Appendix One
Interview conducted via
email with 'Mouchette,'
Gary Owens, December
2003
Note: Contact with 'Mouchette' was made through
the following email address...mouchette@mouchette.org
GO I'd like to address this
to the people or persons who maintain the Mouchette site, my name is Gary Owens
and I'm currently writing a thesis at a University in the UK about Internet
Art. Would it be possible to ask you
some questions about Mouchette, you can, of course, keep your anonymity if you
wish. I know this is impertinence...
MOUCHETTE I can easily answer
your questions without losing my anonymity, and this is not impertinence.
GO Is
Mouchette a work of Internet Art, in your view?
MOUCHETTE Yes it is. It's
always been a work of Internet art, it depends on the Internet to function and
even to exist, and it was created because of it.
GO Do contributors submit
things that you reject or take the site in a direction you don't like?
MOUCHETTE I certainly make it
a point to check everything posted to my site and I would never let anything be
published automatically, but there are very few entries I reject. I do
sometimes, when I find too rude or too dangerous. Most of the time, I don't
mind publishing insults and blame because it is also part of the reactions.
GO Did you expect the
Suicide Kit page to become such a vibrant chat community?
MOUCHETTE No, I don't expect
anything from the Suicide Kit page. If nobody would post there, I would gladly
let it die and forget about it. But it seems to be very meaningful for people
who post there to be read, so I try to maintain it and I created a
classification so that people can find each other more easily.
GO What
was it that inspired you to start the site?
MOUCHETTE I started the site
in 96. From the beginning I noticed the "personal page" as a sort of
artistic genre where people were presenting a construction of themselves. The
self-construction was mostly innocent, but I always found it funny to think
that these people could be very different from how they presented themselves.
Internet was the first
medium in history where people could communicate in real time without using
their body. So I decided to create this very young girl saying "I
am..." so that people would believe she is the author of the website.
I chose the character of
Mouchette from the film by Robert Bresson because I was into young girls and
this one had very dark sides to it. Later it proved a much richer influence
that what I'd imagined: the relation to the fly (the name of the character),
the art of Robert Bresson as film maker, some dramatic events from the film
which I exploited in the website in a different way etc...
GO How much of the content,
roughly, has come from you directly?
MOUCHETTE This is hard to
tell... Between the inspiration from the film and the public participation in
the site, one might wonder where I stand?
Well, in fact I would
say EVERYTHING comes from me: I pick up carefully my inspiration material and I
leave the space I want for public participation. I design everything in the
site, especially the mode of communication and exchange with the public (the
database and its functions
GO Do you consider
everything on the site to be art?
MOUCHETTE I consider the whole
site to be an art project. Some parts
of it could be seen as something else (a message board, a social space...) if
they were not part of an art project.
GO Thank
you for your time
MOUCHETTE You're welcome.
Don't hesitate to ask if
there's anything else you want to know.
In return I'd like to
know what your thesis is about, and what you wrote about me.
GO My thesis is about
Internet Art and what effect some of its specific features (like interactivity,
collaboration and anonymity) have on the traditional idea of the
artist/audience relationship. I've been
trying to find a snappy title and that's about as near as I've got! I'm particularly interested in projects
which revolve around identity construction, like yours, Brandon, Keiko Suzuki
etc. Yours seem to be the most
comprehensive example and I'm using you as the big finish. I'm running out of time with this but I plan
to have the final piece available on the Internet, probably in the next couple
of weeks, I'll gladly email you the link when I sort it out.
MOUCHETTE Please do.
All the best and good
luck to you!
*bisou*
Mouchette
Note: Contact with Andrea Zapp was made through
the following email address… www.azapp.de
GO Did any of the contributors produce work
which you rejected, or that took the project in a direction you didn’t agree
with?
AZ Not exactly - there was one
contribution I remember - the work is quite old now - which took a direction
into the gender shift topic, that ended up in a rather violent transvestite
scenario and it became quite exhibitionist, so I finally decided not to leave
it in. Apart from that I didn't really mind which ever direction the project
took - I tried to refer to this by establishing a light and a dark side of the
character/interface.
GO How would you describe your own
role in this project?
AZ Due to the fact that the project
at that time was not a real-time application, but rather a documentary of what
people have sent me via e-mail, I very much had the role of an editor still. I
didn't change contributions, but I had to add them together and I also created
the subtitles. It was very much a collaborative diary, where I provided the
pages. Nevertheless it discussed the role of the artist more as a catalyst and
moderator within a multi-authorship.
GO How did you decide upon the list
of contributors, could anyone send in contributions or was it by invitation
only?
AZ Both - I announced the project in
mailing list etc., but I also asked artists directly and a few entries came
after a workshop on narratives and Internet. But I always tried to reinforce
the idea of the identity shift between the natural and digital space, in which
the Orlando figure becomes an avatar and metaphor of a multiple personality;
that was essential for me, also in relation to the Woolf book, and not so much
a collaborative web design.
GO Thank you for your time
AZ No problem - below is a
publication, in which my own article refers to this topic, it could be in your
faculty library I guess -
M. Rieser/A. Zapp, eds:
New Screen Media. Cinema/Art/Narrative - Book
and DVD
BFI, London/ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2002
http://www.bfi.org.uk/newscreenmedia
Gary Owens
December 2003