dd:
In your keynote address at the 
DAC
2000
"Reconfiguring the Author: The Virtual Artist in Cyberspace"
you discussed the tensions between text and image in digital
art and the model of the individual author as genius. How do
you see the impact of graphic design on the web writing
process? How will the fact that web art is based on
technology change authorship?
MA: Authorship is not
necessarily disappearing, as in all of these "death of the
author" scenarios we keep hearing about. Rather, it is being
reconfigured into a more fluid, oftentimes collaborative,
networking experience. Take my PHON:E:ME project for
instance. Sure, I came up with the
initial concepts and negotiated the funding and exhibition
context for its eventual display, but the work itself was
collectively-generated by both an internationally networked
team of artists, DJs, writers, designers, programmers and
curators who produced the work as well as a select
group of
artist-writers-theorists whose work got sampled into the
project's Big Remix.
The idea was to use
available technology in a way that would challenge various
forms of narrative construction. For example, let's take the
notion of "the author's voice." I am uncomfortable with this
phrase. I remember my friend, the late-great novelist Kathy
Acker, saying, in a radio dialogue
she and I were part of, that
she has no voice, that she just "steals shit." In her
own straightforward way, Acker was really tapping into what
so much work of the last 100 years is about --
appropriating, remixing, sampling, citing, mirroring,
virtually republishing, etc. And in this way,
I wanted to create a work that
was fighting against notions of originality, genius,
intellectual property and all of the things that bind one
(an author and a reader) to a book and the political economy
of meaning that we associate with such a tangible object. Of
course, I had already begun investigating
these issues in both GRAMMATRON and my novels, even
though the latter were
obviously bound by the slave-logic of the book.
So with PHON:E:ME, I started
developing relationships with artists from various
backgrounds and disciplines and I continued my
investigations reconfiguring the writing practice into
something else altogether different, an expanded concept of
writing, and in so doing envisioned an mp3 concept album
about concept art, where the author function becomes
something more in tune with network conduction. The Author
as Network Conductor has many implications and
possibilities, which I won't get into here now, but the
change is significant because it means that writers
must make (h)activist
cultural production a major part of their practice. I think
this gets overlooked by too many intellectuals who are
looking for the optimum comfort-zone for their theoretical
musings and, needless to say, creates discomfort for many
traditional writers who are bound by the book, intellectual
property rights, and the big mainstream publishers and their
publicity machines.
The first step in
problematizing this notion of "the author's voice" was to
digitally record my voice saying all of the phonemes in the
English language. These digital recordings then became
source-material for DJs to experiment with in their unique
studio environments, taking what was supposedly the voice of
the author, his utterances, the basic sound units that form
sensible language, and manipulate them for their own (DJ)
uses. I also recorded some spoken word rants that were
themselves surf-sampled-and-manipulated language riffs taken
from other sources. The two DJs involved in the project,
Erik Belgum (Minneapolis) and Brendan Palmer (Sydney), were
excellent collaborators and, especially with Belgum, who
came up with the idea of creating a unique
speech-synthesizer that would essentially provide the
backbone or scaffolding for the emerging phonemic
architecture, I was all-too-happy to let them do with my
so-called voice whatever they wanted. That was liberating to
me!
Then there was the creation
of the hyper:liner:notes which accompanied and soon
became a central feature of PHON:E:ME. These textual
patterns that emerged and became the hyper:liner:notes were
also heavily manipulated. You can see them as hypermediated
text chunks that then become randomized within a Shockwave
interface. In fact, we tried to limit the so-called
"hypertextual" element as much as we could,
reconceptualizing online narrative space as an anti-link
(and thus anti-consumer) practice. We became more interested
in what we started calling "openings," "wandings,"
"conducting," etc. The entire design of the site, directed
by L.A. designer Anne Burdick with incredible artistic and
programming collaboration from Cam Merton in Perth and Tom
Bland in San Francisco, was -- as far as I am concerned --
part of the story. The animation, the color scheme, the use
of typography, the hidden codes, and overall visual metaphor
of the interface we developed for the project, all
contribute to how the story works, or more importantly how
the story works against conventional narrative structure and
behavior.
In fact, the more I think
about it, narrative and authorship, don't even feel like the
right terms here. It feels more like process-oriented
network art that has a story to it, an ongoing ungoing
story, we might say, although this should not be
misconstrued with the sort of anything-goes,
anyone-can-contribute, pseudo-utopian ideal of the
Network as Author, since we all
know that most of the projects that grow out of that false
logic are, for the most part, uninteresting experiments in
what ends up being chat-discussions camouflaged as
fictitious discourses procured by hapless
participants.
Still, though, coming to
terms with language and meaning in this new media context is
beginning to feel useless. For example, the term ebook. I
don't like that term at all, and yet, if I think of
PHON:E:ME as a heavily manipulated ebook -- well, when
measured against the general usage of that term, i.e.
repurposing book content in electronic format -- all of a
sudden, it feels very far removed from old modes of cultural
production like conventional book publishing, especially if
you now think of an ebook as an mp3 concept album that is
being exhibited as Internet art in traveling shows like the
Walker Art Center's "Let's Entertain" or big industry shows
like SIGGRAPH 2000.
dd:
One of your considerations at DAC 2000 was the blurring of
the lines between art, entertainment and what the corporate
media industry likes to call content. How do you see the
future of digital art? What role will 'Avant-Garde
Capitalism', as you term it in an essay, play in this
setting?
MA: Digital art
distributed or taking place on the Internet can play a more
(h)activist or interventionist role in the evolution of this
new medium. The time it takes to get online and locate a
unique cluster of interlinked, distributed communities
(networked-audiences, online markets) is much less than what
we had to deal with when developing cultural productions
within the confines of older paradigms. One of the
interesting things going on right at this moment is that the
gold rush mentality that came and now went with all of the
hype surrounding e-commerce has proven to many of us
that the effects this
medium will have on our international culture is very hard
to track right now.
I was recently on a panel
with the President of CNN, the former President of NBC and a
few others, and when the TV correspondent who was moderating
asked us all what we expect to see in 10 years, I
deliberately suggested that
"perhaps 10 years from now we will have found out that the
network cannot be properly commodified by the big corporate
enterprises and that there will be this move back to using
the new media technology as a way to create alternative
forms of art and communication." Now, some may immediately
say "where is Amerika's head? he must be dreaming..." --
that I don't see the way the web has become overly
commercialized. But even my students too are now beginning
to create their own (h)activist Internet art practice,
wherein we see all of this slick corporate net media as just
more source-material, more source-code, to
surf-sample-manipulate.
The main part of this
(h)activist strategy is to blur the lines between fiction
and faction, the Truth and the truth, content and
advertising. This last blurring I mention, the one
between content and
advertising, is perhaps the most salient to me now because
we are essentially playing the same game that the big corpo
sites are playing. That is to say, many net artists are
using their ingenuity to become serious players in the
attantion-economy, especially as it exists on the
WWW.
If, for example, Phillip
Morris wants to distort the truth by creating web content
that basically lies about their mission and, in so doing,
falsely advertises how responsible they are as a
multi-national corporation, then we can easily access that
data and manipulate it to our own ends to tell a different
story -- a kind of Phillip Morris remix that then gets
distributed or channeled to our own elaborately networked
communities -- although our version is fictional too, albeit
a more robust, intellectually-provocative fiction. And we
can not only get that out into the public domain in the time
it takes to hit the Put button in our ftp program, we can
also unleash an online media campaign that may increase the
amount of traffic we get to our site. This isn't to say that
the major corporations are not aware of these parallel
strategies. The President of CNN came up to me after our
panel and told me that he totally understands our strategy
and that we essentially are delivering to our audience
our version of the
Truth, our version of history-in-the-making, the one we as
Internet artist's are making up as we go along. Of course,
we pose no threat to CNN or other mainstream news
organizations, at least not yet, but our ability to actively
"version" the (hi)stories of our contemporary lives on the
Net changes things significantly. Artists/writers want a
piece of the "reality-programming" action
too.
dd:
Alt-X and trAce
have organized an International Hypertext Competition in
1998. In 2000 it is called Competition
for New Media Writing.
Have we already passed the Golden Age of Literary Hypertext,
as Robert Coover has complained in his essay early 2000? The
term New Media Writing does not refer to a specific
structure of writing but to everything what can be done in
the digital realm. What is this competition looking for and
how is it going to judge who deserves the
£1000?
MA: Good question. We
are "feeling our way" through the cultural upheavals that
are taking place in and around the evolving network culture,
and have decided to use this competition as an event that
celebrates an expanded concept of writing in online culture.
New media writing could still be
hypertext, but it could also be
animated typography or experimental/poetic imagetext, like
one of our winners last time, Jenny Rice's project called
Rice. A good example of what I mean by New Media Writing can
be found at the trAce incubation site by clicking on the
"Salon Exhibitors." There you will see a summer show I
curated entitled "ink.ubation" -- there is a wide range of
work there that I contextualize in my curatorial statement
"What in the World Wide Web is Happening to Writing?" As I
mention there, much of the excitement being generated around
online writing has to do with our ability as writers to use
the net as a medium to
1) experiment with formal
issues that have been exhausted in book form,
2) pioneer new modes of cultural production and
distribution,
3) problematize the individual Author-As-Genius model by way
of collaborative authoring networks that sustain
non-hierarchical group production and
teamwork.
I find a lot of this work
infectious, like some kind of language virus I want to
continue spreading...
dd: I
look forward to reading the winner of this year's
competition and all the new project which will appear in the
future. Thank you very much for the interview.
your
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