Some Internet artists have deliberately used the difficulty in separating art from life in order to challenge our notions of identity and authority. ®TMark’s infamous George W. Bush website is a prime example. The Internet Art activist group were able to secure the gwbush.com domain name and used it to create what appeared at first glance to be the US President’s official website. By doing this ®TMark were able to force the user to question their assumptions about Bush, his personality and policies. The site caused enough confusion for Bush’s lawyers to demand that it be closed. The dispute was brought to wider notice when in an interview Bush demonstrated his irritation with the site and declared “there ought to be limits to freedom.”
The Nick Crowe piece Service 2000 (2000-2002) is similar in its intent and execution. Crowe created a whole series of spoof websites for many of the most prestigious galleries in the UK, populating them with kitsch clip art graphics, poor quality photographs and schlock music. Crowe was able to acquire many of the galleries more obvious domain names, a sure sign of how slow curators and collectors were to responding to the potential of the Internet and Internet Art. The sites were convincing enough for web designers to contact the galleries offering to improve their online profiles. Heath Bunting, one of the first major international stars of Internet Art, has identified hoaxing, faking and rewriting as key activities to the medium. Bunting writes “if you say: this is an artwork, you’ve blown your cover immediately.”
If we define an artist as someone engaged in the production of art, what happens to that definition if we can no longer distinguish between art and life? [lire aussi le commentaire 4 de l'article 05] Service 2000 and gwbush.com are hoaxes, and part of the natural life of a hoax is that at some point the perpetrators are revealed. The traditional role of the artist and the relationship between them and the audience is merely delayed; both pieces are now placed firmly placed within the canon of Internet Art. Did the contributors to Keiko Suzuki consider themselves to be artists, however, and is it right for those contributions to be solidified now into something approaching a recognisable art object? In order to investigate this point further it is enlightening to look at a similar project, one which is still very much alive, Mouchette.
Mouchette is another avatar web project which seems, in the light of the current atmosphere regarding paedophiles on the Internet, to be all the more pertinent and disturbing. The site is supposedly the personal website of an emotionally troubled thirteen-year-old girl who is planning to commit suicide. Mouchette is in fact based on a novel by Georges Bernanos (filmed in 1967 by Robert Bresson), in which a young girl is sexually abused and contemplates killing herself. Who exactly is behind Mouchette is unclear, rumours are often circulated in chat rooms and on it’s own pages, and further investigations reveal a site which is growing all the time and appears to be collaborative in nature. Indeed, users are invited to become members of a Mouchette club, which gives them the privilege of sending emails as Mouchette, answering her mail, and even uploading their own HTML pages and artwork onto the site.
Mouchette continues to raise questions not only about the ‘author’ of the piece but also about what constitutes an artwork. For example, in one of the most vibrant parts of the site, entitled Suicide Kit, Mouchette asks users to write in with suggestions as to how she should commit suicide. Although this was not the intention of the originator(s) this has become a chat room for people with suicidal tendencies, a virtual meeting place in which they can exchange advice and express support for one another. The users of this particular part of the site make little reference to Mouchette, either its origins or its purpose, and generally seem disinterested in their virtual surroundings. Some clearly believe that Mouchette is a real thirteen-year-old girl, a precocious one with highly developed web building skills.
The originator(s) of Mouchette state categorically that they see the whole site as a work of Internet Art, but does that mean that we should not attempt to distinguish between its various pages on the grounds of content or style? How can we compare, for example, the home page of the site, with its garish colours and ambiguous whimpering sounds, to the response pages of Suicide Kit, where one suicidal seventeen-year-old girl writes “this web site is keeping me breathing. Theodor Adorno has written that he is concerned that we may exchange “art’s elite separateness for something worse—its undifferentiated continuity with the ‘barbarism’ of everyday life.” This is particularly pertinent to Internet Art as the hypertextual nature of the Net means that every website is theoretically just one click away from any other. Interestingly Robert Atkins has claimed that Mouchette was more powerfully ambiguous before it found it’s current home in an on-line art gallery context.
Mouchette is undoubtedly a collaborative piece and contributions to it can come from many different sources. Although the originator(s) do reserve the right to reject pieces if they so wish there is evidence that the project has been taken in directions not entirely to their liking. The identity of the originator(s) is not known and most of the contributions to the site are also anonymous. In many ways the project fulfils the early Utopian dream of the net.art group; an artist has started a project but the outcome of the piece appears to be to some extent beyond their control.
Mouchette also achieves something which may never have been its original intention; it destabilizes the relationship between the artist and the audience. In her essay ‘Streams of consciousness: Info-narratives in networked art,’ Christiane Paul writes that “in interactive net art, the boundaries between self and virtual art object often appear to collapse, and the art work is not necessarily perceived as an ‘otherness,’ because it is the user/viewer who assembles or even creates it.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens, aujourd’hui à 21h15 How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003. www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
-
It is this very concept of individual authority which has come under attack, and has led post-structuralist theorists to declare the death of the author. In his essay of that name Roland Barthes asserts that writing is the place where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the author. His description of a culture in which « a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash » seems to be a premonition of the Internet, a collaged medium where chat, information, propaganda, gossip and opinion mix in such a way it is often impossible to distinguish one from the other. For Barthes the one place where all this information comes together as a unified whole is in the mind of the reader. This is the basis of a new type of literary criticism, one which does not focus on the intentions or biographical leanings of the author, but instead sees the text as being part of the fabric of the culture, understandable only in relation to other texts. It could be argued that the practice of surfing the Net is a realisation of this idea. The user or web surfer, as indicated by the names of the two most popular web browsers, is both an explorer and a navigator, finding their way around a sea of links, forging a path that is uniquely meaningful to them.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens, aujourd’hui à 21h18 How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003. www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
-
The post modernist destabilization of the master narrative and authority has of course been explored in other art movements, including the Surrealists, Conceptual art and the Fluxus group, but the Internet appears to be a medium particularly suited to it. What Internet Art promises is, in another of the iconic statements made by Bookchin and Shulgin, the practical death of the author. Arguably this claim is made good in pieces such as Mouchette and Keiko Suzuki, but at what cost? In his piece Why Have There Been No Great Net Artists? Steve Dietz makes the point that the « idea of the lone, inspired creator conflicts with the consistent practice of borrowing and collaboration » in Internet Art. The more the Internet artist challenges the » cultish myth » of the sole, creative genius, the more they risk marginalizing their own contribution to the production of art.
It is possible to see a reaction to this in more recent developments. Early Internet Art, due to technical restrictions and the newness of its form, was usually text based and constructed with standard HTML pages. It was possible for a user to download whole sites and alter their code, effectively making the work their own. A link can be made here to what is known as the Open Source movement. Many of the original Internet pioneers had a Utopian dream that all software would be freely available over the Net. In fact, not only would software be free but also its code would be open for anyone to tamper with, or (as was the hope) to adapt and improve. They argued that by releasing the combined creative potential of theoretically millions of users software could be improved at a rate impossible through normal business practices.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens, aujourd’hui à 21h20 How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003. www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
-
Towards the anonymity of the artist
Some Internet artists have deliberately used the difficulty in separating art from life in order to challenge our notions of identity and authority. ®TMark’s infamous George W. Bush website is a prime example. The Internet Art activist group were able to secure the gwbush.com domain name and used it to create what appeared at first glance to be the US President’s official website. By doing this ®TMark were able to force the user to question their assumptions about Bush, his personality and policies. The site caused enough confusion for Bush’s lawyers to demand that it be closed. The dispute was brought to wider notice when in an interview Bush demonstrated his irritation with the site and declared “there ought to be limits to freedom.”
The Nick Crowe piece Service 2000 (2000-2002) is similar in its intent and execution. Crowe created a whole series of spoof websites for many of the most prestigious galleries in the UK, populating them with kitsch clip art graphics, poor quality photographs and schlock music. Crowe was able to acquire many of the galleries more obvious domain names, a sure sign of how slow curators and collectors were to responding to the potential of the Internet and Internet Art. The sites were convincing enough for web designers to contact the galleries offering to improve their online profiles. Heath Bunting, one of the first major international stars of Internet Art, has identified hoaxing, faking and rewriting as key activities to the medium. Bunting writes “if you say: this is an artwork, you’ve blown your cover immediately.”
If we define an artist as someone engaged in the production of art, what happens to that definition if we can no longer distinguish between art and life? [lire aussi le commentaire 4 de l'article 05] Service 2000 and gwbush.com are hoaxes, and part of the natural life of a hoax is that at some point the perpetrators are revealed. The traditional role of the artist and the relationship between them and the audience is merely delayed; both pieces are now placed firmly placed within the canon of Internet Art. Did the contributors to Keiko Suzuki consider themselves to be artists, however, and is it right for those contributions to be solidified now into something approaching a recognisable art object? In order to investigate this point further it is enlightening to look at a similar project, one which is still very much alive, Mouchette.
Mouchette is another avatar web project which seems, in the light of the current atmosphere regarding paedophiles on the Internet, to be all the more pertinent and disturbing. The site is supposedly the personal website of an emotionally troubled thirteen-year-old girl who is planning to commit suicide. Mouchette is in fact based on a novel by Georges Bernanos (filmed in 1967 by Robert Bresson), in which a young girl is sexually abused and contemplates killing herself. Who exactly is behind Mouchette is unclear, rumours are often circulated in chat rooms and on it’s own pages, and further investigations reveal a site which is growing all the time and appears to be collaborative in nature. Indeed, users are invited to become members of a Mouchette club, which gives them the privilege of sending emails as Mouchette, answering her mail, and even uploading their own HTML pages and artwork onto the site.
Mouchette continues to raise questions not only about the ‘author’ of the piece but also about what constitutes an artwork. For example, in one of the most vibrant parts of the site, entitled Suicide Kit, Mouchette asks users to write in with suggestions as to how she should commit suicide. Although this was not the intention of the originator(s) this has become a chat room for people with suicidal tendencies, a virtual meeting place in which they can exchange advice and express support for one another. The users of this particular part of the site make little reference to Mouchette, either its origins or its purpose, and generally seem disinterested in their virtual surroundings. Some clearly believe that Mouchette is a real thirteen-year-old girl, a precocious one with highly developed web building skills.
The originator(s) of Mouchette state categorically that they see the whole site as a work of Internet Art, but does that mean that we should not attempt to distinguish between its various pages on the grounds of content or style? How can we compare, for example, the home page of the site, with its garish colours and ambiguous whimpering sounds, to the response pages of Suicide Kit, where one suicidal seventeen-year-old girl writes “this web site is keeping me breathing. Theodor Adorno has written that he is concerned that we may exchange “art’s elite separateness for something worse—its undifferentiated continuity with the ‘barbarism’ of everyday life.” This is particularly pertinent to Internet Art as the hypertextual nature of the Net means that every website is theoretically just one click away from any other. Interestingly Robert Atkins has claimed that Mouchette was more powerfully ambiguous before it found it’s current home in an on-line art gallery context.
Mouchette is undoubtedly a collaborative piece and contributions to it can come from many different sources. Although the originator(s) do reserve the right to reject pieces if they so wish there is evidence that the project has been taken in directions not entirely to their liking. The identity of the originator(s) is not known and most of the contributions to the site are also anonymous. In many ways the project fulfils the early Utopian dream of the net.art group; an artist has started a project but the outcome of the piece appears to be to some extent beyond their control.
Mouchette also achieves something which may never have been its original intention; it destabilizes the relationship between the artist and the audience. In her essay ‘Streams of consciousness: Info-narratives in networked art,’ Christiane Paul writes that “in interactive net art, the boundaries between self and virtual art object often appear to collapse, and the art work is not necessarily perceived as an ‘otherness,’ because it is the user/viewer who assembles or even creates it.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens, aujourd’hui à 21h15
How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003.
www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
-
It is this very concept of individual authority which has come under attack, and has led post-structuralist theorists to declare the death of the author. In his essay of that name Roland Barthes asserts that writing is the place where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the author. His description of a culture in which « a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash » seems to be a premonition of the Internet, a collaged medium where chat, information, propaganda, gossip and opinion mix in such a way it is often impossible to distinguish one from the other. For Barthes the one place where all this information comes together as a unified whole is in the mind of the reader. This is the basis of a new type of literary criticism, one which does not focus on the intentions or biographical leanings of the author, but instead sees the text as being part of the fabric of the culture, understandable only in relation to other texts. It could be argued that the practice of surfing the Net is a realisation of this idea. The user or web surfer, as indicated by the names of the two most popular web browsers, is both an explorer and a navigator, finding their way around a sea of links, forging a path that is uniquely meaningful to them.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens, aujourd’hui à 21h18
How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003.
www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm
-
The post modernist destabilization of the master narrative and authority has of course been explored in other art movements, including the Surrealists, Conceptual art and the Fluxus group, but the Internet appears to be a medium particularly suited to it. What Internet Art promises is, in another of the iconic statements made by Bookchin and Shulgin, the practical death of the author. Arguably this claim is made good in pieces such as Mouchette and Keiko Suzuki, but at what cost? In his piece Why Have There Been No Great Net Artists? Steve Dietz makes the point that the « idea of the lone, inspired creator conflicts with the consistent practice of borrowing and collaboration » in Internet Art. The more the Internet artist challenges the » cultish myth » of the sole, creative genius, the more they risk marginalizing their own contribution to the production of art.
It is possible to see a reaction to this in more recent developments. Early Internet Art, due to technical restrictions and the newness of its form, was usually text based and constructed with standard HTML pages. It was possible for a user to download whole sites and alter their code, effectively making the work their own. A link can be made here to what is known as the Open Source movement. Many of the original Internet pioneers had a Utopian dream that all software would be freely available over the Net. In fact, not only would software be free but also its code would be open for anyone to tamper with, or (as was the hope) to adapt and improve. They argued that by releasing the combined creative potential of theoretically millions of users software could be improved at a rate impossible through normal business practices.
Commentaire posté par Gary Owens, aujourd’hui à 21h20
How has Internet Art dealing with the theme of identity challenged the notion of authorship and the traditional artist/audience relationship? MA uclan, 2003.
www.gdowens.com/madis/text.htm