monsieur antipyrine's manifesto, Tristan Tzara

14th july 1916

DADA is our intensity: it erects inconsequential bayonets and the Sumatral head of German babies; Dada is life with neither bedroom slippers nor parallels; it is against and for unity and definately against the future; we are wise enough to know that our brains are going to become flabby cushions, that our anti dogmatism is as exclusive as a civil servant, and that we cry liberty but are not free; a severe necessity with entire discipline nor morals and that we spit on humanity.

DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates.

We are circus ringmasters and we can be found whistling amongst the winds of fairgrounds, in convents, prostitutions, theatres, realities, feelings, restaurants, ohoho, bang bang.

We declare that the motor car is a feeling that has cosseted us quite enough in the dilatoriness of its abstractions, as have transatlantic liners, noises and ideas. And while we put on a show of being facile, we are actually searching for the central essence of things, and are pleased if we can hide it; we have no wish to count the windows of the marvellous elite, for DADA doesn't exist for anyone, and we want everyone to understand this. This is Dada's balcony, I assure you. From there you can hear all the military marches, and come down cleaving the air like a seraph landing in a public baths to piss and understand the parable.

DADA is neither madness, nor wisdom, nor irony, look at me, dear bourgeois.

Art used to be a game of nuts in May, children would go gathering words that had a final ring, then they would exude, shout out the verse, and dress it up in dolls' bootees, and the verse became a queen in order to die a little, and the queen became a sardine, and the children ran hither and you, unseen.

Then came the great ambassadors of feeling, who yelled historically in chorus:

Psychology Psychology hee hee

Science Science Science

Long live France

We are not naive

We are successive

We are exclusive

We are not simpletons

and we are perfectly capable of an intelligent discussion.

Be we, DADA, don't agree with them, for art isn't serious, I assure you, and if we reveal the crime so as to show that we are learned denunciators, it's to please you, dear audience, I assure you, and I adore you.

above copied from:

Concepts, Notations, Software, Art, Florian Cramer

March 23rd, 2002

Software and Concept Notations
Software in the Arts

To date, critics and scholars in the arts and humanities have considered computers primarily as storage and display media, as something which transmits and reformats images, sound and typography. Reflection of the as such invisible layer of software is rare. Likewise, the term ``digital art'' has been associated primarily with digital images, music or audiovisual installations using digital technology. The software which controls the audio and the visuals is frequently neglected, working as a black box behind the scenes. ``Interactive'' room installations, for example, get perceived as a interactions of a viewer, an exhibition space and an image projection, not as systems running on code. This observation all the more applies to works in which it is not obvious at all that their production relied on programmation and computing. John Cage's 1981 radio play ``Roaratorio'', for example, appears to be a tape montage of a spoken text based on James Joyce's ``Finnegans Wake'', environmental sounds recorded in several cities of the world and Irish folk music, edited with analog recording technology. Yet at the same time it is an algorithmic artwork; the spoken text was extracted from the novel using a purely syntactical, formal method (mesostychs of the name ``James Joyce''), and the montage was done according to a random score generated on a computer at the Parisian IRCAM studios. While the book-plus-CD set of ``Roarotorio'' documents the whole composition extensively, containing the audio piece itself, a recording and a reprint of John Cage's reading, a recording and a reprint of an interview, an inventory of the cities where sound was recorded, it includes the computer-generated score itself only in a one-page excerpt and nothing at all of the computer program code which generated the random score.1

The history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history of ignorance against programming and programmers. Computer programs get locked into black boxes, and programmers are frequently considered to be mere factota, coding slaves who execute other artist's concepts. Given that software code is a conceptual notation, this is not without its own irony. In fact, it is a straight continuation of romanticist philosophy and its privileging of aisthesis (perception) over poeisis (construction),2 cheapened into a restrained concept of art as only that what is tactile, audible and visible. The digital arts themselves participate in this accomplicity when they call themselves [new] ``media art''. There's nothing older than ``new media'', a term which is little more than a superficial justification for lumping together a bunch of largely unrelated technologies, such as analog video and computing, just because they were ``new'' at a particular time. If one defines as a medium something that it is between a sender and a receiver, then computers are not only media, but also senders and receivers which themselves are capable of writing and reading, interpreting and composing messages within the limitations of the rule sets inscribed into them. The computer programs for example which calculate the credit line of checking accounts or control medical instruments in an emergency station can't be meaningfully called ``media''. If at all, computer processes become ``media'' only by the virtue that computers can emulate any machine, including all technical media, and by the virtue of the analog interfaces which transform the digital zeros and ones into analog sound waves, video signals, print type and vice versa.
A Crash Course in Programming

A piece of software is a set of formal instructions, or, algorithms; it is a logical score put down in a code. It doesn't matter at all which particular sign system is used as long as it is a code, whether digital zeros and ones, the Latin alphabet, Morse code or, like in a processor chip, an exactly defined set of registers controlling discrete currents of electricity. If a piece of software is a score, is it then by definition an outline, a blueprint of an executed work?

Imagine a Dadaist poem which makes random variations of Hugo Ball's sound poem ``Karawane'' (``Caravan''):

KARAWANE

jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla
grossiga m'pfa habla horem
égiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung
blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa ólobo
hej taat gôrem
eschige zunbada
wulebu ssubudu uluw ssubudu
tumba ba-umpf
kusagauma
ba-umpf

The new Dada poem could simply consists of eight variations of the line ``tumba ba-umpf''. The author/performer could throw a coin twice for each line and, depending on the result, choose to write down either the word ``tumba'' or ``ba-umpf'', so that the result would look like:

tumba tumba
ba-umpf tumba
tumba ba-umpf
tumba ba-umpf
ba-umpf ba-umpf
ba-umpf tumba
tumba ba-umpf
tumba ba-umpf

The instruction code for this poem could be written as follows:

1. Take a coin of any kind with two distinct sides.
2. Repeat the following set of instructions eight times:
1. Repeat the following set of instructions twice:
1. Throw the coin.
2. Catch it with your palm so that it lands on one side.
3. If the coin shows the upper side, do the following:
* Say "tumba"
4. Else do the following:
* Say "ba-umpf"
2. Make a brief pause to indicate the end of the line.
3. Make a long pause to indicate the end of the poem.

Since these instructions are formal and precise enough to be as well executed by a machine (imagine this poem implemented into a modified cuckoo clock), they can be translated line by line into a computer program. Just as the above instruction looks different depending on the language it is written in, a computer program looks different depending on the programming language used. Here I choose the popular language ``Perl'' whose basic instructions are rather simple to read:

for $lines (1 .. 8)
{
for $word (1 .. 2)
{
$random_number = int(rand(2));
if ($random_number == 0)
{
print "tumba"
}
else
{
print "ba-umpf"
}
print " "
}
print "\n"
}



The curly brackets enclose statement blocks executed under certain conditions, the $ prefix designates a variable which can store arbitrary letters or numbers, the ``rand(2)'' function generates a random value between 0 and 1.9, ``int'' rounds its result to either zero or one, `` '' stands for a blank, ``
n'' for a line break. This program can be run on virtually any computer; it is a simple piece of software. Complex pieces of software, such as computer operating systems or even computer games, differ from the above only in the complexity of their instructions. The control structures - variable assignments, loops, conditional statements - are similar in all programming languages.

Unlike in the instruction for throwing coins, the artists' work is done once the code is written. A computer program is a blueprint and its execution at the same time. Like a pianola roll, it is a score performing itself. The artistic fascination of computer programming - and the perhaps ecstatic revelation of any first-time programmer - is the equivalence of architecture and building, the instant gratification given once the concept has been finished. Computer programming collapses, as it seems, the second and third of the three steps of concept, concept notation and execution.

Contrary to conventional data like digitized images, sound and text documents, the algorithmic instruction code allows a generative process. It uses computers for computation, not only as storage and transmission media. And this precisely distinguishes program code from non-algorithmic digital code, describing for example the difference between algorithmic composition on the one hand and audio CDs/mp3 files on the other, between algorithmically generated text and ``hypertext'' (a random access database model which as such doesn't require algorithmic computation at all), or between a graphical computer ``demo'' and a video tape. Although one can of course use computers without programming them, it is impossible not to use programs at all; the question only is who programs. There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or design themselves.

To discuss ``software art'' simply means to not take software for granted, but pay attention to how and by whom programs were written. If data doesn't exist without programs, it follows that the separation of processed ``data'' (like image and sound files) from ``programs'' is simply a convention. Instead, data could be directly embedded into the algorithms used for its transmission and output to external devices. Since a ``digital photograph'' for example is bit-mapped information algorithmically transformed into the electricity controlling a screen or printer, via algorithmic abstraction layers in the computer operating system, it follows that it could just as well be coded into a file which contains the whole transformation algorithms themselves so that the image would display itself even on a computer that provides no operating system.3
Software Art
Executable Code in Art

If software is generally defined as executable formal instructions, logical scores, then the concept of software is by no means limited to formal instructions for computers. The first, English-language notation of the Dadaist poem qualifies as software just as much as the three notations in the Perl programming language. The instructions only have to meet the requirement of being executable by a human being as well as by a machine. A piano score, even a 19th century one, is software when its instruction code can be executed by a human pianist as well as on a player piano.

The Perl code of the Dada poem can be read and executed even without running it on machines. So my argument is quite contrary to Friedrich Kittler's media theory according to which there is either no software at all or at least no software without the hardware it runs on:4 If any algorithm can be executed mentally, as it was common before computers were invented, then of course software can exist and run without hardware. - A good example are programming handbooks. Although they chiefly consist of printed computer code, this code gets rarely ever executed on machines, but provides examples which readers follow intellectually, following the code listings step by step and computing them in their minds.

Instead of adapting Dadaist poetry as software, one could regard some historical Dadaist works as software right away; above all, Tristan Tzara's generic instruction for writing Dada poems by shuffling the words of a newspaper article5:

To make a Dadaist poem:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

The poem is effectively an algorithm, a piece of software which may as well be written as a computer program.6. If Tzara's process would be adapted as Perl or C code from the original French, it wouldn't be a transcription of something into software, but a transcription of non-machine software into machine software.
Concept Art and Software Art

The question of what software is and how it relates to non-electronic contemporary art is at least thirty-two years old. In 1970, the art critic and theorist Jack Burnham curated an exhibition called "Software" at the Jewish Museum of New York which today is believed to be first show of concept art. It featured installations of US-American concept artists next installations of computer software Burnham found interesting, such as the first prototype of Ted Nelson's hypertext system ``Xanadu''. Concept art as an art ``of which the material is `concepts,' as the material of for ex. music is sound'' (Henry Flynt's definition from 19617) and software art as an art whose material is formal instruction code seem to have at least two things in common:

1. the collapsing of concept notation and execution into one piece;
2. the use of language; instructions in software art, concepts in concept art. Flynt observes: ``Since `concepts' are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language''.8

It therefore is not accidental that the most examples of pre-electronic software art cited here are literary. Literature is a conceptual art in that is not bound to objects and sites, but only to language. The trouble the art world has with net.art because it does not display well in exhibition spaces is foreign to literature which always differentiated between an artwork and its material appearance.

Since formal language is a language, software can be seen and read as a literature.9

If concepts become, to quote Flynt again, artistic``material'', then concept art differs from other art in that it actually exposes concepts, putting their notations up front as the artwork proper. In analogy, software art in particular differs from software-based art in general in that it exposes its instructions and codedness. Since formal instructions are a subset of conceptual notations, software art is, formally, a subset of conceptual art.

My favorite example of both concept art in Flynt's sense and non-computer software art is La Monte Young's ``Composition 1961'', a piece of paper containing the written instruction ``Draw a straight line and follow it''. The instruction is unambiguous enough to be executed by a machine. At the same time, a thorough execution is physically impossible. So the reality of piece is mental, conceptual.

The same duplicity of concept notation and executable code exists in Sol LeWitt's 1971 ``Plan for a Concept Art Book'', a series of book pages giving the reader exact instructions to draw lines on them or strike out specific letters.10 LeWitt's piece exemplifies that the art called concept art since the 1970s was by far not as rigorous as the older concept art of Henry Flynt, La Monte Young and Christer Hennix: While the ``Composition 1961'' is a concept notation creating an artwork that itself exists only as a concept, mentally, LeWitt's ``Plan for a Concept Art Book'' only is a concept notation of a material, graphic artwork. Unlike the concept art ``of which the material is `concepts''', LeWitt's piece belongs to a concept art that rather should be called a concept notation art or ``blueprint art''; an art whose material is graphics and objects, but which was instead realized in the form of a score. By thus reducing its its own material complexity, the artwork appears to be ``minimalist'' rather than rigorously conceptualist.

A writing which writes itself, LeWitt's ``Plan'' could also be seen in a historical continuity of combinatory language speculations: From the permutational algorithms in the Sefer Jezirah and ecstatic Kabbalah to the medieval ``ars'' of Raimundus Lullus to 17th century permutational poetry and Mallarmé's ``Livre''. The combinatory most complex known permutation poem, Quirinus Kuhlmann's 1771 sonnet ``Vom Wechsel menschlicher Sachen'' consists of 13*12 nouns can be arbitrarily shuffled so that they result in 10114 permutations of the text.11 Kuhlmann's and La Monte Young's software arts meet in their aesthetic extremism; in an afterword, Kuhlmann claims that there are more permutations of his poem than grains of sand on the earth.12 If such implications lurk in code, a formal analysis is not enough. Concept art potentially means terror of the concept, software art terror of the algorithm; a terror grounded in the simultaneity of minimalist concept notation and totalitarian execution, helped by the fact that software collapses the concept notation and execution in the single medium of instruction code. - Sade's ``120 days of Sodom'' could be read as a recursive programming of excess and its simultaneous reflection in the medium of prose.13 The popularity of spamming and denial-of-service code in the contemporary digital arts is another practical proof of the perverse double-bind between software minimalism and self-inflation; the software art pieces awarded at the transmediale.02 festival, ``tracenoizer'' and ``forkbomb.pl'' also belong to this category.

La Monte Young's ``Composition 1961'' not only provokes to rethink what software and software art is. Being the first and still most elegant example of all artistic jamming and denial-of-service code, it also addresses the aesthetics and politics coded into instructions. Two years before Burnham's ``Software'' exhibition, the computer scientist Donald E. Knuth published the first volume of his famous textbook on computer programming, ``The Art of Computer Programming''.14 Knuth's wording has adopted in what Steven Levy calls the hacker credo that ``you can create art and beauty with computers''.15 It is telling that hackers, otherwise an avant-garde of a broad cultural understanding of digital technology, rehash a late-18th century classicist notion of art as beauty, rewriting it into a concept of digital art as inner beauty and elegance of code. But such aesthetic conservativism is widespread in engineering and hard-science cultures; fractal graphics are just one example of Neo-Pythagorean digital kitsch they promote. As a contemporary art, the aesthetics of software art includes ugliness and monstrosity just as much as beauty, not to mention plain dysfunctionality, pretension and political incorrectness.16

Above all, software art today no longer writes its programs out of nothing, but works within an abundance of available software code. This makes it distinct from works like Tzara's Dada poem which, all the while it addresses an abundance of mass media information, contaminates only the data, not its algorithm; the words become a collage, but the process remains a synthetic clean-room construct.

Since personal computers and the Internet became popular, software code in addition to data has come to circulate in abundance. One thus could say that contemporary software art operates in a postmodern condition in which it takes pre-existing software as material - reflecting, manipulating and recontextualizing it. The ``mezangelle'' writing of mez, an Australian net artist, for example uses software and protocol code as material for writings in a self-invented hybrid of English and pseudo-code. Her ``net.wurks'' are an unclean, broken software art; instead of constructing program code synthetically, they use readymade computations, take them apart and read their syntax as gendered semantics. In similar fashion, much software art plays with control parameters of software. Software artworks like Joan Leandre's ``retroyou'' and ``Screen Saver'' by Eldar Karhalev and Ivan Khimin are simply surprising, mind-challenging disconfigurations of commercial user software: a car racing game, the Microsoft Windows desktop interface. They manage to put their target software upside down although their interventions are technically simple and don't involve low-level programming at all.
Software Formalism vs. Software Culturalism

Much of what is discussed as contemporary software art and discourse on has its origin in two semi-coherent London-based groups. The older one around Matthew Fuller, Graham Harwood and the groups I/O/D and Mongrel is known, among others, for the experimental web browser ``WebStalker'', which instead of formatted pages displays their source code and link structures, the ``Linker'', a piece of ``social software'' (to use a term by Fuller) designed to empower non-literate users to design their own digital information systems, and ``natural selection'', a politically manipulated web search engine. Fuller also wrote a scrupulous cultural analysis of Microsoft Word's user interface and an essay with the programmatic title ``Software as Culture''. The other group involves the programmer-artists Adrian Ward (whose ``Auto-Illustrator'' won the transmediale.01 software art prize) and Alex McLean (whose ``forkbomb.pl'' won the transmediale.02 software art prize), the theoretician Geoff Cox and participants in the mailing list ``eu-gene'', the web site http://www.generative.net and the ``DorkBot'' gatherings in London (which involve poetry readings of program code). Both groups take exactly opposite standpoints to software art and software criticism: While Fuller/Harwood regard software as first of all a cultural, politically coded construct, the eu-gene group rather focuses on the formal poetics and aesthetics of software code and individual subjectivity expressed in algorithms.

If software art could be generally defined as an art

* of which the material is formal instruction code, and/or
* which addresses cultural concepts of software,

then each of their positions sides with exactly one of the two aspects. If Software Art would be reduced to only the first, one would risk ending up a with a neo-classicist understanding of software art as beautiful and elegant code along the lines of Knuth and Levy. Reduced on the other hand to only the cultural aspect, Software Art could end up being a critical footnote to Microsoft desktop computing, potentially overlooking its speculative potential at formal experimentation. Formal reflections of software are, like in this text, inevitable if one considers common-sense notions of software a problem rather than a point of departure; histories of instruction codes in art and investigations into the relationship of software, text and language still remain to be written.



©This document can be freely copied and used according to the terms of the Open Publication License http://www.opencontent.org/openpub

References

[Cag82]
John Cage. Roaratorio. Ein irischer Circus über Finnegans Wake. Athenäum, Königstein/Taunus, 1982.
[CWM01]
Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward, and Alex McLean. The Aesthetics of Generative Code, 2001. http://www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics/index.html.
[Fly61]
Henry Flynt. Concept art. In La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow, editors, An Anthology. Young and MacLow, New York, 1963 (1961).
[Hon71]
Klaus Honnef, editor. Concept Art. Phaidon, Köln, 1971).
[Kit91]
Friedrich Kittler. There is no software, 1991. http://textz.gnutenberg.net/textz/kittler_friedrich_there_is_no_software.txt.
[Kuh71]
Quirinus Kuhlmann. Himmlische Libes=küsse. ?, Jena, 1671.
[Lev84]
Steven Levy. Hackers. Project Gutenberg, Champaign, IL, 1986 (1984).
[Mol71]
Abraham A. Moles. Kunst und Computer. DuMont, Köln, 1973 (1971).
[Tza75]
Tristan Tzara. Pour fair une poème dadaïste. In Oeuvres complètes. Gallimard, Paris, 1975.

©This document can be freely copied and used according to the terms of the Open Publication License http://www.opencontent.org/openpub
Footnotes:

1[Cag82] - Regarding randomness generated with computers, the software artist Ulrike Gabriel says that it doesn't exist because the machine as a fact by itself is not accidental.

2A similar angle is taken in the paper ``The Aesthetic of Generative Code'' by Geoff Cox, Adrian Ward and Alex McLean, [CWM01]

3I would not be surprised if in a near future the media industry would embed audiovisual data (like a musical recording) directly into proprietary one-chip hardware players to prevent digital copies.

4[Kit91]

5[Tza75]

6My own Perl CGI adaption is available under "http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/permutations/tzara/poeme_dadaiste.cgi"

7[Fly61]

8ibid.

9But since formal language is only a small subset of language as a whole, conclusions drawn from observing software code can't be generally applied to all literature.

10[Hon71], p. 132-140

11[Kuh71]

12ibid.

13As Abraham M. Moles noticed already in 1971, [Mol71], p. 124

14knuth:art

15according Steven Levy [Lev84]; among those who explicitly subscribe to this is the German Chaos Computer Club with its annual ``art and beauty workshop''.

16which is why I think would be wrong to (a) restrict software art to only properly running code and (b) exclude, for political reasons, proprietary and other questionably licensed software from software art presentations.

Original-URL:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/software_art/
concept_notations//concepts_notations_software_art.html

Above copied from: http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/ concepts_notations_software_art.html

futurist photodynamism, anton giulio bragaglia

1st july 1913

To begin with, Photodynamism cannot be interpreted as an innovation applicable to photography in the way that chronophotography was. Photodynamism is a creation that aims to achieve ideals that are quite contrary to the objectives of all the representational means of today. If it can be associated at all with photography, cinematography and chronophotography, this is only by virtue of the fact that, like them, it has its origins in the wide field of photographic science, the technical means forming common ground. All are based on the physical properties of the camera.

We are certainly not concerned with the aims and characteristics of cinematography and chronophotography. We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.

We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality, and take the utmost care to avoid it. For us this is a harmful and negative element, whereas for cinematography and chronophotography it is the very essence. They in their turn overlook the trajectory, which for us is the essential value.

The question of cinematography in relation to us is absolutely idiotic, and can only be raised by a superficial and imbecilic mentality motivated by the most crass ignorance of our argument.

Cinematography does not trace the shape of movement. It subdivides it, without rules, with mechanical arbitrariness, disintegrating and shattering it without any kind of aesthetic concern for rhythm. It is not within its coldly mechanical power to satisfy such concerns.

Besides which, cinematography never analyses movement. It shatters it in the frames of the film strip, quite unlike the action of Photodynamism, which analyses movement precisely in its details. And cinematography never synthesises movement, either. It merely reconstructs fragments of reality, already coldly broken up, in the same way as the hand of a chronometer deals with time even though this flows in a continuous and constant stream.

Photography too is a quite distinct area; useful in the perfect anatomical reproduction of reality; necessary and precious therefore for aims that are absolutely contrary to ours, which are artistic in themselves, scientific in their researches, but nevertheless always directed towards art.

And so both photography and Photodynamism possess their own singular qualities, clearly divided, and are very different in their importance, their usefulness and their aims.

Marey's chronophotography, too, being a form of cinematography carried out on a single plate or on a continuous strip of film, even if it does not use frames to divide movement which is already scanned and broken up into instantaneous shots, still shatters the action. The instantaneous images are even further apart, fewer and more autonomous than those of cinematography, so that this too cannot be called analysis.

In actual fact, Marey's system is used, for example, in the teaching of gymnastics. And out of the hundred images that trace a man's jump the few that are registered are just sufficient to describe and to teach to the young the principal stages of a jump.

But although this may be all very well for the old Marey system, for gymnastics and other such applications, it is not enough for us. With about five extremely rigid instantaneous shots we cannot obtain even the reconstruction of movement, let alone the sensation. Given that chronophotography certainly does not reconstruct movement, or give the sensation of it, any further discussion of the subject would be idle, except that the point is worth stressing, as there are those who, with a certain degree of elegant malice, would identify Photodynamism with chronophotography, just as others insisted on confusing it with cinematography.

Marey's system, then, seizes and freezes the action in its principal stages, those which best serve its purpose. It thus describes a theory that could be equally deduced from a series of instantaneous photographs. They could similarly be said to belong to different subjects, since, if a fraction of a stage is removed, no link unites and unifies the various images. They are photographic, contemporaneous, and appear to belong to more than one subject. To put it crudely, chronophotography could be compared with a clock on the face of which only the quarter-hours are marked, cinematography to one on which the minutes too are indicated, and Photodynamism to a third on which are marked not only the seconds, but also the intermovemental fractions existing in the passages between seconds. This becomes an almost infinitesimal calculation of movement.

In fact it is only through our researches that it is possible to obtain a vision that is proportionate, in terms of the strength of the images, to the very tempo of their existence, and to the speed with which they have lived in a space and in us.

The greater the speed of an action, the less intense and broad win be its trace when registered with Photodynamism. It follows that the slower it moves, the less it will be dematerialised and distorted. The more the image is distorted, the less real it will be. It will be more ideal and lyrical, further extracted from its personality and closer to type, with the same evolutionary effect of distortion as was followed by the Greeks in their search for their type of beauty.

There is an obvious difference between the photographic mechanicality of chronophotography -embryonic and rudimentary cinematography - and the tendency of Photodynamism to move away from that mechanicality, following its own ideal, and completely opposed to the aims of all that went before (although we do propose to undertake our own scientific researches into movement).

Photodynamism, then, analyses and synthesises movement at will, and to great effect. This is because it does not have to resort to disintegration for observation, but possesses the power to record the continuity of an action in space, to trace in a face, for instance, not only the expression of passing states of mind, as photography and cinematography have never been able to, but also the immediate shifting of volumes that results in the immediate transformation of expression.

A shout, a tragical pause, a gesture of terror, the entire scene, the complete external unfolding of the intimate drama, can be expressed in one single work. And this applies not only to the point of departure or that of arrival - nor merely to the intermediary stage, as in chronophotography - but continuously, from beginning to end, because in this way, as we have already said, the intermovemental stages of a movement can also be invoked.

In fact, where scientific research into the evolution and modelling of movement are concerned, we declare Photodynarnism to be exhaustive and essential, given that no precise means of analysing a movement exists (we have already partly examined the rudimentary work of chronophotography).

And so - just as the study of anatomy has always been essential for an artist - now a knowledge of the paths traced by bodies in action and of their transformation in motion will be indispensable for the painter of movement.

In the composition of a painting, the optical effects observed by the artist are not enough. A precise analytical knowledge of the essential properties of the effect, and of its causes, are essential. The artist may know how to synthesise such analyses, but within such a synthesis the skeleton, the precise and almost invisible analytical elements, must exist. These can only be rendered visible by the scientific aspects of Photodynamism.

In fact, every vibration is the rhythm of infinite minor vibrations, since every rhythm is built up of an infinite quantity of vibrations. In so far as human knowledge has hitherto conceived and considered movement in its general rhythm, it has fabricated, so to speak, an algebra of movement. This has been considered simple and finite (cf. Spencer: First Principles - The Rhythm of Motion). But Photodynamism has revealed and represented it as complex, raising it to the level of an infinitesimal calculation of movement (see our latest works, e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, Changing Positions).

Indeed, we represent the movement of a pendulum, for example, by relating its speed and its tempo to two orthogonal axes.

We will obtain a continuous and infinite sinusoidal curve.

But this applies to a theoretical pendulum, an immaterial one. The representation we will obtain from a material pendulum will differ from the theoretical one in that, after a longer or shorter (but always finite) period, it will stop.

It should be clear that in both cases the lines representing such movement are continuous, and do not portray the reality of the phenomenon. In reality, these lines should be composed of an infinite number of minor vibrations, introduced by the resistance of the point of union. This does not move with smooth continuity but in a jerky way caused by infinite coefficients. Now, a synthetic representation is more effective, even when its essence envelops an analytically divisionist value, than a synthetic impressionist one (meaning divisionism and impressionism in the philosophical sense). In the same way the representation of realistic movement will be much more effective in synthesis - containing in its essence an analytical divisionist value (e.g. The Carpenter, The Bow, etc.), than in analysis of a superficial nature, that is, when it is not minutely interstatic but expresses itself only in successive static states (e.g. The Typist).

Therefore, just as in Seurat's painting the essential question of chromatic divisionism (synthesis of effect and analysis of means) had been suggested by the scientific enquiries of Rood, so today the need for movemental divisionism, that is, synthesis of effect and analysis of means in the painting of movement, is indicated by Photodynamism. But - and this should be carefully noted - this analysis is infinite, profound and sensitive, rather than immediately perceptible.

This question has already been raised by demonstrating that, just as anatomy is essential in static reproduction, so the anatomy of an action - intimate analysis - is indispensable in the representation of movement. This will not resort to thirty images of the same object to represent an object in movement, but will render it infinitely multiplied and extended, whilst the figure present will appear diminished.

Photodynamism, then, can establish results from positive data in the construction of moving reality, just as photography obtains its own positive results in the sphere of static reality.

The artist, in search of the forms and combinations that characterise whatever state of reality interests him, can, by means of Photodynamism, establish a foundation of experience that will facilitate his researches and his intuition when it comes to the dynamic representation of reality. After all, the steady and essential relationships which link the development of any real action with artistic conception are indisputable, and are affirmed independently of formal analogies with reality.

Once this essential affinity has been established, not only between artistic conception and the representation of reality, but also between artistic conception and application, it is easy to realise how much information dynamic representation can offer to the artist who is engaged in a profound search for it.

In this way fight and movement in general, light acting as movement, and hence the movement of light, are revealed in Photodynamism. Given the transcendental nature of the phenomenon of movement, it is only by means of Photodynamism that the painter can know what happens in the intermovemental states, and become acquainted with the volumes of individual motions. He will be able to analyse these in minute detail, and will come to know the increase in aesthetic value of a flying figure, or its diminution, relative to light and to the dematerialization consequent upon motion. Only with Photodynamism can the artist be in possession of the elements necessary for the construction of a work of art embodying the desired-for synthesis.

With reference to this the sculptor Roberto Melli wrote to me explaining that, in his opinion, Photodynamism 'must, in the course of these new researches into movement which are beginning to make a lively impression on the artist's consciousness, take the place which has until now been occupied by drawing, a physical and mechanical phenomenon very different from the physical transcendentalism of Photodynamism. Photodynamism is to drawing what the new aesthetic currents are to the art of the past.' . . .

Now, with cinematography and Marey's equivalent system the viewer moves abruptly from one state to another, and thus is limited to the states that compose the movement, without concern for the intermovemental states of the action; and with photography he sees only one state. But with Photodynamism, remembering what took place between one stage and another, a work is presented that transcends the human condition, becoming a transcendental photograph of movement. For this end we have also envisaged a machine which will render actions visible, more effectively than is now today possible with actions traced from one point, but at the same time keeping them related to the time in which they were made. They will remain idealised by the distortion and by the destruction imposed by the motion and light which translate themselves into trajectories.

So it follows that when you tell us that the images contained in our Photodynamic works are unsure and difficult to distinguish, you are merely noting a pure characteristic of Photodynamism. For Photodynamism, it is desirable and correct to record the images in a distorted state, since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement. Besides this, our aim is to make a determined move away from reality, since cinematography, photography and chronophotography already exist to deal with mechanically precise and cold reproduction.

We seek the interior essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion, since as things are dematerialised in motion they become idealised, while still retaining, deep down, a strong skeleton of truth.

This is our aim, and it is by these means that we are attempting to raise photography to the heights which today it strives impotently to attain, being deprived of the elements essential for such an elevation because of the criteria of order that make it conform with the precise reproduction of reality. And then, of course, it is also dominated by that ridiculous and brutal negative element, the instantaneous exposure, which has been presented as a great scientific strength when in fact it is a laughable absurdity.

But where the scientific analysis of movement is concerned - that is, in the multiplication of reality for the study of its deformation in motion - we possess not merely one but a whole scale of values applied to an action. We repeat the idea, we insist, we impose and return to it without hesitation and untiringly, until we can affirm it absolutely with the obsessive demonstration of exterior and internal quality which is essential for us.

And it is beyond doubt that by way of such multiplication of entities we will achieve a multiplication of values, capable of enriching any fact with a more imposing personality.

In this way, if we repeat the principal states of the action, the figure of a dancer - moving a foot, in mid-air, pirouetting - will even when not possessing its own trajectory or offering a dynamic sensation, be much more like a dancer, and much more like dancing, than would a single figure frozen in just one of the states that build up a movement.

The picture therefore can be invaded and pervaded by the essence of the subject. It can be obsessed by the subject to the extent that it energetically invades and obsesses the public with its own values. It will not exist as a passive object over which an unconcerned public can take control for its own enjoyment. It will be an active thing that imposes its own extremely free essence on the public, though this will not be graspable with the insipid facility common to all images that are too faithful to ordinary reality.

To further this study of reality multiplied in its volumes, and the multiplication of the lyrical plastic sensation of these, we have conceived a method of research, highly original in its mechanical means, which we have already made known to some of our friends.

But in any case, at the moment we are studying the trajectory, the synthesis of action, that which exerts a fascination over our senses, the vertiginous lyrical expression of life, the lively invoker of the magnificent dynamic feeling with which the universe incessantly vibrates.

We will endeavour to extract not only the aesthetic expression of the motives, but also the inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions that we feel when an action leaves its superb, unbroken trace.

This is in order to offer to others the necessary factors for the reproduction of the desired feeling.

And it is on our current researches into the interior of an action that all the emotive artistic values existing in Photodynamism are based.

To those who believe that there is no need for such researches to be conducted with photographic means, given that painting exists, we would point out that, although avoiding competing with painting, and working in totally different fields, the means of photographic science are so swift, so fertile, and so powerful in asserting themselves as much more forward looking and much more in sympathy with the evolution of life than all other old means of representation.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/antongiuliobragaglia_futuristphotodynamism.htm

Digital poetics or On the evolution of experimental media poetry, Friedrich W. Block

(Online version without notes and references. Print version is forthcoming in Eduardo Kac (ed.): New Media Poetry)


I. Introduction or From technological leveling off to poetological positioning

The academic and literature critical discussion on new media poetry or about digital texts swings to and fro, in method and conception between two poles: one is the 'work immanent' approach of structure description and classification, and the other the deduction of abstract media esthetics. At a tangent to this the communication on media, culture and media art has been more or less committed to the priority of technological reasoning since the nineties at the latest.

The concern with technology remains a dilemma: Technology has to be taken into account when dealing with concrete structure analyses of works of digital poetry, but some traps lie in wait. Is the knowledge accounted for here really sufficient? I would say that few of those taking part in the discussion who do not actually work in the specific area artistically are capable of programming digital texts (the same may be said of some artists). Another problem is something I have casually termed a new techno-ontology: a ‘cold fascination’ for technological being (also of texts), which flares up briefly with each innovation pressing for the market in the respective field. This includes the far-reaching absence of any ideology criticism of things technical -- mainly in the nineties, where the area of media art as well as digital poetry expanded. In fact the opposite was the case: A 'new' avant-garde consciousness, igniting with current technical achievements and with the connected artistic experiments, is undeniable in the digital poetry discussion: along with the new media, newness according to modern progress and as a value of economic exchange returns with a vengeance. If, however, you take ‘technical’ to mean more than the purely instrumental - the tools of hard and software independent of their cognitive, physical or communicative use - if it is interpreted dynamically as a process and symbolically according to the ancient world’s notion of ‘techne’ (techne as creative workings or as art) then it is clear that the explanation of literature, digital literature indeed, cannot be reduced to technology. In addition questions of perception, communication, social and cultural orders arise. In this case literature must be a multi-dimensional system to which belong, in addition to the works, technical procedures and the corresponding media as well as protagonists with respective cognitive areas, action roles, groupings, institutions, communications and symbolic orders, e.g. such as genre knowledge or programs of poetics. Each dimension is subject to certain coordinated dynamics and historical development.

Bearing this in mind, my contribution will refer to the "program" area. Programs consist of certain strategies, principles, values, work attitudes, questions and objectives which single artistic events and manifestations orient and control with pre or post interventions according to poetics. Programs occur in various planes of complexity which may cross each other. They develop intrinsic values and the specifics of these have to be indicated - usually with type or genre titles or, if required, with group or movement names.

Some examples of programs and partial programs in order of abstraction: Futurism, Zaum, language of stars/Viennese group, literary cabaret, dialect poem / digital poetry, New Media Poetry, L.A.I.R.E., poème à lecture unique. Of course it is not necessarily the norm to interlock more comprehensive programs with partial programs or concretions - since the seventies poetry has, if at all, favored smaller programs: Strategies of individual artists without a clear 'superstructure'. In this respect labels such as 'digital poetry', 'net literature' or "New Media Poetry" may be the cause for surprise these days.

The arbitrarily chosen series (Futurism to digital literature) has been developed here in such a way as to allow for a further generic program term, a term admittedly not so reliable as, say, experimental literature. From this viewpoint, position determination must be to ask how digital poetry should be assessed as a program: idiosyncratic and unique or more as a partial program. The avant-garde consciousness mentioned previously seems to speak for uniqueness, as does the tendency within the discourse to make a clear break with, say, all literature of book and print as well as the cultural history thereof.

The assessment as a partial program, however, is supported by the observation that standing definitions of digital poetry have a large proximity to strategies of existing and historically grown programs - including the mentioned avant-garde consciousness. At the least we can say that they overlap. If this is so, and I assume it is, then there are a number of advantages for the description of digital poetry: Certain strategies and abstract concepts for digital poetry can be enriched semantically and questioned at an 'added value'. This applies to declarations about the performance and function of digital poetry, as well as to the assessment of the quality of single works. Finally, it becomes possible to regard programmatic parallels as well as more general developments in a slightly different light.

As a test of this generic objective, let us dwell on the concept of experimental literature. Since the fifties and increasingly so since the late sixties, the developments have produced a variety of polished procedures and strategies thanks to a strong bias on theory, which are also well-thought-through according to poetics as in no other area of literature. There isn't another literary field in which the concern has been so intensively with new media technologies and with things technical - not simply thematically, regarding content, but primarily in the formal structures themselves. Briefly, once again, before I outline this program with some key strategies here is a compilation of all those qualities the discourse ascribes to digital poetry.



II. Slogans or Popular definitions of digital media poetry

Within the discourse digital poetry is ascribed an identity so long as it specifically deals with the conditions which computer, Internet (computer networks), and certain software programs and programming languages have to offer. This means that digital poetry is defined by the fact that it may be produced, spread, saved, and received only under these conditions, and not in any other way. In the main the following possibilities have been derived from this or are named repeatedly as criteria:

- the mechanical, algorithmic generation of texts (supporting or complete)

- electronic linkage (in the computer, on Intranet or Internet) of fragments and files of the same or also different media types, derived from this the

- multi- or non-linearity of both text structure and individual reading matter and if required

- multimediality and animation of texts in the broadest sense

- interactivity as a 'dialog' between machine (hard and software) and user as a - dependent on the programming -- reversible or irreversible intervention into the display or data base text, as a telematic communication between different protagonists on the computer network; derived from this

- the shift or even de-differentiation of traditional action roles such as author, reader, editor.

These criteria are specific enough to delimit digital literature from other literature. They have but one flaw: they say nothing about the esthetic or artistic state of digital texts. Online shops, route planners, library catalogs, multimedia encyclopedia, scientific mailing lists or newsforums, erotic chats, search machines or even the homepage of one John Smith or Lieschen Müller might just as well be included here. Once again, when technological conceptualization levels off, the old question of poeticism rears its head. At first the answers which were given here were informatively and esthetically aimed at predictability (Birkhoff); later on they were aimed both cognitively and communicatively at semantic framing (convention of esthetics, coding of the art system). But with this the various criteria could only receive some prefix or other (e.g. artistic or literary interactivity) and little else was gained. Only when we proceed semantically according to art specific conditions do we move on from here. This can be tried via single work analyses, or also with contextualization in reference to existing more concrete programs. If, in addition to technological criteria others such as 'reflection', 'production', 'presentation', 'exemplification' of, or 'experiment' with the technological and media possibilities are considered -- then we have already reached the program of experimental poetry.



III. Affiliation or The birth of digital poetry in the spirit of poetic experiment

The idea of the poetic experiment has circulated internationally amongst literary figures and academic observers since the fifties, although it has a far more ancient history. It marks an historical break, following the global catastrophe of World War and Holocaust, when a new generation, 20 to 30 years old at the time, started to seek out up-to-date and more advanced possibilities of poetry writing. Following the experience of a total abuse of language, media and art, the demand, especially in Central Europe, was for a more radical approach than to simply support a 'realistic' representation function of language. The long-forgotten approaches of the avant-garde in the first decades of the century were rediscovered, and similar interests in approximately the same age group where discovered in various regions of the world. Under the label of concrete poetry jointly launched by the Brazilian Noigandres group and Eugen Gomringer in 1955, artists from Europe (also Eastern Europe), North and South America as well as Asia were soon communicating with each other. Often they cooperated in groups and soon started to meet up in international exhibitions, anthologies, editions, journals. When, by the end of the sixties concrete poetry (primarily the Gomringer variety) was found to be too restricted, numerous partial programs appeared on the scene, such as: visual, sound, and action poetry - increasingly overlapping with general genre programs such as Fluxus, pop art, concept art, mail art or copy art.

Especially around 1967/68 an intellectual climate was noted - at least in Europe - within the context of social, political and cultural movements, which today bears fruit for the discourse on digital poetry and media art: along with this transitional period, the family likeness between experimental poetics developed since the fifties and the philosophical reflection on linguistic turn (e.g. Derrida’s "Grammatology, 1967), the medial revolution (e.g. McLuhan‘s "Gutenberg-Galaxy" 1962, in German 1968) as well as science (Hein von Foerster’s and John von Neumann’s Cybernetics) leaps to the eye.

From the beginning experiment as a program concept was intended not so much to aid the classification of certain texts, but rather to help orient in a certain poetic setting repeatedly said to have the following common criteria:

- the interest in a work being with rather than in the language, i.e. the concentration on its semantics and material aspects as well as its use in connection with other sign systems

- the experiment with new perception and communication media

- to make the processes of producing and understanding esthetic forms a central theme

* linkage and integration and therefore also extension of media and procedures used in more traditional forms of art



* the connection of literature with other arts - particularly with contemporary developments in the fine arts and music - and also with science and politics, the reflection on the limits of literature



- the very rational and cognitively oriented attitude of the producers

- their cooperation in groups and their international integration.

The opening out and diffusion of concrete poetry into a variety of different programs - dependent to a large extent on individual artist personalities - is accompanied by the volatile development in the field of technical media. Language artists experimented as early as the sixties with photography (Jochen Gerz), film and TV (Gerhard Rühm, Timm Ulrichs and Klaus-Peter Dencker) with video (Ernesto de Melo e Castro), later on with neon writings (Mauricio Nannuci, Timm Ulrichs) photocopy (Jürgen Olbrich, Emmett Williams), holography (Eduardo Kac, Richard Kostelanetz). In sound poetry the voice is reinforced and distorted using the electronic possibilities of microphone amplification and alienation (François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin). The new radio play established experiences with stereophonic sound systems, cut and original soundtrack (Friederike Mayröcker, Bill Fontana et.al.). Also the typewriter possibilities were played through: This was the leading medium of concrete poetry mainly because of its flexible typography which could be treated independently from the typesetter. Complementarily there are experiments with handwriting - psychograms for the 'technology of self' (Gerhard Rühm, Carlfriedrich Claus, Valeri Scherstjanoi). Of course the book - the absolute criterion of differentiation according to the digital poetry discourse - was tested for possibilities of extension and deconstruction, for example via kinetic transformation (Raymond Queneau), collage transformation(Jiri Kolar, Franz Mon) or sculptural and architectural transformation (Juan Brossa, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Timm Ulrichs).

The beginnings of computer-based literature did not happen in a vacuum, nor - as is often believed - do they lie in American hyper fiction in the late eighties. They originated much earlier within the catchment area of experimental and concrete poetry, and can be described with a far greater continuity than the digital revolution propaganda with its historical break would have us believe:

First 'stochastic' or 'artificial' texts were produced in 1959 by Theo Lutz within the Stuttgart group surrounding Max Bense, with the help of a program run on the large computer Zuse Z 22. Parallel to this experiments and first exhibitions with pictures created digitally were taking place. Jean Baudot (1964 in Montreal) and Gerhard Stickel (1966 in Darmstadt) produced 'automatic texts'. During these experiments it was not so important to interpret the results, not even the concrete processes in the machine. The main question was how the machine should be interpreted with regard to its esthetic function e.g. in relation to the creativity of the human author. These early approaches were accompanied in particular by subtly differentiated poetology which received its impulses from cybernetics, the information theory and semiotics. As early as 1950 - the year of Allan Turing's pioneering essay "Can a machine think?" - the synthesis of man and machine was explained with an ontological bent by Max Bense in "Literaturmetaphysik". The essays of Oswald Wieners, a member and mentor of the Viennese group, are particularly relevant from a poetics point of view. In them the "Turing Machine" is propagated for as a model of understanding and of esthetic processes. In the book "die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman" 1969 (the improvement of Central Europe, novel) his "bio-adapter" concept ironically anticipates the move into cyberspace.

In the USA Aaron Marcus has been exploring virtual and interactive text space in his "Cybernetic Landscapes" since the end of the sixties, and has developed a poetics program of interactivity, simulation and movement. In France, too, the poetic analyses of computers has been continuous since the early seventies. Background for this were the statements of the "workshop for potential literature" (OULIPO) whose members Paul Fournel, Italo Calvino and Jacques Roubaud were concerned with different procedures of "computer-aided creation processes". The roots of net literature can also be traced back to the early eighties in France: in the specific sense of literature within computer network systems (videotext projects such as "A.C.S.O.O." or " L' Objet Perdu").

Of course there arealso individual artist personalities whose experiments have gradually led them to be occupied with the hypermedia: This can be said of the French mentioned above, it applies to Reinhard Döhl as a member of the Stuttgart Group, and to Augusto de Campos, one of the fathers of concrete poetry. It is valid for pioneers like Ernesto de Melo e Castro or Richard Kostelanetz, or for one of the leading hypertext poets: Jim Rosenberg, and it also applies to younger representatives such as André Vallias who started out in visual poetry.

Following on from this affiliation of digital poetry, it seems obvious to ask whether certain key strategies of experimental poetry can be used to esthetically enrich technological criteria such as 'programming and source codes', 'animation and processuality', 'interactivity' or 'hypermedia'.



IV. Retroperspective or Digital poetics with strategies of the experimental program

When poetological examples are listed here, then this is not in order to assert the continued existence of a certain movement - e.g. concrete poetry - or even to assert the assumption that digital poetry is epigonal. It is precisely this development of concrete poetry as form or movement which - as said - must be considered to have been complete since the late sixties. The selected examples do, however, stand for the experimental program since the fifties as a whole, as well as for the 'intellectual climate' mentioned earlier. They are only intended to illustrate the importance of poetological ideas and strategies for the development of contemporary media poetry in addition to their realization in individual artworks.



1. ‘Concrete material’ and digital medium

"Concrete poem communicates its own structure: structure-content. Its material: word (sound, visual form, semantical charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this material. Concrete poem, by using the phonetical system (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific linguistical area – "verbivocovisual", which shares the advantage of nonverbal communication, without giving up the word’s virtualities. Chronomicro-metering of hazard. Control. Cybernetics. The poem as a mechanism regulating itself: feed-back."

With the notion of 'concrete' or 'material' a fundamental change of reference and function in literary language usage is called for within the program of experimental poetry - exemplary here, the "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" by the Brazilian Noigandres group in 1958: The esthetic interest focuses primarily on the language as a sign system, as a cognition and communication medium, and as the artistic means of creation. It is language itself which is valid in all its qualities – the perceived qualities in particular - as the material which it is necessary to reflect upon and to form – similar to the material of colors, lines, areas in art ("Art concret" by Theo van Doesburg 1930) or in music where tones and sounds are the material ("Musique concrète" Pierre Schaeffer 1948).

As a complement of form, the concept ‘material’ replaces the old pre-modernist definition of substance (German: "Stoff" - which aimed at spirit, meaning, theme, contents, fable etc.) - initially with a tendency to emphasize strongly the 'material', i.e. perceivable side of the signs. Most recently with concept art (and experimental as conceptual poetry) it has become clear that intellectuality, ideas, semantics, codes, can also function as material in the artistic game.

In the meantime, a more neutral idea on offer is the esthetically current idea 'medium', this being the transformation of ‘material’ in terms of a logic of difference - an abstract and highly integrative media concept as Niklas Luhmann has suggested. With this, experimental poetry would have always been media poetry.

From a semiotic point of view, the program outlined in the "Pilotplan" and other poetics manifestos is concerned with the following: that all esthetic word processing be subject to the priority of 'self reference' or 'exemplification' by language or sign complexes. Or, going with system-theory: one always orientates on a level of second order observation which potentially treats all structure and use possibilities of language - as observation medium - according to form aspects.

The poetological statements repeatedly mention the text being ‘reduced’ to the language material which is clear from a design point of view - often only a word or word fragment on the page, concentration on perceptible graphic or phonetic forms - but which, on the contrary, must be seen theoretically as an increase in complexity in possible meanings. Above all else 'reduction' like 'material' and 'concrete' should be seen as an indicator for the move to a higher self-referential observation level.

In practice this indicates a calculated or method-conducted intervention into the language or non-language codes, e.g. by procedures of isolation, contamination, fusion, permutation. In the "Pilot Plan" this is conveyed by the idea "verbivocovisual", or in the deliberately unusual design of the phonetic system (digital, i.e. isolating and distinguishing single sounds) and syntax (analogue in the sense of area syntax as in visual poetry).

Digital poetry gains the following from these principles: If digital poetry requires a corresponding type or genre name according to poetics, then this should exemplify its specific digital or hypermedia structures and processes, its specific type of media. This means it creates events and situations to observe language-usage within the hypermedia. Of course the material is no longer only the word, nor is it, speaking generally, the medium, the character, the media-codes and notations but, of course, their specific manifestations in computers and computer networks. According to 'material' thought, the procedures which stage source codes, programming and interfaces self-referentially are the most important here. Such exemplification is present - also visibly - e.g. in desired clarity when the difference between HTML code and browser interpretation is produced, as in the Japanese group Exonemo's "Discoder" (the "Jodi" group is another classic), or when different symbol formats are contaminated as in the ASCII-Art-Ensemble, which experiments with the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" or when Perl scripts are used to compose, as in the case of Alan Sondheim (each poem a small program - also demonstrated with historical affiliation on Florian Cramer's "Permutations" web site). Of course all the other demonstrations of computer-based features need to be included here, such as hypermedia networking, animation, interactivity - this will be looked at in more detail - or simply the discrepancy between hard and software e.g. in Frank Fietzek's "Bodybuilding" installation which uses a prime mover as interface for text production and reception.

With the demand to design the concrete poem like a self-regulating mechanism according to cybernetic, algorithmic methods the "Pilotplan" of 1958 offers the option to exemplify these principals with the Turing Machine - as mentioned this was occurring in Stuttgart practically, at the time of this manifesto’s publication.

2. "movens": animation and information process

The "Pilot Plan" already has something further to offer: the exhibition of the moment of movement by using a so called time-space-isomorphism: "In a first moment of concrete poetry pragmatics, isomorphism tends to physiognomy – that is a movement imitating natural appearance (motion); organic form and phenomenology of composition prevail. In a more advanced stage, isomorphism tends to resolve itself into pure structural movement (movement properly said); at this phase, geometric form and mathematics of composition (sensible rationalism) prevail".

I think that this phase model can be applied to the present development of digital poetry as far as the question of movement is concerned, namely in the distinction between movement as a perception event on the screen on the one hand (animation) and as a structural movement of the calculations or symbolizing processes and action processes on the other (information processing). The current trend shows a tendency towards the second phase.

In addition to the short note in the Noigandres group manifesto there is another stage important for the establishment of the movement strategy within the program of experimental art and literature: A volume appeared in 1960 containing "documents and analyses for literature, fine arts, music, architecture", entitled "movens" and published by Franz Mon in cooperation with Walter Höllerer and Manfred de la Motte. The literary perspective of this enterprise was aimed at formulating experimental poetics in such a way as to embrace the complete arts with the main theme of movement. Essentially it was all about the esthetic production and processing of sign processes. Umberto Eco's book "the open artwork" appeared two years later with a corresponding opinion: The open artwork is produced most consistently when the activity of awareness and interpretation of those who produce and receive the work can be conceptually expected, and it becomes an "artwork in movement".

Procedurally "movens" is a 'retroperspective' (a concept termed by Cathérine David for the "documenta X") when artists like Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Kurt Schwitters or Gertrude Stein are integrated with the past - from the immediate to the avant-garde. These important figures stand for the process character of art. The same is true for the contemporary examples which among others originate from experimental poetry, light and kinetic sculpture, dynamic theater, electronic music or a 'labyrinthian' architecture. The attention is directed towards the dynamic 'material' (once again!) in the broadest sense of language or symbolic processes.

So you see "movens" too makes the connection of kinetics and process orientation within the idea of movement and thereby supports the poetics base for digitally poetic criteria of animation and information processing. Interesting approaches in the area of digital poetry build entirely on this connection - supported technologically. The French e.g. concerned themselves early on with time in digital texts (since the eighties in the groups ALAMO and LAIRE), namely with the temporal relationship of movement on the screen or text animations on the one hand, and perception possibilities, as well as interactive direct access possibilities within this course of motion on the other. The concern is also to explore the tension between the time units of programmed text, perceived text and read text (e.g. Philippe Bootz). Following on from this understanding of time and movement one is today particularly interested in the staging of information processes (in the computer: e.g. the conversion of text into pictures as in the previously mentioned "Verbarium" by Sommerer & Mignonneau, on the net: e.g. "23:40" by Guido Grigat or "mi_ga's" spam mail art or, as in the recent works of Eduardo Kac, also in the tension between artificial and 'natural' data processing).


3. Audience activity and interactivity

The interest in the process has brought about the fact that not only the activity of producers is conceptualized, but also that of the audience. This has also led to interactivity.

In the fifties the art concept was extended to include open structures and processes. This has led generally to an esthetic attention to symbolic, cognitive and communicative processes and also particularly to the direct incorporation of audience or recipient. This applies to intermedia art, action art, happening art, Fluxus and concept art, and it also applies to experimental poetry developing in close contact with these approaches. In detail, the concern here is with the psychophysical conditions in the formulation process -- with a rare concentration and differentiation e.g. in Carlfriedrich Claus' 'Exerzitien'. And at the same time, while the author function is relativized, these are also projected onto a 'new' active recipient who comprehends and completes the creation process. The 'new reader' has become an ideal figure for open and self-reflexive perception, interpretation and comprehension processes. The program of experimental poetry can no longer do without this personal projection.

The interactivity of digital poetry refines this program in the respect that now the ideal becomes technically clear or is 'empirisized': On the one hand, the activity of the user is often programmed - self-referential in the best cases (as a switch, form or input function e.g. in Philippe Bootz' "poème à lecture unique" or in "Assoziationsblaster" by Alvar Freude and Dragan Espenschied) or it is symbolized (e.g. by hyper-textual role play in Luc Courchesne’s "Portrait One"). On the other hand the user appears embodied in the game with the machine or already as its part- e.g. when producing text by means of a bicycle (Shaw’s famous "Legible City") or a prime mover (Fietzek's "Bodybuilding"). At all events interactivity lives off the analogy and the dialog between user and computer, which conceives both as data processing systems with hard and software components which are made to intersect. Even the first text generators were inspired by this analogy - more or less de-constructively.

4 Intermediality and hypermediality

A further strategy in the discourse of digital poetry is hypermediality. This is regarded as an extension of hypertext, only that not only text files, but also audio files, picture files and video files are inter-switched with each other and issued as a "Gesamtdatenwerk" (a ‘complete data work’, an expression termed by Roy Ascott). According to Roberto Simanowski here we are dealing with "the at present [i.e.:1999] perhaps most relevant type of digital literature", which takes the hypertextual inheritance of its predecessor into multimedia. This understanding of hypermediality is, however, reduced to the multimedia surface of the output devices, and insufficiently fulfills the specific requirements of the computer and corresponding artistic works. The digital media hype here is not what is produced with effective publicity at more or less cunning ’verbiaudiovisions’, but rather the fact that each perception medium is coded digitally, i.e. alphanumerically (in the end with '1' and '0'): The interesting poetic works build upon this in accordance with the experimental program and the conceptualization of concrete ‘material' (see IV.1): Moving pictures, indeed whole films are published as a writing process in ASCII (ASCII Art Ensemble); text input is converted into picture structures ("Verbarium"); with user interventions in the HTML source text, the whole text picture generated by the browser for display output becomes deconstructed ("Discoder").

With these procedures concepts like 'multimedia' or ’Gesamtdatenwerk' lead the wrong way (in the direction of mass-media spectacle and back to Richard Wagner's totalitarian 'Gesamtkunstwerk’). The strategies of visual or also sound or concrete poetry are fundamentally more informative when they haven't simply concentrated on linking disparate media but rather on the intermedial exemplification thereof.

The conceptualization of intermediality according to poetics is helpful here as carried out by Dick Higgins in the middle of the sixties in the catchment area of intermedia art and experimental poetry. For Higgins it is all about a 'conceptual fusion' of medial conditioned horizons (i.e. media concepts realized culturally and individually). "Conceptual fusion" refers to the fact that we are not dealing with a mixture of media (this is why the counter-concept 'mixed media' is used in analogy to today's multimedia) but rather with an artificial artistic production of the gap or the break between traditional forms (or coding) of media. This means that those media (writing, pictures, sound etc.) which are accessed, are presented self-referentially as symbolic forms. Conceptually they therefore dissolve themselves - a second order observation - in an imaginary meta medium.

The extension of visual or sound or intermedial poetry with digital or hypermedial literature as in the examples mentioned above consists in the following: The conceptual or also ideational semantics of the thought of fusion (also described as strategy of a diffuse 'meta medium') is conveyed in strategies of technical or syntactic wording in computer symbol languages. Or to use spatial imagery: the horizontal axis of perceptible inter-media (e.g. a "Schriftzeichnung" [written drawing] by Gerhard Rühm) is extended by a vertical axis of programming (e.g. via self-referential interventions in the HTML or Perl script code). This also corresponds to the 'empirisation' - as illustrated on interactivity - of existing strategies of experimental poetry.



V. Résumé or "Texts in the spaces in between"

The attempt to prevent the poetic occupation with digital media from restingon a description which relies on the wordings of the 'consciousness industry' (only today does Ardorno's invective seem charged correctly), this attempt leads to an intermediary discourse which must interweave evolved conceptualizations of poetics and technology.

We hereby avoid an additional accessing of the old dualism of two worlds (C.P. Snow) in which one might simply switch more or usually less competently to the technical side. Opposed to this, literature appears within the program of experiment as a part of the technically and medially coined world which is at the same time recursively observed from a literary angle. This procedure has been the only way to locate the site of digital literature within the net of literatures, i.e. in the system of literary communication. The first reference point of technically oriented or digital poetry is the specific context of - art and literature: its protagonists, works, discourses, programs!

With the allocation of digital poetry to the program of experimental media poetry, its performance and function also brighten (at the same time both externally as a scientific observation and internally as a demand of poetics): If poetry is symbol art and if 'digital' means the technology of universal symbolization (or description), then we are here dealing with the perception and experience of symbolical symbolization -- at the end a 'dia-bolical' venture which literally throws aside the mechanics or the conditions and possibilities of symbolizing. If literature is art or poetry in the word-sense of 'creating and producing' (poiesis) and if 'digital' means technical in the same sense, then things technical - dynamic material and material process at the same time - also appear to be self-referential here. Digital poetry reveals the possibilities of present media cultural practice, i.e. current ways of our world making.

In other words: here we are dealing with the one place in literature in which, as nowhere else, the function of literature in the technical age is made clear, but with a thoroughly critical, yes evil (diabolical) look into the interior dynamics of technical ways of thinking and action patterns. This also implies a continuous ideology criticism of things technical which has yet to be formulated with such clarity elsewhere. From this angle, digital poetry intensifies and illuminates the function which the experimental program has generally fulfilled excellently since the fifties - excellent in so far as the question of technology is treated not only thematically but mainly 'technically' here with all available means. It is this function of the poetical experiment in general which becomes clear through digital poetry and the present discourse, also looking back historically.

Strategy, (inter-) medium or material, movement, activity - under these poetological circumstances, digital texts as experimental poetry always lie somewhere 'in between'. Literally, they are 'media poetry', open texts aimed at complex medial, communicative and cognitive processes. In keeping with Franz Mon (1961) these are "Texte in den Zwischenräumen" - texts in the spaces in between.

Original-URL: http://www.brueckner-kuehner.de/block/p0et1cs.htm

Above copied from: http://www.netzliteratur.net/block/p0et1cs.html

Laurie Anderson "Life on a String"

Rolling Stone Album review of Life on a String

Don't let the deadpan voice, arch phrasing and avant-garde haircut fool you. Despite her forbidding performance-art reputation, Laurie Anderson is a singer-songwriter of crushing poignance - a minimalist painter of melancholy moods who addresses universal themes in the vernacular of the commonplace. She's at her best on Life on a String, her first studio album in seven years. Horns dance like Mardi Gras revelers through "The Island Where I Come From," and Van Dyke Parks' daring string arrangement imbues "Dark Angel" with impish humor. But the overall tone is sparse, haunted, intimate. Vertigo-inducing violins and luminous bass tones speak Anderson's language - a poetry of loneliness that peaks through "Pieces and Parts" and the brief instrumental "Here With You"; towers majestically on the deathbed meditation "Slip Away"; then walks away with the album on the impossibly fragile, beautifully realized title track.
GREG KOT
(RS 876 - August 30, 2001)

above copiede from: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/laurieanderson/ albums/album/111744/review/5941827/life_on_a_string

manifesto for a new poetry visual and phonic, Pierre Garnier

1962

Once we lived safely beneath our stratum of air. Now we are waves spouting in the cosmos. How can we expect our words to remain wrapped up in the atmosphere of the sentence?

Let them be reunited, like ourselves, to cosmic space--word constellations on the white page.

Every word is an abstract picture.

A surface. A volume.

A surface on the page. A volume when spoken.

Gamier emphasized the necessity for a break with the old rhythms:

The rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening the reader's mind.

We listen to the purring of Racine but do not understand it. In poetry we become aware of the universe--for it to be based upon the enumeration of feet is an absurdity.

It makes no difference whether FER or AVION have one or two syllables. What counts is their meaning, the space which the words themselves occupy upon the printed page,

the vibrations they set up in fact the volume which they enclose-immense and horizontal in the case of FER, infinite but with a note of disquiet for AVION

The structure of the sentence would also have to go:

The structure of the sentence has caused the same damage as the rhythms of poetry. What a difference there is between: "The tiger is coming to drink at the river bank" and the single name: TIGER!

The poet is left with words stripped of all worn out structural trappings:

Words are as hard and as scintillating as diamonds.

The word is an element.

The word is a material.

The word is an object.

For those who know how to look at them, some words possess a remarkable topography.

TRANSATLANTIQUE, for instance, rocks and seas, peaks and abysses--why, even the moon cannot be any richer in craters and parched valleys, in rhythms and beauties.

Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk and the foliage are the visible aspects of a tree.

Underneath are the roots, the ideas.

We must grind our well-worn language to dust--in other words, make the individual words scintillate.

We must do away with imprecise terms, adjectives, for example--or again use them as nouns, as substance, that is to say, as material.

But the word cannot be set on the page unless it is in harmony with the atmosphere of the poem.

What is more, the value of each word is modified by the fact that the poem belongs no longer to a flux but to a static system.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/pierregarnier_manifesto.htm

Reconciling Interiors: The Screen as Installation, James Charlton

Bert: “It’s easy. Now let’s see.
You think…. you wink….
you do a double blink.
You close your eyes and… .jump.”
and the objects that surround it.
Jane: “Is something supposed to happen?”
[Walsh, 1964.]

Just as Bert fails to “jump” into the world within the picture drawn on the footpath in Mary Poppins, so is contemporary art failing to understand the relationship between the screen [1] and the installational context of which it is part. While Walt Disney could rely on a timely tune and a special effect to fool the viewer, contemporary video installation has no such sleight of hand with which to assist the audience in making the transition between the modality of the screen and the modality of the installation. Instead the viewer remains stranded on the footpath and must constantly cross the threshold that is the monitor, oscillating between the information on the screen. While visual arts practice has for 40 years2 been essentially a multimedia discipline, the screen is afforded a treatment within installation art that perpetuates a sense of difference and separates it from other media. [2]

Indebted to modernist notions of truth to materials, installation art brings together a disparate body of materials and integrates them into a cohesive statement. The contextual reading of media in which the associations and surrounding contexts are accepted as central to the work, is the basis of not only contemporary art practice but also the gallery. Even the idealized neutrality of the “white cube” is subject to this contextual reading.

Yet the screen has largely escaped contextual reading and is treated in a manner inconsistent with other media in the installation. The apparatus of the screen — i.e. the monitor — is frequently ignored both as an object within the installation and as the context for the screen. In this way the monitor assumes a position parallel to the historical role of The Frame in painting. [3] It separates that which is interior from that which is exterior. It becomes the interface between the spatiality of the screen, the interior, and the spatiality of the installation, the exterior. Why is it that installation art, despite having integrated almost all other media into art practice, has failed to bridge the gap between the interior of the screen and the exterior of the installation? Is there a fundamental difference in the way that we experience screen media that predisposes an incompatibility between these elements or has contemporary art practice simply failed to find the “spoonful of sugar” that will enable it, like Mary Poppins, [3] to swallow its medicine and make a seamless transition, back to the painting on the footpath?

This paper explores the reading of the screen in an installation art context in order to identify strategies for the integration of the screen in installation art. [4] The apparatus, the image and the space. The video monitor, computer screen and data show are the common apparatus of the image in installation art. [5] In each case the image presented is site specific, not only to the apparatus that is its source but also to the “site” that is the origin of the image. Both installation and screen image thus become site specific elements. A screen image is never without a source;6 the source being the apparatus that projects the image onto a surface. The apparatus is the monitor or the projector inclusive of the screen surface. The apparatus is the frame separating “two absolutely different spaces that somehow coexist” [Manovich, 1995, p.1]. It is the border between interior and exterior. It is however only the secondary site within which the image is located. The primary site is that of its origin, where it was made: in the case of the video image, where it was filmed; in the case of the computer-generated image, the software that was used. This is the space of the screen interior. It is based in the relation between the image [4] and a space that is “elsewhere”. This reading treats the image as a representation that never becomes an autonomous original that is a property of the apparatus alone. The installation is the space within which both these sites – the apparatus and the elsewhere — are contextualised. It is the exterior space separated from the interior image by the apparatus — the monitor, the frame. Installation is often site specific [7]. Like the screen image the installation exists in a particular space and belongs to a specific period of time. It is radically changed if it is re-made or exhibited elsewhere.[8] Both screen image and installation relate to a specific site. Installation is present in its own site, whereas the screen image is premised in a site elsewhere.

Contemporary art would have us see the screen as a strange non-site that is neither the image, the apparatus nor the physical context. The screen in this sense does not exist, or rather exists only as a concept defined by other parts. Absent if any one element is missing, the screen is an authentic illusion. It exists as a product of the vector between the parts that resembles Barthes tableau. [9] Our attitudes to these elements — the apparatus, the image and the space — form a complex set of relationships, a triad of shifting perceptions and contradictions, which the viewer must navigate.

[5] The Image.

The notion of the image as a product of “elsewhere” is supported by two seemingly contradictory stances that present
the image as either a window or a mirror. By extending Lev Manovich’s [1995] analysis of the classical screen, it is possible to locate the image within the framework of the window established by pictorial representation, a representation that is “not defined directly by imitation” [Barthes, 1973, p.69], and is extended by cinema, television and subsequently amended by computers. Manovich asserts that in each of these cases visual culture has been largely premised on “the existence of another virtual space, another three-dimensional world enclosed by a frame, and situated inside our normal space” [Manovich, 1995, p.1]. Failing to analyse the composition of the screen, Manovich confuses the screen with the image. It is the image that is the product of another space and not the tripartite relationship of the screen. Nevertheless Manovich clearly establishes a chronology between the illusionary window of pictorial representation established by painting and our reading of contemporary screen images [10].

Anna McCarthy more clearly separates the image from the screen in her analysis of television in non-domestic spaces. As part of exploring the relationship between the screen image and its physical location McCarthy analyses marketing strategies that employ the screen image to promote products. These strategies are an attempt to “collapse spaces” [6] [McCarthy, 2001, p.161] by employing a “spatiotemporal ideology of the screen as a kind of window, binding one place to another and bringing the spectator closer to another (real or imaginary) location” [McCarthy, 2001, p.162]. This “collapse of space” is a result of carefully contrived “semiotic interplay between images and things” (McCarthy, 2001, p132). McCarthy ‘s work relies on a reading of the image as a window to elsewhere. For her it is a multi-directional window that can both transport the viewer elsewhere and transform the space it appears in. This duality is the basis for Vito Acconci’s Television, Furniture and Sculpture: The room with the American View that enables us to conceive of the screen image as both window and mirror. Acconci [1990] asserts that it is naïve to perceive the image as a window to elsewhere due to the physicality of the apparatus that contains it. Acconci proposes a notion of the image as “some kind of distorting, inside-out mirror” (Acconci p125). The content of the image might be the world elsewhere, but the subject is a reflection of the viewer and their perception of the world. In this way the image can be seen as “placeless: at least its place can’t be determined” (Acconci, 1990, p132). For Acconci, then, “video installation is a conjunction of opposites” (Acconci 1990, p132), in which the placelessness of video and the site specificity of the installation mirror each other, forming a narcissistic reflection that Rossalind Krauss (1978) would claim is the medium of video. In analysing Acconci’s video Centers, 1971, in which the artist points for 20 minutes at the screen, Krauss presents the screen as a mirror that holds the image of the artist in the narcissistic gaze between the camera and monitor. The narcissism of video’s gaze that is [7] present in the image effectively eliminates the exterior world of the installation from the image’s interior. The image, bound up in the reflection of its source, cannot acknowledge its context. It is a reflection of the artist and the subject but not the space that surrounds it. The artist becomes the elsewhere that is made present within the installation.

I have argued here that the image is site specific in that it is premised in a space that is elsewhere. This argument does not exclude the reading of the image as either window or mirror, as both are representations — views or reflections — of that which is elsewhere. The image can thus be located; it is not “placeless” even though that place may not be known. The image belongs to a place that is other than the space of the installation, a place that is its source. The image is thus always separated from the installation by its site specificity, which exists outside of the site specificity of the installation. This site specificity differentiates the image from other installational elements/objects. While objects may reference another context their source does not lie elsewhere. They exist autonomously in the space of the installation and within the strategies defined by the artist. [11]

The Apparatus

The image is not, however, autonomous. It relies upon the electronic apparatus of the screen to give it form. The apparatus is a presentation device based on the format of frame. It is easy to understand televisions, computer monitors, PDAs (Personal Diary Assistants) and cellphones in this way because the surface that receives the image is an integrated part [8] of the physical equipment. The screen frame, however, is not reliant on proximity to the image and may even be so removed as to escape our notice. Video projections have established a niche within contemporary practice by working between the conventions of painting and theatre. The datashow effectively hangs the image on the wall of the gallery and to a large extent is disregarded by the viewer in the same way that a conventional frame is. The darkened gallery space becomes a theatre and the image becomes something akin to Manovich’s “classical screen” which is frontal and disembodied. [12] Margaret Morse suggests that the projection is a strange inversion of interiority and exteriority in which an image that is “ nothing but light” [Morse, 1990, p.162] is emitted from the interior to be manifested in the exterior. Not only does this notion not bare comparison to the light emitting from a monitor but it conceives of the screen as a two dimensional device. For the video projection the frame is not the surface of the wall but the dark invisible space between the projector and the wall. Viewers who haplessly walk into this space traverse the frame and are literally entering the image, much to the irritation of other viewers whose expectation of the image has been interrupted. A frame then is not necessarily visible but is a requirement of the image that cannot exist without it. So when Manovich asserts that “with VR, the screen has disappeared altogether” [Manovich 1995, p.2), he is confusing the screen with the frame. While the virtual and actual spaces have coincided to eliminate the frontality of the “classical screen”, the scale [9] and relative placement of the viewer have not changed but the unseen frame of the VR apparatus has obscured them. As Darren Tofts [1999] points out in Your place or mine? Locating Digital Art, virtual reality requires a meta-place that is “actual”. Without this “actual” space virtual reality becomes reality. The very notion of the virtual then predisposes that its image is framed. That we can’t see the apparatus of the frame does not mean it does not exist. A framing apparatus then is a prerequisite of the image in order for that image to remain separate from that which surrounds it – the space of the installation.

The space.

The space is the place of the object and the viewer. The apparatus exists as an object in the space yet simultaneously separates the space from the image it presents. [13] The apparatus mediates the relationship between the space and the image. Installation art is premised on establishing relationships between its parts. Installation’s content then is located more in the space between its elements than it is in the identity of the elements themselves. The parts are treated as signs in a text.
McCarthy includes the screen as part of the installation’s textual field, stating: “At such times the wall’s dense semiotic interplay between images and things extends to encompass the material on screen as well” [McCarthy, 2001, p.132]. She substantiates this by asserting that elements are capable of “referencing each other across linguistic and material [10] categories”. McCarthy sees the screen as being present in the space of the installation whereas in fact the screen, as I have argued, is comprised of three elements, one of which is located, as McCarthy acknowledges, “elsewhere”. This makes it impossible for the screen to fully participate in the discourse of the parts that comprise the installation. Fig.2 – Anna McCarthy. Monitor in a restaurant. McCarthy’s own methodology supports this impossibility. Using photography to document the television in a wide variety of locations, McCarthy presents photographs to accompany her analysis.14 In these photographs the screen image is often so unreadable or so in contrast with its environment as to effectively separate it from the objects that surround it. In the most extreme example the screen is nothing more than a glowing rectangle – it is literally missing from the space (See Fig.2).

I am not naïve enough to argue that the photograph is a “truthful” depiction of the site; after all, it too is an image that belongs to a place that is elsewhere. But I do want to propose that [11] these photographs expose the subtlety of the dislocation that occurs almost seamlessly between the image and its environment. This dislocation is as unnoticeable and as instinctual as a blink.15 The shift between the interior and the exterior has become so established as a frame that it becomes an almost invisible boundary. But as is the case with the frame apparatus of VR, our failure to see it does not mean we do not perceive it. It is, then, the viewer not the artist who connects the space of the screen and the space of the installation and breaks down the proscenium arch that is the apparatus. It is, as Margaret Morse points out, the viewer “who is the subject of the experience” [Morse, 1990, p.159] — their own experience, and an object in the space. Is it here in the vector between image, apparatus and space that the viewer is able to experience the screen installation almost as a seamless whole?

In discussing Peter Campus’s mem, 1974, Krauss observes that as soon as “he stands outside the triangular field of the works, the viewer sees nothing but the large, luminous plane of one of the walls in a darkened room” [Krauss, 1978, p.188]. The screen in McCarthy’s photograph appears as a glowing rectangle because the viewer has been removed from the work by the camera. In the viewer we find the installations gest [16] described by Barthes [1973] in which disparate sites, for Barthes the past and the present, are brought together. The viewer located in the vectors of the installation literally connects the site of the installation with that of the screen. The screen and the installation are not otherwise integrated. The viewer is thus split [12] between two site-specific locations — the actual space of the gallery installation and the meta-space of the image.[17] This has the effect of doubling “the viewing subject who now exists in two spaces, the familiar physical space of his/her real body and the virtual space of an image within the screen” [Manovich, 1995, p.6]. While the installation viewer is thus imprisoned within the vector that is Plato’s cave,18 the viewer is not immobilized. S/he simply sees nothing if s/he steps “outside of the vector formed by these three elements” [Krauss, 1978, p.188]. An alternative interpretation of the divided viewer that does not incapacitate the viewer is found in Guy Debord’s notions of the spectacle in which the viewer is both subject and object. In this sense the artwork, inclusive of the viewer, is both mirror and window, real and illusory, actual and virtual. Any separation that we perceive “is itself part of the unity of the world” [Debord, 1967, p.1], of the combined viewer/installation relationship, [19] that is housed in the “world” of the gallery. Seemingly Debord has found another way to dismantle the frame and separate the image from the space, the internal from the external. To do this is simply to impose a new frame, the frame of the gallery. Continuing to apply this inclusiveness to each successive layer of framing would reduce everything to sameness. However, the unified world that Debord envisages would still require Toft’s meta-place to exist in. The viewer is thus destined to remain in the vector between image and space where s/he must find a means of navigating its structures. [13]

Tactics for the viewer.

Without the viewer the vector beaks down. The interplay of parts ceases as its elements become solipsistic and isolated. The viewer then assumes a pivotal role in activating the work and is the central element in a framework contrived by the artists. The viewer thus informs the “strategies” that the artist employs in the artwork. [20]

The artist, like the “strategies” of Michel de Certeau, is isolated from his/her environment. They do not directly figure in the viewer’s vector and are only evident through the artwork that is the strategy. [21] For de Certeau a strategy serves as the interior, “the base from which relations with an exteriority… can be managed” [de Certeau, 1984, p.36]. De Certeau also asserts that outcomes are as much a result of actions as they are of the structures that govern them. These actions are the “tactics” of those operating within the strategic systems. A “tactic” then is something that occurs within a “place that belongs to another” [de Certeau, 1984, p.36]. The viewer and his/her “tactics” remain exterior, outside of the work, informing it and navigating within it but not determining its nature. While the relationship between the viewer and the artist is clear, the relationship between the screen and the installation is less clear given that both, being separate sites, possess “strategies” independent of each other. Within the larger strategic construct of the artist they remain exterior to each other. [14]
The two strategic positions only achieve awareness of each other via the vector established by the viewer who is split in two, expected to conform to two sets of rules. To cope with this the viewer develops “tactics” that enable him/her to integrate the elements. This is how Anna McCarthy failed to recognize the blank screen in her photographs and why the data show and VR interface are often not seen as frames. Viewers willingly blinker themselves, choosing to ignore the conflicting spatialities as they strive to make the work make sense. [22]

It is an integration that is not authored by the artist, for the artist does not conceive of the split. The art world has accepted the “tactic” of the blink, and it is ignored in the same way that the Modernist plinth was not read as part of the work. It is integration of content but not of subject. [23] The screen and the space remain separated. Even the tactics of the viewer cannot integrate them. This must be achieved within the work by the artist, so that there is a singular strategy that governs the installation (the screen and the space) and the viewer is not torn between two locations.
The artist, then, must find a strategy for integration that removes the viewer from the vector between the screen and the space. This strategy must enable the screen, the space and the viewer [24] to share the same interiority, rather than attempt to isolate the viewer in an exterior. The viewer cannot become passive in the work, for according to de Certeau they will continue to develop “tactics” for interacting with it. The viewer must therefore become active. Interactivity may in fact be the “strategy” by which the artist is able to achieve integration. [15]

Interactivity.

This possibility is explored by Dr McKenzie Wark where he identifies interactivity as “the medium that gives one thing, and one thing only, back to the artist; the ability to determine relations” [Wark, 1995, p.280]. Wark [1995] argues that instead of giving more choices in constructing the meaning of a work, interactive multimedia rigidly structures the way a viewer (or should I say participant) experiences a work. By integrating everything [25] Wark conceives of a singular dimensionality, one in which the artist reclaims control of the art work:

Along with one dimension and one dimension alone the possibility of constraint returns. And with constraint comes the possibility of making meaning. That one dimension of the manifold, almost infinite dimensions of aesthetics is relation. Relations between sounds, images, movements, words – between any and everyform. Now the artist can install a limit within the work to the omnivorous desires of the viewer, listener, interpreter. The godlike power of the other on the end of art to paw at the object, flip through pages, flick their eyes over the artwork and on to the next can be taken back and given to the artist. [Wark, 1995, p.280] Wark specifically identifies the interactivity of digital multimedia as the site of this one dimensionality. But making the screen alone interactive will not unify the screen and the installation. The installation will remain outside of the screen. The installation space must [16] be located within the screen and the screen within the installation space so that there is only one site for the viewer to interact with.
This would require installation to relinquish its dominance over the screen [26] and allow the “eleswhereness” of the screen to become part of the nature of installation. Similarly the screen would accept the otherness of installation. Installation and screen would share the same site specificity.[27]

This bears comparison to Debord’s unified world — a concept that becomes problematic if the gallery is excluded and becomes a meta-space. To achieve integration, the integrated screen installation must be located in the world and not separated from the experience of the viewer.

Dieter Daniels identifies the Internet as a site where such an installation might exist when he says “the Internet dissolve(s) all contextual relationships” [Daniels, 2000, p.15]. Viewers and location are brought together by the Internet, as their content is specific to one location and applicable to all. For the Internet to become an installation site it must do more than simply serve as a pinboard for paintings. It must be active in the content of the work – it must be site specific. “Virtual galleries” operate primarily as extensions of “real galleries”. They do not establish an active relationship with the net as context. They remain an image on a monitor, referential to that which is elsewhere. To become a site capable of integrating the screen [17] space and the installation space, the content of the net-based art must address its location and the location must be both content and media.

Net.Art as installation

The same anti-institutional, anti-commodity stance that gave rise to the land-art28 of the 1970s in which artists began making work in the environment outside of existing gallery structures has produced Net.Art. The term Net.Art was coined in 1995 as a result of a scrambled email.[29] It has subsequently been adopted to define what by nature is a diverse intangible practice that uses the Internet as a site of both content and media.
Still largely ignored, and for a long time unnamed by the art world, Net.Art is autonomous and amorphic. Its decentralised and diverse nature stems from the manner in which it is a product of the Internet. Net.Art is too playful to be taken seriously and too cynical to be anarchistic. It implants itself in the very institutionalised systems it critiques – those of classification, communication, commodification. Perhaps the most useful definition to date is to be found in the “manifesto” Introduction to Net.Art by Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin. In the irony of sections like Critical Tips and Tricks for the Successful Modern Net.Artist [Bookchin, 1999, p.3], this Net.Art project enables the viewer to assemble a chimerical understanding of Net.Art. Net.Art eludes any clear definition, a definition that would be its demise, because there is nothing to define other than the activity of the user/viewer. [18]
By turning the viewer into content in this way Net.Art projects create a feedback loop between the viewers and the artwork. This parallels Acconci’s Centres, 1971, but instead of the artist pointing a finger at the monitor it is the viewer who is at the epicentre of the work.
Fig.3 - C5, Softsub.
C5’s Softsub project (Fig.3) that scans the composition of users’ hard drives, plots their data profiles on a comparative grid and restructures their hard drive, typifies the way that Net.Art turns viewers into content. The artist has simply managed information and compiled a database. Content is derived from the input of users/viewers interacting with the work. The information supplied is itself what constitutes the work. Exhibited as part of the 2002 Whitney Biennale, 1.1 (Fig.4), another C5 project, eliminates the need for direct user input. Instead it uses existing Internet data to provide a visualisation of the web. The C5 software searches the web for possible IP addresses and maps them as a pixel value on the screen. The viewer can navigate the web by selecting a pixel. [19]
Fig.4 - C5, 1:1.
Lawrence Rinder notes, “1:1 collapses the distinction between map and interface. Its interface suggests that it is the environment it refers to” [Whitney, 2002, p.116]. The spatial location of the sites around the globe has become actualised in the image on the screen. The screen has become a geographical terrain, an installation space in which the project exists. It is no coincidence that metaphors such as surfing, navigating or architecture have become an integral part of both web design and use. Metaphors are, as Thomas Erickson points out, “an invisible web of terms and associations that underlie(s) the way we speak and think about a concept” [Erickson, 1990, p.21].
If it is hard to conceive of a screen as a spatially defining agent, consider James Buckhouse and Holly Brubach’s Tap, 2002 (Fig.5), in which PDAs become the screen. Users/viewers select one of Tap’s animated characters to download onto their PDA. This character can be “taught” a dance routine, take lessons and give a recital by beaming information to another Tap user’s PDA. [20]
Fig.5- Buckhouse and Brubach. Tap.
What is interesting about the work in the context of this essay is the way that the mobility of the PDA engages the screen as a spatial coordinate. The mobility of the PDA that could be anywhere heightens our awareness of its physical presence in space. Its spatial autonomy, or that of the user, makes it a spatial agent. The PDAs effectively become the walls of the gallery outside of which there is nothingness. The act of beaming, while less tangible than an Internet connection, is somehow a more physical connection between participants who must achieve relative proximity to exchange data. While the Internet, due to its scale, becomes hard to conceive of spatially, it is an interrelation of sites in exactly the same way as the PDA in TAP.
Encased in a self-referential framework delineated by images in remote locations, Net.Art becomes the site where installation space and screen space are integrated. Every monitor, [21] every room, every user connected to the Internet is part of the installation. It is a sculptural installation that exists as a result of the apparatus that frames it, the Internet. [30]
In bringing both image and space together within one site-specific frame Net.Art does not trap the viewer between spatialities. It exists only in one space — the screen installation of which the viewer is part. The screen image and the space are reduced to one dimension [31] along with the viewer. The only element not part of the work is the artist.
Net.Art then is nothing but a rhizome of autonomous sites. Remove any one of its parts – the image, the site, the monitor or the viewer — and the artist is left with nothing but a strategy. Net.Art is pure strategy whose contents are determined by the tactics of the viewer/user.

Conclusion.

The problematised relationship between the screen image and the installation is premised on a spatial incompatibility. The screen belongs to a space that is “elsewhere” and can never be fully present in the installation. This “elsewhere-ness”, while abstract, is not placeless. It ties the image to a meta-space equal in its specificity to that of the installation. The viewer is compromised and must develop tactics to shift between modalities. The tactical “blink”, which enables the viewer to shift between the present and the elsewhere, also traps the viewer in the vector between image and installation. Proximity does not integrate image and the installation. The semiotic interplay between parts where the [22] meaning of the installation is distilled cannot operate across this vector, or operates in a way that is inconsistent with the relationship of other parts within the installation.
The tactical blink is a response to the doubling of the viewing subject who is divided between two site-specific locations each of which posses a strategy independent of the other. This blink does not place the screen image as an equal object in the space. It is an act of selective omission.
In order to integrate, image and installation must be specific to the same site – each existing within the other. In the way that it brings together structure and content32, Net.Art appears to be positioning itself as such an installation site. Intangible in both its identity and physicality, Net.Art offers opportunities for sculptural practice to engage the spatiality of screen and installation on equal terms.
Net.Art, autonomous and disrespectful, has largely avoided the scrutiny of the art world. Its inclusion in recent exhibitions such as the 2002 Whitney Biennale suggests that this will be shortlived. As the art world’s disciplinarity remodels itself once again to embrace this outsider, will the inclusive site-specific non-locatablity of Net.Art that makes it effective be retained, or will it end up on the footpath next to Bert, waiting for Walt Disney’s remake of
Mary Poppins? [23]

[1]
This essay treats the screen as a concept of framing parallel to Barthe’s notion of the
tableau (Barthes, 1973, p.75). It exists as a product of the monitor (apparatus), the image
(video) and the space (installation).

[2]
The exhibition, The Art of Assemblage Museum of Modern Art, New York 1961 can be
sited as the point from which visual arts practice became interdisciplinary. However, the
first multimedia works in contemporary practice can be attributed to Pablo Picasso (Guitar,
1912).

[3]
Contemporary painting has largely done away with the convention of the “frame” as
separate from the artwork. Instead, painting addresses its boundaries as an integral concept
within the work.

[4]
This notion of integration privileges the installation as the dominant site into which the screen must fit. Integration in these terms is a prejudiced concept premised on the domination of an established disciplinarity over that, which is new. Strangely, installation, the Johnny-come-lately of contemporary art, finds itself entrenched within the establishment of the art world where once it was the radical outsider striving for acceptance. This is the integration-turned-assimilation to which new media are subject. Thus the screen is in the position of defining its identity within the installation context. It is expected to define itself in terms of installation rather than to negotiate a position based on its own intrinsic qualities (to develop tactics that enable it to function within installation).

[5]
The image produced by the video monitor, computer screen and data show all involve hardware that has physical presence in a space. With the data show we are reminded of Lev Manovich’s classical screen and its proscenium arch, but denied this reading by the installation which forces us to acknowledge the data projector as a source for the image.
While physically distanced from the screen the image/source relationship is no different from that of the TV monitor and the image. In fact it is more pervasive in the installation as it operates across the space.

[6]
In Plato’s cave, the source is the light by which the image is projected on the wall of the cave.

[7]
The term “site specific” came into currency within the visual arts in the 1960s as artists began to explore process-based and ephemeral works.

[8]
All installation is not site specific in that its environment is part of the conception of the work. Most installations are responsive to and inclusive of the site to the extent that they become site specific and can be distinguished from other forms of art which are “installed” in a gallery in a manner consistent with the conventions of that space.

[9]
“The tableau is a cut-out segment with clearly defined edges irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view” [Barthes, 1973, p.70].

[ 10]
Manovich extends this argument beyond the dual windows of the modern computer to the window of virtual reality, at which point his failure to deconstruct the screen confuses his argument.

[ 11]
I exclude from this discussion artworks that are so fused with the non-art world as to become indistinguishable from it in a manner premised in Beuys’ “art is life”.

[ 12]
Manovich’s notion of the screen is based largely on Roland Barthes’ reading of the screen as an incorruptible segment isolated from everything which surrounds it. See page 6.

[ 13]
The Internet window in remote locations is not inconsistent with this premise. However in certain circumstances the www is able to challenge this reading. See page 9 Net.Art as installation.

[ 14]
McCarthy discusses her methodology in pages 20-26 with extensive footnotes regarding photography [McCarthy, 2001, p.22 footnote 53]. McCarthy acknowledges here the problems of documenting these sites and the indistinct quality of many of her early attempts. It is interesting that she resorted in many cases to sketches of the environments that enable her to present the monitor as an equal in the space.

[ 15]
As our eye moves between the keyboard and the monitor image we involuntarily blink as a means of cutting between scenes. This cutaway device is parallel to that found in film and video where a break in continuity can be achieved by cutting away to another shot.

[ 16]
[Barthes, 1973. pp.69-78].

[ 17]
See Peter Campus’s mem (1974).

[ 18]
Plato talks of more than a captured audience. He is addressing the contextual readings of truth and knowledge and the problem of shifting between contextual paradigms. In our contemporary context, the exterior space of the installation and the interior meta-space of the screen.

[ 19]
Debord’s combined spectacle/spectator relationship to the mirror bears comparison to Michel Foucault’s Recognition by Mirror in the Birth of the Asylum. Madness and Civilization. In Paul Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (1991) London. Penguin Books.
(p152) – “without surface or exterior limits Madness would see itself, would be seen by itself – pure spectacle and absolute subject.”

[ 20]
There is logically a point here where the audience becomes the author. But as with Debord’s spectator/spectacle relationship this would simply shift the authorship of the work endlessly outwards in meta-space as each layer of authorship is subsumed.

[ 21]
With the exception of performance art we do not directly see the artist when we visit an exhibition. In this case, too, I would argue that the artist is absent. They have employed a strategy that is their body from which their authorship remains separated.

[ 22]
This is analogous to poorly tuned televisions in which the continuity of the image is disrupted by a flicker. After a while the viewer is able to ignore the interference and perceives the image as a seamless whole.

[ 23]
Given that the artist is the subject of all artworks

[ 24]
For the viewer of installation art cannot be exterior to the work and still perceive it.

[ 25]
“Signs proliferate, mutate, their relations with each other, promiscuous and obscene. Audiences shimmer like a mirage on the horizon. They warp into black holes or become polyvalent creators of their own sense and sensibility. Objects demateralise into digital bits. Everything is a copy of a copy. Everything is permitted, and so nothing is true, not even to itself” [Wark, 1995, p.280].

[ 26]
See footnote 2.

[ 27]
I exclude artists whose work is based on the incompatibility of elements. In this case the duality I have identified becomes a “strategy” within the work. The blink in this case is likely to exaggerated, bringing it to the audience’s attention.

[ 28]
Land-art of the 1970s used the Earth’s geography as a location for the work. Works existed not only in the land but in specific locations that were related to other locations and existed outside (at least for a while) of the gallery system.

[ 29]
The term Net.Art comes from an anonymous e-mail sent to Vuk Cosic in December 1995. The message was scrambled due to a software incompatibility. The word Net.Art was the only decipherable content. Vuk then started to use this term for the work he was producing. Alexei Shulgin. (1997). Nettime: Net.Art – the origin. Retrieved 13/6/02 from http://www.amsterdam.nettime.org/List-Archives/nettime-l-9703/msg0009.4.html

[ 30]
It is pertinent to note that many of the more technically sophisticated Net.Art works present data taken from the Internet spatially. Often this has nothing to do with the location of viewers rather the data they have provided. It nevertheless substantiates the notion of the Internet as a sculptural artform. See: Benjamin Fry, Valence, 1999.
www.acg.media.unit.edu/people/fry/valence/, John Klima, Earth, 2001.
www.cityarts.com/earth.

[ 31]
See: Wark, 1995, p.280

[ 32]
“Structure=content” and “net=art” [Blank, 1996, p.3].

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