Here, browsers are like sense organs, through which we see the web: they filter and organise the information scattered about an exponential number of computers around the world. Other methods for distorting Internet content and tools have a more political goal. The collective work Carnivore8, unveiled at the Ars Electronica festival, is a doctored version of the DCS1000 software used by the FBI to perform electronic eavesdropping on the Internet. Josh On, of Futurefarmers, offers an anti-imperialist version of video games whose mission is the war against terrorism9. Heath Bunting10 perverts the media communications of large financial institutions. The U.S. collective RTMARK11 subverts the communications strategies of large, private brokerage houses. The French collective PAVU12 transports and parodies the economic logic of auditing and consulting firms into the Internet's artistic and cultural milieu. They initiate information resulting from plining pre-existing data on the web, which is used to create currency (the gnou) and a system of financial valuation matched to transacting works of art. Finally, the European collective ETOY13 carries out a variety of actions at the heart of the political and economic battlefield around Internet domain names (DNS, dot.com), thereby inaugurating a war of information in the domain of e-business and new financial stocks such as NASDAQ.
At the dawn of Web 2.0, the French artist Cristophe Bruno exemplifies the rise of the parasite artist by "attacking" the tools and rituals of the collaborative web. He has baptised an initial site of works "Google Hacks": artistic systems and computer programs which subvert Google's utilitarian operations in order to reveal its hidden, constraining dimensions. According to Bruno, the Internet has become a tool for total surveillance and control whose economic dynamic is the analysis and prediction of trends, using software to track private taste and identity on the web.
To reveal these determinisms, he calls a series of Wi-Fi Internet performances in physical space The Human Browser. Through headphones, an actor hears a synthetic voice reading a flow of Internet texts in real time, acting out the text he hears. This textual flow is recorded by a program, installed on a Wi-Fi laptop, which subverts Google's utilitarian operations. According to the context in which the actor finds himself, certain keywords are sent to the program (using a Wi-Fi PDA) and used as input in Google, constantly linking the textual flux to the context. At SIANA (Semaine Internationale des Arts Numériques et Alternatifs or International Digital and Alternative Art Fair) held from 15 to 17 March 2007 in Evry, France, Bruno presented WiFi-SM, which invites the viewer-actor to share the world's pain: a WiFi-SM patch, placed on a volunteer's body, does a Google search of 4,500 information sources around the world for programmed words suggesting evil and suffering-"murder", "violence", "rape", "virus". Each time a keyword is found, the viewer experiences a small electric shock, in sympathy with global suffering. With this "P2P (Pain to Pain" technology, Bruno parodies advertising and proposes a marketing slogan: "lower your guilt complex."14
Many net artists have been associated since the beginning of the Internet with the freeware movement, creating works of art inspired by the "copyleft" model of open source and collaborative code development. The Art Bit Collection15 of the International Computer Consortium of Tokyo (ICC) and the site runme.org16 bring together work that explores this form of net art, principally experiments around program languages, software environments, network communities, applications for visualising the back rooms of the web and, finally, subverted applications of interactive software. These projects focus on computer applications which can be used by web surfers, also known as software authors.
THE IMAGE AND COMMUNICATION RE-INVENTED
While the use of digital technologies in contemporary art reinforces the predominance of the conceptual underpinnings and various registers of the artistic expression of computer ideas, codes and programs, it also rehabilitates the image and communicative exchange. On the one hand, digital art created for the Internet gives rise, in many respects, to new kinds of artistic images and their reception. These images become increasingly visible on our computer screens the more these computers' ability to archive and retrieve them grows. Initially, images were employed on our screens to create a background, to illustrate and dress up a text; little by little they have come into their own, appreciated for their own graphic and aesthetic qualities. But here again, this aesthetic is transformed by the confrontation with the computer, which endows it with new prescriptions. The interactive digital image no longer fixes reality: it brings shared environments to life and makes them visible. Synthetically generated or digitised, the image takes on hitherto unseen uses. Well beyond its functions of illustrating or representing, it makes possible, through computers, the employment of various modes of action.
On the other hand, the interactivity introduced into and by the computer image gives rise to new art forms while making possible concrete possibilities for communication and action on the part of the public.
The image, in effect, is acted upon17 and becomes something to be performed as much as something to look at.
It is more a part of the multi-layered interface known as exploration.
Permeable and sometimes even malleable, it nevertheless gains depth.
In other words, the digital image becomes equipped and augmented18 with a functional dimension. It lends itself to highly diverse artistic experiments and reception practices. Rising above the traditional contrast between high and mass art, net art thus joins media practices and the aesthetic experience of new forms of artistic creation: video games, interactive cinema, digital and interactive installations.
At the interface of interactive cinema, video games and the Internet, a growing number of artists are working to find new ways to display images and new ways of relating to them. The Internet image becomes a shared environment. Like Mouchette, many net art projects adopt the form of an illustrated and changing narrative similar to the diary form. Now, however, it is editorialised, revealed and experienced almost in real time on the web. These projects explore on-line the possibilities of a visual and textual archive that it is possible to display and maintain over the long term, with or without the participation of visitors. Here the form of the image-narrative borrowed from the cinema becomes the space of play and a communication environment19. The interactivity on offer consists in a possibility of acting upon the sequence and the unfolding of sequences or dynamic mini-narratives which react in real time to visitors' actions. Certain "potential" images become the theatre of operations between the artist, the program and the public. This is particularly the case of projects created by artists and computer people20 working in tandem to create a kind of interactive cinema for the Internet, in which interactivity allows the viewer to change's the film's linearity21. Other net art projects explore new ways of creating a collective image. Like the pioneering project of the artist-engineer Olivier Auber, the Générateur Poïétique, these works confer new forms of use upon recent mobile technology (cellular telephones, palm pilots, GPS, etc.). In urban space, for example, artists create installations which rely on the public's participation, like those of the Nuit Blanche of October 2004 in Paris, where it was possible to play Tetris on the façade of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The library's T2 tower was transformed into a giant screen (20 x 36 pixels on a 3,370 square-metre surface) using light from the windows. Telephone calls and the sending of SMS messages had an artistic impact on the lighting of the façade22.
Net art also tends to take shape in physical objects, like the artistic experiments of Douglas Édric Stanely, who for a number of years has been exploring experimental forms of a new kind of cinema, which he calls interactive, generative or algorithmic cinema. His major work - Concrescence23 - enquires into the possibilities of narration and the forms of experience proper to the programmed image. His work links interactive and generative narrative software with a physical set-up for interacting with the image, a hypertable which, in defiance of the laws of film projection, consists of a horizontal screen on which the viewer can manipulate and experience various narratives and images. According to Stanley, "the choice of images, that is to say the narration, comes from the interaction between the hand (of the viewer) and the program". Even without interaction, the program of artificial life makes images appear and disappear according to the rules of behaviour in reaction to the viewer's actions. "This independence of two life systems-the user's hand and the system of artificial life growing up around it-makes it possible to create a story in the face of any kind of interaction".
Here the image is in no way an end in itself. Rather, it embodies a link, an interface which displays on-screen a language structure and renders the program visible while at the same time linking the author and the audience. By creating a hybrid of the ways of creating narratives proper to the cinema and the "playability" proper to video games, it gains in interactivity and gives rise to artistic experimentation and new forms of reception. The "virtual" and "fragmented" model inherited from computer technology redefines the qualities of the "image", the way it circulates or becomes a part of the narrative. The image is no longer at the service of a linear narrative or a fixed representation. It plays the role of an interface which is mobilised to design, support and act a work of art whose ideal career presupposes precisely that some of its fragments become potential or "acted out"24. In this sense, the image is caught between the representation of the work designed by its author and the context in which it is read by its visitors.
The specificity of net art and its recent development resides today in this combination of technological configuration and ritualised social opportunity. The audience's involvement, here, is a new from of imperative. It is enacted in computer systems which generate various models of interactivity. It is the object of artistic strategies for creating loyalty and rests on the audience's construction of "takes". It engenders, finally, various reception "contracts" and "rituals" proper to this art form. As a result, the works of art produced by it are dialogical, in the sense that they create a negotiated reception with the audience. The result is a collective form of articulation and operation which is no longer at the service of a sole result but rather imbedded in a changing and incremental process in which various actors, individually and collectively, participate in a work at the boundary to be made and re-made. The Internet has placed the work of art at the centre of a negotiation that is distributed socially amongst artists, computer people, technological systems and an involved viewer.
Notes
1 : On this notion of "devices" in technological arts, see:
Anne-Marie Duguet, « Dispositifs », in Communications n° 48, Seuil, Paris, 1988, pp. 221-242;
Douglas-Edric Stanley, Essais d'interactivité. Hypothèses, analyses et expériences, Mémoire de DEA, Université Paris 8, Laboratoire d'Esthétique de l'interactivité, Paris, 1998.
Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Art et Internet. Les nouvelles figures de la création. Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2005. 
2 : The same phenomenon affected the early history of photography, cinema and video, which were in turn explored and subverted by experimental artists. Nam June Paik's and Wolf Vostell's early videos were devoted to destroying television, physically (in the form of video sculptures) as well as symbolically, by acting upon the medium itself by altering the video signal. Television, the piece of furniture itself, the screen, the cathode tube, the video signal and its non-definition, its feverishness and luminance were taken as both the object and the material of the artistic enquiry.
3 : For an early manifesto for an "activist" net art see Joachim Blank.
4 : For an early manifesto for a "hacktivist" net art see Joachim Blank.
5 : See Jodi;
Jodi, OSS;
Jodi, Error 404.
6 : See Mark Napier, Shredder et "About the Shredder".
See also the work of the London group IOD (Mathew Fuller, Colin Green and Simon Pope): a program to reconfigure information which enables the exploration and use of the Internet on a structural level. Webstalker.
7 : At the initiative of the group LAN, a mix of artists and design professionals. See TraceNoizer Disinformation on Demand.
8 : See Carnivore created by the RSG, an international collective of computer people and artists.
9 : See Josh On de Futurefarmers, AntiWargame.
10 : See Heath Bunting.
11 : See RTMARK.
12 : See Pavu.
13 : See Etoy.
14 : Projects by Christophe Bruno :
Human Browser, 2001-2006, (1st prize at the Share Festival, Turin - Jan 23-28, 2007)
et WIFI SM (Feel the Global pain), 2007.
For another example of subverting a web application Web (Flickr) see in this issue Mario Klingemann, Flickeur, UK, 2006.
15 : "In the art world, a work of art is called an "art piece".
The word "piece" designates a thing that actually exists, but since software creations exist only as binary data, calling them an "art piece" seems wrong. Substituting "bit" for "piece," we have decided to call such a work an "art bit"."
Manifeste de l'exposition "art.bit collection", June 21 - August 11, 2002 @ ICC.
16 : See for exampleEldar Karhalev & Ivan Khimin, Screen Saver, 2001;
Radical Software Group (RSG), Carnivore, 2001;
Adrian Ward, Signwave, Auto-Illustrator / Autoshop, 2001-2002;
Alex Mclean, forkbomb.pl, 2002;
Amy Alexander, Scream, 2005.
17 : This concept came out of the pragmatic study of the forms of writing in interactive narrative systems at the conference "L'action sur l'image" at the Université de Paris 8, organised by Jean-Louis Weissberg.
18 : In a sense close to the computer concept of "heightened reality": a system that make sit possible to superimpose in real time the image of a virtual 3D or 2D model onto an image of reality, which can thus be manipulated.
19 : See also Jenni, JenniCam (archives);
Ana Clara Voog, Anacam;
Natacha Merritt, Digital Diaries;
Agnès de Cayeux, In my Room.
20 : See Durieu & Birgé, Le ciel est bleu, 2002;
Clauss & Birgé, Flying Puppet, 2001-2007.
21 : See Grégory Chatonsky, Sur Terre;
see also in this issue Peter Horvath, Triptych : Motion Stillness Resistance, Canada, 2006.
22 : See Project Blinkenlights.
See also the projects of obx.lab (Jason Lewis and his team) or the Graffiti Research Lab (GRL).
23 : Douglas Edric Stanley, Concrescence.
24 : Étienne Souriau (1956), « L'œuvre à faire », in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, February 25, 1956.
Jean-Paul Fourmentraux
(Translated from French by Timothy Barnard)
top
 back
|
