Round Table
Ryszard Dabek
i.j.oog
dan zero
I.K.Bonset
The following discussion took place on January 26 (Australia Day) 1997.
We understand fiction to operate.
Participants
i.j.oog
is a poet and story teller who publishes his work exclusively through use
of hypertext and the World Wide Web. He currently resides in Brussels
as a guest of the Belgium National
Literature Board. He was the only writer officially invited to be an
observer at the Dutroux
enquiry.
dan zero is a self described
digital collagist. His Angelus
Novus has been shown nationally internationally - most recently at the
ICA in London
and at the ISEA conference
in Montreal, Canada.
He is currently developing a new interactive artwork which has the working
title The Sad
Men.
I.K. Bonset has enjoyed a long and varied
artistic career, spending time in Europe, the United States, Africa and
Australia. His work, deeply rooted in the anti-strategies of refusal and
absurdity, is represented in a number a major international collections.
A definitive retrospective is currently being prepared by the Oslo Museum
of Modern Art for summer 1999.
Ryszard Dabek
is an artist and writer who lives in Sydney, he is currently researching
and writing a biographical history of the life and work of I K Bonset.
Dabek: I would like to start this conversation by putting to the
table the notion of crisis. Given the different practices of the panel members
I would find it interesting to hear your views on this relationship between
crisis and interaction, and in particular the importance of technology in
such developments.
Marinus van Reymerswaele
The Tax Gatherer and his Wife
1538
Panel, 67 x 103 cm
München, Alte Pinakothek
zero: Well of course Benjamin
pointed out 60 years ago that every art form from the Greeks on and perhaps
even earlier, goes through stages in which effects are aspired to which
are possible only by means of radical change in technology. An example would
be that of the Dutch painters
in the 16th century working with a camera obscura being in effect aspiring
photographers. I am inclined to suspect that modernism in its entirety and
particularly its postmodernist manifestation... its obsession with identity
and language... its various attempts to deny and/or undermine the object
and the status of the art work may be viewed as such. Different attempts
at interactivity have been around since Duchamp's
bicycle... (inaudible)... one of the most misunderstood works in the entire
history of art...
oog: (laughing) when you see poor old Rauschenberg's
early 60s pieces in the Ludwig
Museum in Cologne which include instructions like ''open the box'' or
''rearrange the objects'' there is a dirty great big official notice next
to them saying ''verboten die objekten an zu raken'' and if you do wait
around until the attendant has gone for a leak and you try and open the
box it has been glued shut...
Bonset: isn't inaction also a form of interactivity...?
zero: yes well those museums paid a lot of money for those works
and now they are watching them disintegrate in front of their eyes... I
mean Rauschenberg was not exactly preoccupied with the archival soundness
of his materials. But in my own case I was thinking more of how a medium
like photography, or video or even film will historically become seen as
a precursor to computer based art. For example the idea of a loop in a video
installation where the audience becomes involved to the extent that they
walk in and out as they please and what they see and hear is dependent on
the timing of that it is not a static thing... it is not a linear thing...
oog: also in terms of the text, we have witnessed the rise and fall
of the novel... and technology by means of hypertext affords the possibility
of engaging with a text in a totally different way... here you can escape
from the linearity of a text and thus from traditional story telling...
you can move in and out of one story and into another.... and from a poem
into a novel.... there are many different connections possible all of a
sudden and not just within one writer's oeuvre either.... even without considering
hypertext, and we are starting to see hypertext novels and poetry... in
terms of publishing -that is the making public of the text - to me the internet
has become crucial... I was always unsure... even afraid... of committing
my words to print... it is too definite... it requires the text to be finished
in some way... you know there it is black and white... it is too much like
inscribing it in stone... I am more interested in something that is dynamic
and I am always changing my work anyway... some of my poetry and prose which
is on the net now has been around for years but has changed radically a
number of times... or even if it is just exchanging one word for another
like I suddenly think of the right word in a poem I wrote years ago and
I pity the writers who for millennia have had to commit their work to print
and thought of a better line or worked out a more effective plot years later...
I mean imagine if Shakespeare
could have had an internet site...
zero: everyone is becoming rather tired of starry-eyed technophile
babble...
(Bonset mutters something about a
new renaissance)
zero: ...but I definitely think a higher quality art... a more resolved
art is possible because of the digital medium and the internet... it allows
artists and writers and musicians to work more dynamically and contrary
to popular belief to retain more control of their work in that they are
able to change it at any time...
Dabek: I find it interesting that both you zero and oog have chosen
to illustrate your positions by evoking the practices of past artists- Duchamp
& Rauschenberg: both of who unarguably, were concerned with notions
of interaction. But whereas you both seem to be arguing for a new "approach"
to the artwork inextricably woven to technological advancement, both Duchamp
& Rauschenberg's practices were far less specific in their agendas.
The perceptual/conceptual shifts their work engendered, while being obviously
applicable to new media works, resonate just as strongly when applied to
easel painting. It seems that for them interaction was more a question of
engagement rather than simply activity. I cannot help but here a ring of
truth in I.K Bonset's assertion that inaction is also a form of interactivity.
Bonset: (laughing) in Dutch
the word for 'easel' and 'donkey' are the same...
oog: I was just making the point that poor old Rauschenberg...
zero: I would say Duchamp's work after 1913 was in the first place
an undermining or a denial... of easel painting...
Dabek: For sure, but I think artists like Buren, Richter and even
Klein have all borrowed to some degree from Duchamp and in doing so, have
in certain ways expanded painting. By that I mean that they have encouraged
the viewer to reconsider the artwork and how they interact with it.
oog: I am getting out of my depth here but didn't Duchamp make the
point that the audience's act of viewing is every bit as creative as the
artist's act of making ?
zero: correct... but you should have seen the face of the attendant
in the Pompidou when I walked up to
Bicycle and spun the wheel around really hard... I had never seen it like
that but it just seems to be crying out for it... but the interactivity
is as it were hidden... and in relation to this I was far happier with the
installation of Angelus Novus with a touch screen rather than with this
pregnant looking mouse on a fucking mouse pad... but then people were saying
shouldn't you put up a sign saying 'please touch the screen' which was missing
the point entirely... and people went through who told me they loved the
work but never thought of touching the screen...
oog: I have the same problem with hypertext... I hate the ugliness
of the underlined word in a different colour... you are almost forcing the
reader to click on the word... I'd rather it was process of discovery say
that if you roll over a word with the mouse the icon changes.
zero: Lyn
Hershman did something crudely attempting that a couple of years back
with "A Room Of One's Own" where you have to move your head to
see the girl taking off her clothes and then she stops and says "...what
are you looking at...?" I had a version of Angelus Novus which keeps
track of how fast you are clicking and how many times and if it reaches
a certain level it stops and says "What is wrong with you...."
so yeah I agree with Bonset...
oog: which version was that Dan?
zero: I am not saying... you try it!
Bonset: I click because I CAN....!
zero: I feel like the point Benjamin made is that the artist or the
culture is looking for ways to do new things and then the technology to
make it possible almost arises out of some sort of morphogenetic resonance
- like say the way the printing press was invented in about 3 different
places in Europe completely independently and the same with photography....
so I think I should've said that the possibilities afford the technology
rather than the other way around...
Bonset: does the giraffe eat the leaves on the tallest branches because
it has such a long neck or does it have a long neck so that it can...
Dabek: It is true that developments in artistic production and technological
advancement can be seen to go hand in hand, so to speak. However, I think
it is simplifying things somewhat to declare that these advances in technology
arise solely from a restlessness with pre-existing modes of artistic production
and reception.
zero:...and perception... the whole cognition and communication processes...
I am talking about the whole thrust of our culture... intellectual... even
spiritual... development... and it is not a linear cause and effect thing...
it is a chaotic butterfly thing... it is about two or more things arising
together...
Dabek: Much of the technologies used by artists have been developed
for far more utilitarian (military, surveillance etc.) purposes under the
watchful eye of government and corporate interests.
oog: well the printing press was invented to spread the word of god...
zero: right... and I have long argued for people to seize this technology
and to use it in their work and play and for artists to enjoy the irony
of employing a machine developed to achieve greater objectivity, more accurate
calculations, to deal with subjectivity...
Dabek: ..one cannot ignore the role played by the marketplace itself
in creating a hothouse environment that demands advancement at an ever accelerated
pace. So if we are to talk about interactivity as arising from crisis I
think we should not contain our notion of crisis to the art object itself
but consider it across a much broader field.
zero: ok but this takes us back to Duchamp again - the crisis of
the art object reflects a much broader crisis and as far as the market place
is concerned... they are basically consumer products I am using to make
and show my work... not Silicon Graphics
work stations... I am not interested in working on that level... I am not
competing with Walt
Disney Studios... I am not Ian Haigh or Troy
Innocent...
Bonset: but you wish you were Linda
Dement...
zero: but I am not cool enough... I am just a little bloke from Wagga
Wagga and I am not arguing that a Sudanese
farmer could make (or relate to for that matter) an interactive computer
art work but that does mean I shoud be doing sand paintings?
oog: tooshay zero...!
zero: I would love to be able to make something which runs full frame
32bit video at 25fps with cd quality stereo sound on your computer - why
wouldn't I? it's not the marketplace that's creating it -the big corporations
are creating a demand in the marketplace - Intel's new chip being the latest
example... but in terms of sin Apple has paid a price commensurate with
its name - in offering a great product which everyone wants but then not
being able to satisfy the demand...
Bonset: and thence... what hope the snake...?!
zero: ...imagine McDonalds
running out of Big Macs...
Bonset: but would Dan refuse a sponsorhip from Intel...?
zero and oog (in unison): ...of course he wouldn't...
Dabek: Dan.....in a way I find an acknowledgement of this idea of
a total crisis in your work Angelus Novus. While never resting on anything
overtly specific, the work manages to allude to an all pervading discomposure.
Between admonishments to "end the struggle" and "become zero"
and the somewhat labrynthine structure of the piece, the viewer has an increasing
sense of implication in this "crisis" the further they go.
oog: yeah but don't you also get the feeling that it is a celebration
in a kind of post-postmodernist sense and that you...
Dabek: Oh yes definitely! The work offers no solution but it does
offer the user the chance to revel in their circumstance. Im not sure celebration
is the word I would use to describe it. The pleasures of Angelus Novus are
far more involved and dire, like the condemned mans last cigarette.
zero: oh-ho that sounds morbid - maybe I could be a kind of digital
Christian Boltanski...
Bonset: we all need to die a little sometimes
zero:...nah... on reflection...all those biscuit tins would drive
me insane...
Dabek: I want to speak more about the idea of finality in the "new
media"
work. ij touched on it earlier talking about a reluctance to put anything
in print. Iam especially interested in exploring the institutional pressures
on new media works to conform with existing structures of display etc.
oog: I think as far as this is concerned a crisis is perceived because
we don't like change like we don't like death we want things to be unchanging
we wonder what the definitive edition of Hamlet is and this is changing
slowly especially in music... how many different versions of songs are released...
you can have the acoustic version a radio mix and if you know Tricky you
can get him to do a remix and if you die they can strip out everything but
the vocal track and the remaining members of the band can add backing tracks
more appropriate to current market demands twenty years later...and so a
message is able to penetrate that market place in 93 different ways...
Dabek: To regress for one moment: I find the example of the remix
in popular music that dan has evoked a very effective one. For the remix
opens up a potentially infinite number of restructurings and interpretations
of an original text. It becomes a type of declaration that finality or closure
is not an option. In a way it presents popular music with a type of escape
hatch from its own self induced crisis. This state of never finishing is
more representative of the creative process than that the idea of the single
finalised work, one never simply stops.
zero: which is exactly why I have produced so many different versions
of Angelus Novus... although you inadvertently create the feeling that a
new version is an update and replaces the previous version which isn't the
case at all... each version stands on its own and is complete but of course
not final... and when you start...
Dabek: I cant help feeling that that existing methods of display
are simply inadaquate for showing new media works. The museum by its very
nature demands finality and stasis. The danger is obviously that one version
of work will be canonised by the not inconsiderable discursive power of
the museum as the final finished masterpiece.
zero: Well of course the museum/gallery has been in crisis as an
institution for many many years especially as a place for the consumption
of contemporary art... it is certainly true that Benjamin's vision of the
disappearance of the aura is increasingly being realized. We are seeing
a symptom of this in the increasingly shallow spectacles which musea need
to organize in order to get the public through the door. Before too long
the idea of going somewhere and paying admission to see a few static images
will be an amusing historical anomaly and this erosion of the authority
of the museum/gallery will continue..
Dabek: It seems that the promise of fluidity that new media work
holds can really only be fully realised by employing by employing equally
fluid methods of display and dissemination. Obviously I am thinking about
the internet.
zero: I think we are increasingly seeing artists producing a range
of products in a variety of media and the emphasis will be not on the showing
of the work i.e. to provide a space for viewing as the gallery/museum does
because that visibility will be provided by the net by the cdrom and soon
the dvd... it is more about the availability and thus the consumption of
artists products... already a cdrom containing a whole lot of digital interactive
artworks can be given away with an issue of an art journal (Artlink) although
I thought it was a bit sad some artists putting on 'lite' editions of their
work...
Bonset: Benjamin would have been tossing and turning in his grave...
oog: The fact remains that much of this work is going to be accessible
only to people with expensive hardware...
zero: (laughing) the people out there may not realise this but oog
is the only person left in the entire world still using Lynx on a Mac Plus...
but yeah less than ten years ago I was making works which will run on a
Plus from a single 800k floppy which also contained the system and application
software... say ij there are still plenty of copies available if you are
interested... but sure now a lot of artists including myself are working
with the internet and cdrom. It is becoming increasingly difficult to dictate
not only what, but in what order, where and how people see or hear information...
and consumers increasingly have the means to manipulate it... it is no exaggeration
to say that this is the biggest crisisin the dissemination of information
in the history of human culture...people are accessing all sorts of stuff
which have never been widely available before... it's not just that if you
want to make a bomb or LSD... it has never been easier to find out how...
but say the way the net was used in Sarajevo and Zagreb to allow people
to find out what was happening during the war. All the hysteria about kiddies
accessing porn is a front... I have spent days looking for pornographic
images on the net ... you should see some of the search strings I have typed
in... they are fucking art works in their own right... but without any result
at all... except a few tiny lo-res tits and lots of requests for my credit
card number...
oog: has anyone checked zero's drip recently ?
Bonset: but the means of cultural production are at last within our
reach- we have only to grasp them...
oog : another aspect of that crisis from the audience's point of
view is a crisis of options if that's what you want to call it - is techno-fatigue
- people complain that it's a wilderness... people buy computers with a
whole lot of features they don't need or know how to use... they get a dozen
free cds with their machine which are full of useless information and mindless
games and there is no doubt that there is an enormous proliferation of rubbish
on the net... but you don't go into a library and pick a book at random
off a shelf and read it from cover to cover and then complain that it was
a waste of time... OK one time in a million or whatever you are going to
find a gem but generally you at least go to a section you're interested
in and browse or you find and read something because it has been recommended
to you or you have read something by that author before etc etc so if you
go surfing the net at random it is much the same... and this is going to
become more and more important... people find it difficult to enjoy too
many possibilities... and from a political point of view it is problematic
because it is about the power to control those possibilities and to channel
them into safe... and preferably profitable areas...
Bonset: I find the most beautiful aspect of your work the spaces
between the words...
oog: (laughing) well... I pay a lot of attention to them...
zero: (laughing) ij is like a japanese calligrapher where the white
space around the...
Bonset:....(inaudible)
zero: I am interested in the formal qualities of language the shape
of the words - the rhythm the sound of the voice and also... and I am no
theorist - I have only the vaguest of ideas about semiotics - the way that
language defines place, memory, identity and that your ability both to understand
and be understood... and I am always playing with this... I'm interested
in what happens when you dislocate that... also I have a daughter and she
cannot speak and she...
Bonset:...then...she is free...language is a prison...
oog:...and when Coltrane and Lee Rimmer play I'm old fashioned I
am moved beyond words... no words are necessary...
zero: that's right and now in some contemporary music like techno
words are also completely absent yet there is often a movement something
like a narrative there may be a cathartic moment there may be some kind
of resolution...
Dabek: .......and in a lot of ways I see parallels between these
musical ideas and questions that have continually arisen in literature and
film regarding the narrative form. Its like an assertion that not only is
there more than one side to every story but also that there are as many
ways to tell it. I particuarly find compelling that a sense of resolution
can often come from totally unexpected places and by totally unexpected
means, that resolution does not have to equal closure.
oog : people ask me about my stories - particularly people that may...
think they... recognise themselves in a story and suddenly they find they
have become..or they see themselves as a character - and they shift from
thinking about themselves as real people in a real world to thinking
of themselves as actors in a movie which is more interesting and probably
closer to the truth and they ask me about themselves or other characters
or they wonder why a character did or said a particular thing... when I
write stories about my father my mother complains that the door was in fact
green not red and I try and tell her that I am not into documentary realism
but then The Bold and the Beautiful comes on and the conversation finishes
anyway...
zero (to oog ): it's about the performance and particularly the audience
too - wouldn't you say? do you read your work to an audience at all ?
oog : I haven't had many opportunities to do so but yes I love it
when I do, or rather it terrifies me but it gives me buzz... and it does
influence the text a great deal the sound of it and I read aloud too many
times at all stages of writing - so it is a song in many ways... I would
have to say that an audience is necessary for art to exist even if it is
only an audience of one or even the possibility of an audience... an imagined
audience... and this is what distinguishes an artist from an amateur or
a sunday painter or...
zero : at ISEA in Montreal Angelus Novus never ran as well or as
beautifully as when I was in that huge space by myself after closing...
it's an odd thing finding yourself moved to the depth of your being by a
fucking computer but this is what is possible now... a work made on and
shown on a computer can be as powerful as any artwork or story or any poem
or song... but whenever I considered an audience... when an audience was
present it completely changed the way that the thing was... but I imagined
an audience... I have always imagined an audience even when I was a child
playing Thunderbirds in the bath... and the audience is the crucial difference
between Duchamp and Van Gogh...
oog : I am interested in how stories evolve into songs and songs
into lullabyes and all these different evolutions are the strands of our
culture our history our identity... what makes me me and what does it mean
to say that I am? and for whom does it have any meaning at all...? All of
this is dependent on an audience... whether it is an art work or an individual...
a human being... it has probably got something to do with Lacan but I can
never understand a word of ...
zero : call me a sentimental old fool but when I was kid growing
up before central heating we would often literally create and recreate our
culture when we gathered in front of the roaring fire after dinner and grandmother
would tell stories... it was like a cycle of stories one leading to any
one of a number of others and people would fill in details where she omitted
them or point out that this was before that and and that this or that uncle
couldn't have been there then because... and sometimes a detail would be
revealed which you had not known before and some people would nod off and
others would be looking around to see if there were enough others for a
game of cards but there was an amazing renewal taking place and it is a
tragedy that all that is lost with the deaths of the old people... all those
texts which my grandmother in telling them was publishing even though the
audience was just us the adults and kids and they would be meaningless to
anyone else...
oog : did you write any of them down or tape them....?
zero : I have some tapes but of course they are an entirely different
thing they are dead things because it was an interactive process which depended
on an audience taking part and helping to create it
zero : but ultimately I'd like to not make art anymore... there will
just be dan zero software - an intelligent agent which you install on your
machine so when you log on for today's news you just get all the stuff to
do with death and desire and specials on sausages all layered on top of
each other with sound loops of dirges and voices and drums...
oog : aren't you working on an operating system software which replaces
either mac or windows and runs in 1 mb of RAM and which logs itself onto
the children of blah! web site
on each startup and downloads and installs a new startup screen desktop
alert sound and screen saver...?
zero : no... and I fear that the rumours that Martina
Hingis was desperately trying to track me down after she won the Australian
Open because she had looked at Angelus Novus in an essay for her Contemporary
Arts Studies class at the Zurich Eidgenossische
Technische Hochschule and that I am making a takeover bid for BE
now Apple have NeXT,
are also ridiculous fictions...
Dabek: Fictions indeed, but it seems that a certain spillage between
your personal life and work is bound to happen. I think it would be fair
to say Dan that in the past you haven't been too vigililant in clearing
up these untruths that you seem to attract. There is a certain playfulness
at work here, you seem quite happy to undermine your own sense of Identity.
I would be interested to hear ij's views on this relationship between identity
and artistic practice, as your attitude seems somewhat at odds with Dan's
in this respect.
oog: I
might look like Robert Ford but I feel just like Jesse James
zero : yeah
and the pump don't work cause the vandals took the handles
oog : but it doesn't make sense to ask whether it is a fiction or not...
like does it matter whether it that was Dylan
or Helen Demidenko
or whatever her name is - it's the story that matters and whether it moves
you or not... not the identity of the teller... are we really still digesting
all the Barthes stuff about the author?
Bonset: you'd better hope Helen isn't reading this though or...
zero: but yeah the idea of some future art historian trying to figure it
all out sort of tickles me and I am always leaving false clues and encouraging
rumours... particularly ones involving Winona
Ryder... but of course if the self spills over into the work that is
inevitable and desirable if art is to be about life... and death... but
more than likely the zero flame will just burn brightly... too brightly...
for a short while and then be subsumed by silence...
Bonset:...silence is the most moving song of all...
zero : is Bonset set to loop...?
Dan Zero's Angelus Novus v5.01 is included on the Sequinz CDROM published
as part of Artlink
magazine's Art in the Electronic Landscape special issue (October 1996)
- copies of the CDROM only are also available for $20 inc P+P from Artlink
363 Esplanade Henley Beach SA 5022
The on-line version of Dialogue No.5 was prepared by
globalAutomatic www design
and maintenance
April 1997
