AND-Festival, Liverpool/UK:
Manifestations of Here and Now | Realtime in the Exhibition Space

… as a moment in a continuum, as a continuity of a procedure, as a sequence of events: in the present the phenomenon of time – leaving traces on its way from the past to the future – can’t be considered without reflecting upon the phenomenon of space. If for a long period, time was understood as “the province of the poet” [1] and space as “the province of the painter” [2], nowadays, with the entrance of digital media into the arts, a separation into a world of one-after-another and a world of side-by-side is not sustainable anymore. The broad field of the so called New Media Arts offers the possibility to combine the practices of visual arts with theatre, literature and music to interdisciplinary genres such as interactive installations, Software Art, computer games, generative and last but not least Internet-based Art.

However, the multifaceted arrangements of Internet-based Art that can be produced, perceived, disseminated and exhibited in realtime and in its own medium, do not simply ‚happen’ in a vacuum. On the one hand, they are strongly referred to art historical movements such as Fluxus, the Situationist International and Conceptual Art which can be defined as the source of what nowadays is understood as the “dematerialization of the art object” [3]. On the other hand, the fluidity and variability inherent to Internet-based Art are always built upon concrete structures and a dialogical space/time-relation with the real world: “Time online takes the form of a complex, congealed space, a space that is both experimental and physical. The Net has its own soft and hard space of sites and links, and of servers, wires, satellite and radio links, the two being intimitately conjoined.” [4] Thus, the structural requirements of the medium are jointly responsible for the fact, that “with Internet art, time comes in fits and starts.” [5] The Internet allows its users to define the length of stay with an artwork and to determine where to start and where to end with the perception, as well as the capacities of the computer force the users to accomodate themselves with the speed of its arithmetic operations.

If curators abstain from installing computers with Internet-access in the exhibition space with the aim to create settings in which the artworks can be perceived the same way they can be perceived anytime and anywhere at the private computer, it is necessary to go deeply into the matter of the constantly changing relation between the artwork and its viewers. However, the here and now of perception in the exhibition space can only take place in similarly fluent ways as Internet-based Art continuously produces fluent forms of perception. The spatial configurations of those parameters of perception mainly live on the exhibition- and context-oriented variability, which enables “a fluent transition between the different manifestations a ‘virtual object’ can take”. [6] Even more than to be responsive to the ‚needs’ of the artwork and thereby to focus paradigmatically on its technological strings, the entire perceptive situation takes centre stage in defining the exhibition setting. Finally, the impact and effect Internet-based Art has on its viewers serves as the starting point for the re-construction of experiences in the exhibition.

Exhibition displays which do not loose sight of the original artwork, but create new possibilities for viewers to step into spatial and temporal relation with it, behave “just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point”. [7] Thus, the spatial re-configurations of Internet-based art are translations, that go back to the original and fix its process-related characteristics with the aim to develop their own ‚lives’ in the exhibition space. In this regard, the task of the curator is of course not the creation of new artworks, but to objectify and reify a special moment in the perception of art as a temporarily limited “trace” [8] in the material world. This form of re-materialisation of Internet-based Art in the real space – whether this means the White Cube as a spatial concept of museums, whether this means the trading centres of commercial galleries or alternative spaces – allows to “transform perceptible fragments of this world into interpretative constructs, which bear witness to what normally stays invisible and withdrawn.” [9] A visualisation of transparent procedures – the processes inherent to the works as well as to the perception of Internet-based Art – is configured by the fact that the perception of art never can be finalised, as “we never get along with the works of art. One can only turn away and interrupt the experience”. [10] The relation between the artwork and the viewers can’t be separated from the space/time-continuum of art. On the contrary, this continuum has to be the main starting point for the development of appropriate exhibition displays for Internet-based art – as a moment in a continuum, as a continuity of a procedure, as a sequence of events…
-

lastwishes (2007) / lastwishes materialized (2007-2008)
by carlos katastrofsky

Mailing lists are popular tools to exchange information and opinions among two or more participants, to make this dialogical exchange accessible to a broader public, as well as to archive it for the future. If users communicate via such e-mail-distributors they have got the possibility to send messages, manifestos, complaints, poems – or whatever form the text takes – to co-subscribers and to receive similar material. But, if one decides to subscribe to carlos katastrofsky’s mailing list lastwishes (2007) each word sent to the list has to be reflected upon well before, as with the first use of the send-button the owner’s e-mail-address is automatically unsubscribed. Listening without speaking and if speaking, then only once – this way communication can only work, if something significant is said, irrelevant chatting or discussing becomes impossible.

After its first publication on the Lisbon-based platform LX 2.0 and a presentation at the commercial gallery Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea the mailingslist was adapted as a printer-installation by carlos katastrofsky for the exhibition space of the MAK Contemporary Art Tower in Vienna. While in this second version entitled lastwishes materialized (2007-2008) an object with direct access to the Internet examines the mailing list for new messages each ten minutes, endless paper is lead through the closed inner part of a wooden box. If a subscriber decides to send a significant message, it is immediately printed. If nothing happens on the list, the box only prints a laconic “No communication on this channel”. In “lastwishes materialized” the artist deals with the different levels of time of online-communication and transfers them into spatial structures. He visualises dialogicity – which means the one-after-another of single messages – by filling the exhibition space with endless paper and at the same time – similar to a computer and software – he processes invisible operations in the inner of the wooden ‚black box’ in realtime.
-

nam shub web (2007) / nam shub web installation (2005-2008)
by Jörg Piringer

According to Neal Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash”, the ancient Sumerian Nam Shub of Enki was a neuro-linguistic hack aimed against the standardisation and unification of society and human life through verbal rules and laws. As described by Jörg Piringer, nam shub web (2007) can be seen as a computer-linguistic hack targeted against a global unified culture and empire. The artwork is a website processor which takes the textual content of external websites and applies user defined rules to generate visual poetry. These rules consist of operations that change the text or modify its visual appearance. Each set of rules can be stored and published for others to view and alter. However, “nam shub web” does not store any actual content, it only records commands of how to alter the external websites. In case there is a dynamic website as the source the visual and textual results change with the dynamic content.

This artwork exists in four different versions: nam shub (2007, with precursors from 2003), a program designed as a tool for both creators and performers of text and language oriented arts, which can be seen as a combination of a modular live performance system like Pure Data and a text processor; “nam shub web” (2007), a web-interface and text-processor which can be interacted with online; “nam shub mini” (2008) which is a limited small branch of the original software; and nam shub web, installation (2005-2008) which was shown in the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana in Slovenia in spring 2008. In this installation a printer with Internet-access was placed at the ceiling of the gallery. During the whole exhibition period this installation endlessly re-produced hard copies of the textual content of dynamic websites which have been stored online by users before. Over time, the floor of the gallery was covered with a high amount of single sheets of paper. In the exhibition neither the website nor the text processor where shown. The interactive part of the artwork was completely excluded, but, it was worked out in a way that focused on one of the main characteristics of this work: the temporal overflow of information as well as the fluidity and variability of the text-based characteristics of Internet-based Art.
-

Apartment (2001)
by Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak

As viewers of Martin Wattenberg’s and Marek Walczak’s interaktive website Apartment (2001) type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a twodimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer’s words, reorganising them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships. Each apartment is translated into a navigable 3-D dwelling, so contrasting between abstract plans/texts and experiential images/sounds. “Apartment” is inspired by the idea of the memory palace. In a mnemonic technique, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. (http://www.p0es1s.net)

“Apartment” is a classic of Internet-based Art and was already shown several times in renowned locations as Ars Electronica (2001) or the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001) and in different presentational modes as single- or two-user-interface. In the exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana in Slovenia (2008) the artwork was presented as a simple screening. As nowadays, the 3D-components of the artwork do not work anymore, this part was completely set aside compared to former presentations. However, to emphasise the architectural characteristics of the artwork, the website was not projected onto a wall or any other object at eye level, but on a surface which floated some centimetres above the floor of the gallery. The visitors of the exhibition had the possibility to interact with the artwork with a keyboard and a mouse, to watch others interacting with it and – without any personal involvement – to watch the traces of former interactions and thereby to find their own way through the memory palace.
-

Hottest to Coldest (2008)
by Aleksandra Domanovic

Kuwait City, Riyadh, Tripoli, Hargeisa, Erbil, Addis Ababa, Dushanbe, Asmara, Manama, Abu Dhabi, Tashkent, Doha, Tehran, Ashgabat… A simple website shows a list of names of worldwide cities in black typography, the classification criteria of which are only made accessible by reading the address of this so called single-serving-site. According to actual air temperatures the order of the displayed cities in Aleksandra Domanovic’s Hottest to Coldest (2008) changes continuously from minute to minute, from day to day, from season to season and finally from year to year. Depending on the speed and the bandwidth of the available Internet-access the artist triggers in relatively short intervals data from over two hundred weather-stations via newsfeed and juxtaposes them – automatically – to constantly changing textual formations and combinations.

Up to now, “Hottest to Coldest” was shown twice as a screening in the exhibition space, once at Galerija P74 in Ljubljana (2008) and once at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York (2009). The overdimensioned projection of the screen offers – exactly as the website does – no possibilities to interact with, but forces the viewers to stay in front of the artwork and to contemplate. However, the time of contemplation is defined by the viewers. If the attention span and the patience are not long enough, the viewers can only perceive one single textual formation but do not realise the variability of the artwork. Aleksandra Domanovic mainly follows the idea of re-ordering over and over again information about air temperature in different locations on the globe with the aim to connect the real space with the virtual space: If the weather circumstances in the real world change, the order of the cities in the virtual space change and accordingly the way of experiencing the artwork in the exhibition space changes, too.
-

A la recherche du temps perdu (2005)
by Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic

From the analogue to the digital and back again: in the performance A la recherche du temps perdu (2005) the artists Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djodjevic take the executability of Internet-based code literally by reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust’s literary œuvre. For these purposes the original text is first separated into its individual elements of letters and characters which in turn are decoded into the ASCII-code, a code underlying digital text processing. Starting from this version the text it is then re-coded into zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is the CPU (Central Processing Unit) who interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letters from the prepared sheets of paper and finally turns them over to Display, the fourth person who sticks them onto the wall panel. After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed. Each letter is represented by an individual sequence of signs, consisting of zeros and ones. The performance is situated in an laboratory setting and attempts to find beauty inside the microstructures of the digital. Only during the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.

Published under a GNU General Public License, the performance “A la recherche du temps perdu” was shown in its ‚original’ form in different locations as Berlin (2005), London and Vienna (both 2006) and with different participants. In the presentation at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana (2008) in Slovenia an edited video-documentation of the performance, provided by the artists, was shown in the exhibition space. According to the freely accessible manual of the performance and with the aim to display the performance context, the original laboratory setting was re-constructed in the exhibition space with a working table, a simple chair and a white laboratory coat. To create the possibility for visitors to re-stage the performance anywhere and anytime, additionally, the manual of the performance was printed and provided as a take-away-handout.
-

References:
[1] Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Mit beiläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte, Projekt Gutenberg, http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=5&xid=1617&kapitel=1 (English translation found online: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$5241)
[2] ibid.
[3] Lippard, Lucy R: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972…, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2001
[4] Stallabrass, Julian: Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing, London, 2003, p. 48
[5] ibid., p. 40
[6] Paul, Christiane: Challenges for a Ubiquitous Museum. From the White Cube to the Black Box and Beyond, in: Paul, Christiane (ed.): New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2008, p. 53-75 (p. 56)
[7] Benjamin, Walter: The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, in: Venuti, Lawrence (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader”, Second Edition, New York: Routledge, 2004, p.75-83 (p. 80)
[8] Krämer, Sybille et al (ed.): Spur. Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 2007
[9] Krämer, Sybille: Was also ist eine Spur? Und worin besteht ihre epistemologische Rolle? Eine Bestandsaufnahme, in: Krämer, Sybille et al (ed.): Spur. Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 2007, p. 11-33 (p. 19) (German original version: “wahrnehmbare Bruchstücke dieser Welt in Interpretationskonstrukte verwandeln, die Zeugnis von dem ablegen, was uns unsichtbar und entzogen bleibt.”, translated by CONT3XT.NET)
[10] Rebentisch, Juliane: Zur Aktualität ästhetischer Autonomie. Juliane Rebentisch im Gespräch mit Loretta Fahrenholz und Hans-Christian Lotz, in: Huber, Tobias und Steinweg, Marcus (ed.): Inästhetik. Theses on Contemporary Art, Diaphanes, Zürich/Berlin, 2008, p. 103-118 (p. 106) (German original version: “mit den Werken der Kunst werden wir nie fertig. Man kann sich nur wegdrehen, die Erfahrung abbrechen.”, translated by CONT3XT.NET)