How has Internet Art dealing with
the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional
artist/audience relationship?
The Internet has grown at an almost
exponential rate since the introduction of the first web browser in 1993; current
estimates state over four billion web pages and almost fifty million web sites
on the World Wide Web alone.[1] Although in it’s earliest stages some
artists saw the Net as little more than a telephone
directory it would benefit their career to be listed in,[2]
the Net has also provided the artist
with an unprecedented opportunity to be their own publisher, curator and
gallerist, as well as opening up a new creative space to explore. The term ‘Internet Art’ will be used throughout
this piece to describe those works which exist primarily in the
Internet. Although they may have
involved a gallery experience at some point, these works deal with and are
embedded in the specific possibilities that the Internet offers, and are
unthinkable without it.[3] Many of these specific possibilities have
contributed to a reappraisal of the artist/audience relationship and the notion
of authorship itself. Common features
of Internet Art, such as interactivity, collaboration and the opportunity to
remain anonymous behind a veil of multiple selves or avatars, have also led
many artists to question not only the nature of the art object but also that of
personal identity.
Interactivity and the birth of the ‘user’
Interactivity is one of the most noticeable features of much Internet
Art. The inherent structure of the
Internet allows the individual to remotely access and interact with digital
files and software. This activity
effectively turns what could have been seen as a passive consumer of artwork
into more of an active participant in its display, or even its creation. The term ‘user’ fits this activity better than ‘viewer’ or
‘reader’ and will be used throughout this piece to denote ‘the person who is
experiencing the art.’
Interactivity can come in different forms
and it is entirely possible for an artist to produce an interactive piece which
in no way challenges the traditional role of the artist as the sole progenitor
of their work, or the relationship between the artist and the audience. Two such pieces are Tina Laporta’s Distance (1999) and Nick Crowe’s Discrete
Packets (2000). The structure of Distance is simple,
a long sequence of still images, apparently taken from webcam footage, each
image accompanied by a fragment of text.
The text forms a poetic meditation on the experience of communicating in
online webcam chat rooms; “there is a sense of intimacy here…without touch…are
we getting closer or further apart?…we are artefacts in motion…becoming pixels
on the screen.” The piece has a set
sequence prescribed by the artist, user interaction being limited to bringing
forward the next instalment.
Discrete Packets is also a narrative, which, despite using the
language and iconography of emails, search engines and active links, remains
traditionally filmic in nature. The
piece tells the cautionary tale of Robert Taylor, a man searching for his daughter
over the Internet. When he finally discovers that she is working for an online
sex chat-line and contacts her she reads his greeting as a typical client
fantasy and replies ‘Big Kiss Daddy Big Kiss xxx.’ During a credit sequence Crowe declares this to be ‘A Movie by
Nick Crowe,’ and even provides a cast list.
In both pieces the amount of interaction for
the user is minimal, they are reduced to merely clicking for the next ‘scene’
to begin, rather like turning the pages of a book or jumping to the next
chapter of a DVD. Indeed, both pieces
could exist in those forms without significantly altering their inherent
structure, only the context in which the pieces are shown would change
(interestingly Discrete Packets consists of a Shockwave movie and a set
of HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, pages.
Once the user has downloaded the compressed files to their computer the
piece runs without a live Internet link).
Although they are both reflections on the instable nature of online
identity crucially the identity of the author remains sacrosanct. Indeed Nick Crowe archives his own pieces in
a gallery website entitled www.nickcrowe.net.
It could be argued that both artists are simply using the Internet as
source material for their work and as the means of its publication. Essentially the user ‘reads’ Distance
and watches Discrete Packets; in both cases the audience retains its
traditional place as the largely passive consumer of the work.
As the level of interaction
increases the relationship between the artist and the audience, and as a consequence
our notion of the role of the artist, begins to change. One of the basic features of websites and
their HTML building blocks is the ease with which any one page can be linked to
any other. This feature has been
utilised by writers to produce ‘hypertext,’ in which a ‘reader’ is given the
opportunity to navigate around a database of text elements, creating their own
narrative structure as they go.[4] Although not by any means a new development[5]
this type of experiment with narrative structure is particularly suited to the
Internet. A reader who has traditional
expectations of a text piece may find themselves confused and frustrated by
hypertext, particularly as pieces often deliberately eschew the notion of the
satisfactory ending. In most cases the
user creates their own ending simply by deciding to quit the piece.
Artists were quick to explore the creative
possibilities of hypertext and develop it into what has been termed
‘hypermedia,’ the linking of text, graphics, images, moving images and sounds. An early Internet Art piece that exploited
this potential was Olia Lialina’s My
Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), in which the user chooses how
to navigate around a series of frames containing images and text. The meaning of the piece appears to be
dependant to a small extent on how a particular user sequences these elements,
creating the possibility for seeing the ‘finished’ piece as a sort of
collaboration between Lialina and the user.
Indeed, it could be argued that the sequence the user creates is
uniquely theirs. Can we really say that being able to order the way in which
set elements appear on the screen is really a genuine act of collaboration or
appropriation for the user? In her
seminal work on hypertext, Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) Janet H. Murray
claims that hypertext has over-valued confusion, often leaving users blindly
clicking, lost in a sea of links, images, sounds and text.[6] It
is only in retrospect that users can see the effect that their actions have had
upon the piece; if they are playing a creative role in the construction of the
work they are effectively doing so blindfold.
The artist has dictated the rules of the game and the user is confined
to playing within those rules. Even
though the user is no longer a passive viewer the artist is still the ‘other’
who has defined the boundaries and provided the original elements.
Partly in recognition of these limitations Lialina
encouraged other Internet artists to create their own versions of My
Boyfriend Came Back from the War, using her original graphic and text
elements. The resulting pieces, by
artists such as the Belgian duo Jodi, Masha Boriskina and Vadim Epstein,
often used different media and software to reinterpret the same source
material. The elements that make up My
Boyfriend… are archived at Lialina’s website The Last Real Net Art
Museum; any Internet artist is free to download them and create their own
version. Although many of the
reinterpretations of the piece contain no interactive features (Boriskina’s, in
fact, is a rendering in gouache) this opening up of source material is a
powerful act of egalitarianism on the part of the artist. Lialina hopes that her vision of the
Internet art gallery, which allows for “the infinite reconfigurations of
information in an open system,”[7] will form the basis for online galleries in
the future.
The limitations to online collaboration
Creating a personal version of
Lialina’s My Boyfriend… relies on the user making a certain time commitment
and on the possession of specific art making skills. Other artists have sought contributions from users in a more
immediate and simpler form. The
practical limitations of these contributions are demonstrated by one of the
earliest celebrated works of Internet Art, Douglas Davis’s The World’s
First Collaborative Sentence (1994). The title of the piece raises an important
question; at what point in Internet Art does interaction become
collaboration? To collaborate means ‘to
work with another or others in order to realise a joint project.’ The word ‘interaction,’ despite originally
meaning ‘to act on or in close relation
with an other,’ has seen its meaning shift in recent times due to its
connection with the Internet and computer gaming. In computer
programming the term ‘interactive’ describes a
system or program which is designed to involve the user in the exchange of
information. The interaction with the user is usually conducted
through either a text-based or graphical interface; indeed, the interaction is
with a piece of software and not with the artist. In a collaborative project the two way flow of information may
result in significant changes to the structure of the piece, whereas in
interaction the user is to a large extent confined to playing within the rules
already lain down by the artist.
In The World’s First Collaborative
Sentence Davis invites users to add
words to a sentence that theoretically has no end (no one is allowed to add a
full stop, its primary rule). Many
years later the piece continues to run having incorporated increasingly sophisticated
contributions from thousands of users.
In an exuberant introductory page for the project Davis declares “come
closer…we are about to create together,” and also makes some exaggerated claims
for the effect that the Internet will have on the traditional artist/audience
relationship. Speaking directly to the
user Davis states that the Internet is the medium “where you take over
from me.” Ironically Davis then
goes on to name a group of people who he believes should take the credit for
the work, a list of technicians, designers and supporters who have helped to
create and maintain the site.[8]
Many early Internet artists were immediately
critical of this type of work and what they saw as it’s fraudulent claims
towards collaboration. Alexei Shulgin made the distinction that in most cases
‘interaction’ merely equalled the manipulation of the user. Shulgin has even wondered whether
manipulation is the only form of communication that the audience knows how to
appreciate; “they are (happy) following very few options given to them by an
artist: press left button, jump or sit.”
He has said “there is always an author with his name and his career
behind it, and he just seduces people to click buttons in his own name.” [9] Shulgin even went so far as paying contributors
to one of his pieces in an attempt to bring the inequalities of this
relationship to light.[10] Paul Virilio has stated that the Internet is
not the precursor of a new liberty but of social cybernetics; users are acting
as the feedback mechanism in a system that has it’s own autonomy.[11] In the case of Internet Art this is often an
autonomy designed and maintained by the artist or their technical supporters.
In a sense the idea behind the work becomes a machine for its production, [12]
effectively turning the user into a nameless, voiceless operator, reminiscent
of the hoards of worker drones servicing the behemoth machine in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This is demonstrated most effectively by
the Davis piece; where exactly is the work of art here, is it genuinely in the
collaborative text that has been produced?
The text in reality is essentially unreadable, containing, as it does, a
clash of conflicting contributions from thousands of users. The true work of art is Davis’s original
idea, it’s suitability to its medium and its precedence. Contributions to it merely help to increase
its size, prolong its life and add to its (and Davis’s) fame.[13]
In an attempt to create genuine
collaborative projects many early Internet artists were keen to build both virtual
and physical communities. The group of
artists who formed under the banner net.art (which included Lialina, Shulgin,
Natalie Bookchin and Heath Bunting) often shared programming code as well as
studios, and a crucial element in the groups coherence was face to face
meetings at conferences and international digital art fairs. Collaboration was from the outset something
which seemed to the group to be central to Internet Art practice. In 1999 Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin
produced a work entitled Introduction
to net.art (1994-1999) for the ZKM exhibition net_condition. The work,
which consisted of a set of statements carved into virtual marble, doubled as a
creative piece and as an instruction manual for Internet artists. The piece remains as close as Internet Art
has come to a comprehensive self definition, and contains, under the heading of
‘Specific Features of net.art,’ the declaration that Internet Art must embrace
“collaboration without consideration of appropriation of ideas.”[14] Joachim Blank in his piece What is net.art ;-)? echoes
this when he writes “a single artist may initiate a project but the final
result should lie beyond his control.”[15]
The construction of the ‘ghost-like’
avatar
One way in which these ideals have been put into practice is through
contributing to the construction of multiple selves and avatars. Investigations into the Internet and its
effect on society have identified a major paradox at its heart; the Net is seen
as both an agent of social alienation and the harbinger of a new sense of
global community. For this reason Jean
Baudrillard can describe the modern citizen as living a monadic existence
inside “an archaic, closed off cell,” connected to the outside world via the
telephone, the radio and television, and more recently the Internet.[16] Heavy Internet users are often portrayed in
the media as damaged individuals who have lost (or have never gained) the
ability to interact properly with others.
This monadic nature, however, masks the computer’s communicative
possibilities. This point is
exhaustively explored by American psychologist Sherry Turkle in her work on the
effects of the Internet on our sense of personal identity.[17] Turkle employs the metaphor of Microsoft’s
‘Windows’ to describe how email, Internet chat rooms and Multi-User Domains (or
MUDs) have afforded individuals with the opportunity to construct multiple
selves. Real Life, she explains, is
just another window, and it is often one that her subjects keep minimized in
favour of exploring Internet relationships. This environment, Turkle argues,
becomes a laboratory for the construction of self, and artists using the Net
have used personal identity in a similar way as just another creative material
to work with.
The primary act of self-creation on the
Internet is often the construction of an alternative persona, or avatar. The term ‘avatar’ has its origin in Hinduism
and refers to the ‘descent’ of a deity to Earth in an incarnate form. More than
being merely a mask or character role “an avatar aims to provide the displaced
self with channels for interaction.”[18] This opportunity for the wholesale
reinvention of identity is seen by society as being both liberating and
threatening by turns. Much recent
concern about the Internet has focused on the fear that it is being used by
paedophiles to groom children for abuse, often employing false identities or
avatars to gain their acceptance and trust.[19] John Carr, Internet consultant to the
children’s charity NCH, has suggested that an online element be added to UK
Home Secretary David Blunkett’s proposed identity card scheme, making it
difficult for anyone to contact another person on the Internet without giving
accurate personal details.[20]
It is against this highly charged background
that Internet artists have worked with the construction of Net avatars and
attempted to embrace the Utopian ideal of collaboration without the
appropriation of ideas. Josephine Bosma
has identified two types of avatars on the Net, the comic book hero and the
ghost, or drifter.[21] Bosma dismisses the hero as a flat stereotype but sees the ghost
as a more fluid creation, a being in a constant state of composition. Bosma makes reference to some of the most
famous ghost-like avatars in Internet Art, including Brandon, Keiko
Suzuki and Mouchette. Brandon, an event and web project
originated by Shu Lea Cheang, was a year long collaboration centred around the
life of a real person, the tragic Nebraska teenager Brandon Teena/Teena
Brandon, who was raped and murdered in 1993 when members of her community
discovered she was a female posing as a male.
In the piece, which was commissioned by the Guggenheim to be
incorporated into their Internet Art gallery, Cheang wished to explore both
online and offline spaces using avatars and multiple selves by allowing users
from all over the world to shape and author the project.
This was also the case with Keiko Suzuki,
although no one artist has ever come forward to claim to be the projects
originator. Keiko Suzuki was the
virtual ‘hostess’ and moderator of the influential Internet Art mailing list
7-11. The administration page of 7-11
allowed anyone to become Keiko Suzuki, which led to her being taken in
several different directions at once, being portrayed, for example, as both a
passive figure of pornography and as a feminist activist. Bosma herself conducted a text-chat
interview with Keiko Suzuki in 1997, although no hint was given as to
who was answering her questions. The
interview contained a great deal of playful banter concerning Suzuki’s supposed
appearance at a series of Internet Art conferences, where she claimed she had
kept a low profile because she didn’t feel important enough to introduce
herself formally. Many of the
participants at the events, in fact, wore ‘Keiko Suzuki’ name badges. Bosma states that over many months the
character eventually became “a near visualisation of the net psyche,” not an
individual consciousness, but the sum of many contributors efforts. Keiko
Suzuki is now virtually ‘dead,’ after an incident in which her
administration page was taken hostage by an art-terrorist. As Bosma declares this type of avatar is “by
and large a work of love…this life form can only stay alive if its creators
care about its continuity and shape.” [22]
It is interesting to compare these two
collaborative projects with a third, Last Entry: Bombay 1st
of July…, originated by Andrea Zapp in 1997. This project was inspired by a novel which Zapp describes as
almost a visionary metaphor for the role of identity on the Net-- Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando (1928). In Orlando
the eponymous hero changes gender and defies the aging process, allowing
him/her to embark on a series of adventures around the world and down several
centuries. Orlando can be described as
a flâneur, a self conscious, ironic observer, detached from the crowd and yet
able to influence its behaviour. The
notion of the flâneur in many ways fits easily with the concept of both the web
surfer and the avatar.[23] The projects collaborators, which have included Mark Amerika,
Alexandra Pohl and Annabelle Wick, have created their own pages for the project
in which they are free to take Orlando to any place in time and space. Contributions vary greatly in their style
and content, and Zapp describes the work as “an open and permanently growing
process of dialogue with the user.”[24]
These three projects, in which a group of
users contribute to the construction of an Internet avatar, raise similar
questions about authorship and the nature of the art object. In Last Entry: Bombay… each
contributor is named by Zapp and was presumably invited to produce work for the
piece. Despite being a collaborative
effort the work does not raise any challenge to the traditional artist/audience
relationship. Indeed, the dialogue with
the user Zapp refers to appears to be one conducted solely amongst the artists
who have contributed to the piece.
When questioned by Geert Lovink about her
working practices Shu Lea Cheang describes group projects as if they were
mainstream movies; “I take the credit as concept/direction in executing large
scale productions…I decide which writers, designers, programmers,
cinematographers…I collaborate with.”
She goes on to dismiss the romantic notion of the artist as loner and
sole operator.[25] It seems clear that she sees herself as the
director of a project which accepts contributions from other artists.
With Keiko Suzuki things are not so
clear-cut. Contributions to Keiko
Suzuki were often transient and slight, amounting in many cases to little
more than comments on 7-11’s bulletin boards.
The over-whelming majority of these contributions have gone undocumented
and can no longer be traced. The
resulting ghost-like nature of the avatar becomes so vague it is impossible to
fix any boundaries around what we could describe as ‘the work.’ Our inability to circumscribe the project,
to trace the creative intelligence behind it, or to identify any specific art
object seriously challenges our notion of Keiko Suzuki as being a work
of art at all. This inevitably leads
into a much larger argument, what exactly is an art object, and how relevant is
its definition to Internet Art? In her
unpublished thesis on site specific Internet Art Josephine Berry discusses this
question at a time when Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ seems more relevant than ever.[26]
As works of Internet Art have no specific aura (available, according to
Benjamin, only to the unique, distinguishable and immutable art object) she
believes that they are in danger of
“merely duplicating the banalised modalities of mass media in (their)
attempt to free (themselves) from the cultish myth of the artist as progenitor
of sublime realities.”[27] This is in many ways the fruition of the
modernist dream, the melting of life and art into one another. Indeed, in their Introduction to net.art
(1994-99), Bookchin and Shulgin cite ‘closing the gap between art and
everyday life’ as one of the key aims of Internet Art in general.[28]
Towards the anonymity of the artist
Some Internet artists have
deliberately used the difficulty in separating art from life in order to
challenge our notions of identity and authority. ®TMark’s infamous George W. Bush website is a prime example. The Internet Art activist group were able to
secure the ’gwbush.com’ domain name and
used it to create what appeared at first glance to be the US President’s
official website. By doing this ®TMark
were able to force the user to question their assumptions about Bush, his
personality and policies. The site caused enough confusion for Bush’s lawyers
to demand that it be closed. The
dispute was brought to wider notice when in an interview Bush demonstrated his
irritation with the site and declared “there ought to be limits to freedom.”[29]
The Nick Crowe piece Service
2000
(2000-2002) is similar in its intent and execution. Crowe created a whole series of spoof websites
for many of the most prestigious galleries in the UK, populating them with
kitsch clip art graphics, poor quality photographs and schlock music. Crowe was able to acquire many of the
galleries more obvious domain names, a sure sign of how slow curators and
collectors were to responding to the potential of the Internet and Internet
Art. The sites were convincing enough
for web designers to contact the galleries offering to improve their online
profiles. Heath Bunting, one of the
first major international stars of Internet Art, has identified hoaxing, faking
and rewriting as key activities to the medium.
Bunting writes “if you say: this is an artwork, you’ve blown your cover
immediately.”[30]
If we define an artist as someone engaged in
the production of art, what happens to that definition if we can no longer
distinguish between art and life? Service
2000 and gwbush.com are hoaxes, and part of the natural life of a
hoax is that at some point the perpetrators are revealed. The traditional role of the artist and the
relationship between them and the audience is merely delayed; both pieces are
now placed firmly placed within the canon of Internet Art. Did the contributors to Keiko Suzuki
consider themselves to be artists, however, and is it right for those
contributions to be solidified now into something approaching a recognisable
art object? In order to investigate
this point further it is enlightening to look at a similar project, one which
is still very much alive, Mouchette.
Mouchette is another avatar web project which seems, in the
light of the current atmosphere regarding paedophiles on the Internet, to be
all the more pertinent and disturbing.
The site is supposedly the personal website of an emotionally troubled
thirteen-year-old girl who is planning to commit suicide. Mouchette is in fact based on a novel
by Georges Bernanos (filmed in 1967 by Robert Bresson), in which a young girl
is sexually abused and contemplates killing herself. Who exactly is behind Mouchette is unclear, rumours are
often circulated in chat rooms and on it’s own pages, and further
investigations reveal a site which is growing all the time and appears to be
collaborative in nature. Indeed, users
are invited to become members of a Mouchette club, which gives them the
privilege of sending emails as Mouchette, answering her mail, and even
uploading their own HTML pages and artwork onto the site.
Mouchette continues to raise questions not only about the
‘author’ of the piece but also about what constitutes an artwork. For example, in one of the most vibrant
parts of the site, entitled Suicide Kit, Mouchette asks users to
write in with suggestions as to how she should commit suicide.[31] Although this was not the intention of the
originator(s) this has become a chat room for people with suicidal tendencies,
a virtual meeting place in which they can exchange advice and express support
for one another. The users of this
particular part of the site make little reference to Mouchette, either
its origins or its purpose, and generally seem disinterested in their virtual
surroundings. Some clearly believe that
Mouchette is a real thirteen-year-old girl, a precocious one with highly
developed web building skills.
The originator(s) of Mouchette state
categorically that they see the whole site as a work of Internet Art,[32] but does that mean that we should not
attempt to distinguish between its various pages on the grounds of content or
style? How can we compare, for example,
the home page of the site, with its garish colours and ambiguous whimpering
sounds, to the response pages of Suicide Kit, where one suicidal
seventeen-year-old girl writes “this web site is keeping me breathing.”[33] Theodor
Adorno has written that he is concerned that we may exchange “art’s elite
separateness for something worse—its undifferentiated continuity with the
‘barbarism’ of everyday life.”[34] This is particularly pertinent to Internet Art as the
hypertextual nature of the Net means that every website is theoretically just
one click away from any other.
Interestingly Robert Atkins has claimed that Mouchette was more
powerfully ambiguous before it found it’s current home in an on-line art
gallery context.[35]
Mouchette is undoubtedly a collaborative piece and
contributions to it can come from many different sources. Although the originator(s) do reserve the
right to reject pieces if they so wish there is evidence that the project has
been taken in directions not entirely to their liking. The identity of the originator(s) is not
known and most of the contributions to the site are also anonymous. In many ways the project fulfils the early
Utopian dream of the net.art group; an artist has started a project but the
outcome of the piece appears to be to some extent beyond their control.
Mouchette also achieves something which may never have been
its original intention; it destabilizes the relationship between the artist and
the audience. In her essay ‘Streams of consciousness: Info-narratives in
networked art,’ Christiane Paul writes that “in interactive net art, the
boundaries between self and virtual art object often appear to collapse, and
the art work is not necessarily perceived as an ‘otherness,’ because it is the
user/viewer who assembles or even creates it.”[36] It is interesting, in the light of this, to
consider what may eventually be the disenfranchised position of the
artist. The Mouchette site contains
a salutary tale for the artist who anonymously constructs this kind of
ghost-like, web persona. In a text
piece entitled ‘My Real Face,’ the originator, who describes himself as
a middle-aged man, details how he was forced ‘out’ of the virtual closet at an
Internet Art conference in Toronto.[37] He describes the resultant audience reaction
as ‘chilly’ and ‘aggressive,’ and was reduced to fielding questions about
whether he was a real child abuser. Even personal friends, who had not
previously realised his involvement with the piece, were vocal in their
dismay. He claims even though the
audience “had felt betrayed by my coming out as an alternative persona… I
(felt) even more betrayed that no-one supported my identity construction as an
artistic project.” There is no guarantee,
of course, that this event actually happened, or that the writer is in fact the
originator of the Mouchette site.
The writer ends the piece “you may ask yourself: who is writing?…How
many people witnessed these events?…Are you the art context?…Is this an
artwork?”
Post modernism and the death of the
author
This kind of experience may become
common in the future for artists who seek to claim both authorship and
ownership of similar web-based projects.
Artists may well find themselves to be as much the victim of, as well
agents for, a process which is endemic to post modern culture; the ongoing
deconstruction of authentic identity.
The Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek sees the mutability of digital
files as meaning there can be no effective closure of information, this has
come to typify for him the more generalised decline of symbolic authority
throughout Western society.[38] The Internet as a source of research
material has been a matter of concern for many academics as it is often, in
common with Internet Art, impossible to discern the true author of any
text. French social theorist Michel
Foucault has questioned the nature of authority itself, and how in particular
individuals can learn to speak with the voice of legitimate authority. Foucault sees the rise in the Eighteenth
century of the growing ethic of individualism as paradoxically leading not to
increased freedom but to increased authority.[39] Our dominant definitions of ‘author’ and
‘artist’ also coalesced during this period and are intrinsically linked to the
concept of the individual and the possibility of ownership.
It is this very concept of individual
authority which has come under attack, and has led post-structuralist theorists
to declare the death of the author. In
his essay of that name Roland Barthes asserts that writing is the place where
all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the author.[40] His description of a culture in which “ a
variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”[41]
seems to be a premonition of the Internet, a collaged medium where chat,
information, propaganda, gossip and opinion mix in such a way it is often
impossible to distinguish one from the other.
For Barthes the one place where all this information comes together as a
unified whole is in the mind of the reader.
This is the basis of a new type of literary criticism, one which does
not focus on the intentions or biographical leanings of the author, but instead
sees the text as being part of the fabric of the culture, understandable only
in relation to other texts. It could
be argued that the practice of ‘surfing the Net’ is a realisation of this
idea. The user or web surfer, as
indicated by the names of the two most popular web browsers, is both an
explorer and a navigator, finding their way around a sea of links, forging a
path that is uniquely meaningful to them.
The result of this is effectively an
autonomy shift from the author to the reader, or, in the case of Internet Art,
from the artist to the user. Christiane
Paul has describe hypermedia Internet Art as a form where “readers and writers
collaborate in the process of re-mapping textual, visual, kinetic and aural
components, not all of which have been provided by what used to be called the
author…the very notion of authorship itself becomes questionable.”
The post modernist destabilization of the
master narrative and authority has of course been explored in other art
movements, including the Surrealists, Conceptual art and the Fluxus group, but
the Internet appears to be a medium particularly suited to it. What Internet Art promises is, in another of
the iconic statements made by Bookchin and Shulgin, the practical death
of the author. Arguably this claim is
made good in pieces such as Mouchette and Keiko Suzuki, but at
what cost? In his piece ’Why Have
There Been No Great Net Artists?[42]’
Steve Dietz makes the point that the “idea of the lone, inspired creator
conflicts with the consistent practice of borrowing and collaboration” in
Internet Art. The more the Internet
artist challenges the ‘cultish myth’ of the sole, creative genius, the more
they risk marginalizing their own contribution to the production of art.
It is possible to see a reaction to this in
more recent developments. Early
Internet Art, due to technical restrictions and the newness of its form, was
usually text based and constructed with standard HTML pages. It was possible for a user to download whole
sites and alter their code, effectively making the work their own. A link can
be made here to what is known as the Open Source movement. Many of the original Internet pioneers had a
Utopian dream that all software would be freely available over the Net. In fact, not only would software be free but
also its code would be open for anyone to tamper with, or (as was the hope) to
adapt and improve. They argued that by
releasing the combined creative potential of theoretically millions of users
software could be improved at a rate impossible through normal business practices. The dream foundered on the rocks of
commercialisation, as big businesses, particularly Bill Gates’ Microsoft,
sought to capitalise on software sales.
Recently many Internet artists have begun to use commercial multi-media
software packages, such as the Macromedia’s Director and Flash, in the
production of their work. The resultant
publishing files, which can only be viewed through specific Shockwave and Flash
players, give the artist the option of keeping the piece as Closed Source. This means that the code of the piece cannot
be altered or even downloaded to the user’s computer (and hence the work cannot
‘live’ outside of its online context).
This in turn offers the artist the option to commercially capitalise on
their work by selling interactive pieces as CD ROMs, distinct from their
publication over the Internet.
Julian Stallabrass has stated that there is
still very little truly interactive work on the Internet and cites the
complexity of the necessary programming code as its major stumbling block.[43] It will be interesting to see whether, as
artists become more adept at using complicated software packages like Director
and Flash, they use this potential to champion collaboration without the
appropriation of ideas. If, as Roland
Barthes states, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
author, will the birth of the user necessitate the death of the artist?[44] Exasperated Internet pioneers have said that
they never dreamt that people would watch the Internet, it was always
envisioned, from its outset, to be a participatory medium. Despite this a large section of the
population, who we could term the ‘audience,’ seem quite satisfied to consume
Internet content without any determined desire to collaborate in its
production. It seems to matter little
to them that some commentators have seen this process as one in which they
become part of an art-making machine, which even forces their own bodies into a
shape which is determined by the computer set-up.[45]The
attachment society has to the notions of individualism, authorship and
ownership may be more resilient than expected, and may form a bulwark against
the ongoing fragmentation of personal identity heralded by the growth of the
Internet.
Gary
Owens
MA Fine Art Dissertation
University of Central Lancashire
December 2003
Footnotes
[1] A public organisation called the Internet Archive Project
is involved in a constant process of backing up the data on the Internet, for
up to date figures visit www.archive.org
[2] Blank, Joachim, ‘What is net.art ;-)?’
[3] Inke Arns, ‘A Particular Site-Specificity, or: Do I have a
good reason to be here?’
[4] The definition of hypertext is still under debate, see ‘So
what is hypertext anyway?’
[5] Many
experiments with branching narratives have taken place with the printed medium
over many centuries. These experiments
formed the basis of many of the earliest text based computer games,
particularly the ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ type, which had a great influence on
the resulting phenomenon of MUDs.
[6] Janet H. Murray
‘Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace’ (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1997),
p.133
[7] Olia Lialina, ‘My Boyfriend Came Back from the War’
[8] Douglas Davis quoted on the Lehman College Art Gallery page
‘Douglas Davis’
[9] Both quotes from
an interview with Tilman Baumgärtel in the article ‘Art on the
Internet—The Rough Remix,’ Josephine Bosma (editor) ‘Readme! Filtered by
nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge’ (Autonomedia: Brooklyn, 1999)
[10] This piece, a competition involving form-filling, has now
unfortunately expired
[11] Quoted in Julian
Stallabrass, ‘Internet Art: The Clash of Culture and Commerce’
(Tate Publishing: London, 2003), p. 64
[12] An idea first put forward by Sol Le Witt, cited in Lucy
Lippard, ‘Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object’ (MIT: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997)
[13] It should be said that Davis himself adamantly denies that
the text is unreadable, see his interview with Tilman Baumgärtel
[14] Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin, ‘Introduction to
net.art (1994-1999)’
[15] Joachim Blank, ‘What is net.art ;-)?’
[16] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication,’ (Semiotext: Brooklyn, 1988), p.18
[17] Turkle’s major
work to date is ‘Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet’ (Touchstone: New York, 1995)
[18] Lily Diaz, ‘Jumping
over the edge: consciousness and culture, the self and Cyberspace,’ in Roy
Ascott (editor), ‘Reframing Consciousness: Art, mind and technology’
(Intellect Books: Portland, Oregon, 1999)
[19] Rachel
O’Connell, director of the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of
Central Lancashire, has published figures stating that one in five children in
the UK regularly use chat-rooms, and that a quarter of them have received
requests to meet face to face. In October
2003 MSN shut down many of their worldwide chat rooms stating that it was due
in part to an “increase in unsolicited and inappropriate material, particularly
with regards to children.” See MSN, ‘MSN Chat has closed in the UK’
[20] Quoted in ‘An End to Chat,’ an online Guardian
article by Neil McIntosh
[21] Josephine Bosma, ‘Keiko Suzuki and Mouchette’
[22] All quotations from Josephine Bosma, ‘Interview with
Keiko Suzuki’
[23] For a fascinating analysis of the role of the flâneur in Cyberspace see Lucy, ‘The MOO as the home of the post
modern flaneur’
[24] Andrea Zapp, ‘”Last Entry: Bombay, 1st of
July…” A travel log through time, space and identity’
[25] See her Interview with Geert Lovink 2000
[26] Josephine Berry, ‘‘The Thematics of Site Specific Art on
the Internet’ (PhD thesis,
University of Manchester, 2001, unpublished)
[27] Ibid., p.12
[28] Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin, ‘Introduction to
net.art (1994-1999)’
[29] Reproduced on an ®TMark website
(http://www.rtmark.com/bush.html)
[30] Ljubljana
interview with Heath Bunting, quoted in Julian Stallabrass ‘Internet Art:
The Clash of Culture and Commerce’
(Tate Publishing: London, 2003) p. 134
[31] Mouchette site, http://mouchette.org/suicide/answers.php3
[32] See the interview I’ve conducted with Mouchette,
appendix one.
[33] Contributor Leanne Poole, 23rd October 2003
[34] Quoted in ‘The Thematics of Site-Specific Art on the Net,’
Josephine Berry, p.12
[35] Robert Atkins, ‘State of the (on-line) Art.(art on the
World Wide Web)’
[36] Christiane Paul,
‘Streams of consciousness: Info narratives in network art,’ in Roy
Ascott (editor) ‘Reframing Consciousness: Art, mind and technology’
(Intellect Books: Portland, Oregon, 1999), p.161
[37] Linked to from the Mouchette site,
http://drivedrive.com/mouchette/power_plant.html
[38] Quoted in Josephine Bosma, ‘The Thematics of Site
Specific Art on the Internet’,’ p.16
[39] See in particular ‘Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,’
Michel Foucault, translated by Alan Sheridan (Vintage: New York, 1977)
[40] Roland Barthes, ‘The
Death of the Author,’ in ‘Image Music Text,’ (Fontana Press: London,
1977), pp. 142-148
[41] Ibid., p.146
[42] Quoted in Julian Stallabrass, ‘Internet Art: The Clash
of Culture and Commerce’ (Tate
Publishing: London, 2003), p.143
[43] Julian
Stallabrass, ‘Internet Art: The Clash of Culture and Commerce’ (Tate Publishing: London, 2003), p.67
[44] Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ essay in ‘Image
Music Text,’ (Fontana Press: London, 1977), p.148
[45] Christiane Paul,
‘Streams of consciousness: Info narratives in networked art’ in Roy
Ascott (editor), ‘Reframing Consciousness: Art, mind and technology’
(Intellect Books: Portland, Oregon, 1999), p.162
