[ox] FWD: Tristero project
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- Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 11:57:44 EDT
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From: fibreculture-admin lists.myspinach.org
[fibreculture-admin lists.myspinach.org]On Behalf Of dteh
Sent: Tuesday, 24 September 2002 12:40
To: fibreculture lists.myspinach.org
Subject: ::fibreculture:: PUB: interview - tristero project
dear all, apologies for tardiness; another offering for the paper.
dt
------------------------------------------------
TRISTERO PROJECT ¹ INTERVIEW
by David Teh
TRISTERO is a 'mail-art' project in which online artists-in-residence
creatively 're-cycle' unwanted digital material deposited by subscribers
to the Tristero website. < http://www.tristero.co.uk > It takes its
name from an underground communication network in Thomas Pynchon¢s
paranoid novel ¡The Crying of Lot 49¢ (1965), set prophetically in what
would become the cradle of America¢s corporate IT complex. In this
web-enabled artwork, the viewer uploads spam, random texts, or other
digital detritus, only to find their fragments given a new lease on life
in the artists¢ offerings. I spoke with artist Simon Biggs, and Steven
Bode, who oversaw the project for the London-based Film and Video
Umbrella.
DT: The Tristero project enlists new media forms with which we're all
familiar - email and the 'attachment' - the audience participates by
throwing tid-bits snipped from their own computing environment into the
mix. It must make an unpredictable palette for an artist. Have you
worked on any other 'mail-art' projects? Why Pynchon?
Simon: I've never worked on a piece quite like this before. I have done
works where "viewers" are brought a-new to websites or where they are
able to interact with one another in 3D "chat room" like spaces. These
projects exist only on the web (and could only exist on the web) and
they also take the form and protocols of the internet and the web as
their subject and internal structure. Mind you, my primary interest is
not how the web works but rather how it can function as a metaphor for
my primary referent ¹ the human condition. I suspect that Pynchon was
motivated by similar concerns.
Steven: Tristero is the third in a line of Film and Video Umbrella
online projects where we have used some of the modes and conventions of
the web as a starting-point for a series of artists¢ works. In
¡the.year.dot¢ (1999), we developed a specially designed search engine
that crawled the web looking for sites that contained key words from the
Book of Revelations. It was programmed to find the sixth word of the
website text, grab the sixth image, jump to the sixth link (if there was
one) and then bring these random fragments of material back to
the.year.dot site. The contextualising metaphor here was one of
exegesis, of submitting the proliferating field of the web to a pattern
of revelatory meaning. A number of artists (six, of course!) were each
handed the collected material, which they then used as the basis or the
inspiration for their individual pieces.
Slipstream (2[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]) unfolded around a further series of
interventions, envisaging the internet as a vast field of ¡public
space¢. Nine artists had small-scale works secreted within a number of
host sites, which ranged from a web cam in a local council car park to a
pay-site for mobile phone ringtones. In these two projects, as indeed in
¡Tristero¢, serendipity has been a recurring motif ¹ to some extent,
because the projects echo conceptual ideas and strategies (artists¢
interventions, Fluxus-style
happenings, mail-art etc) with an emphasis on spontaneity; but also,
because the net itself is itself a perfect medium for happy accidents,
for branching off one track and diverting onto another.
I¢ve always been a huge fan of Pynchon¢s writing and the way in which
his preoccupation with networks and interconnectedness prefigures so
much contemporary reality. ¡The Crying of Lot 49¢, with its secret
underground mail system, was written at a time, during the early- to
mid-sixties, when a number of artists were engaging in activities such
as mail art. In the book, Pynchon describes a clandestine communications
network which operates surreptitiously within the US postal system, but
with its samidzat energies, its rainbow communities of interest and its
paranoid, conspiratorial tendencies, what might as well be describing a
version of the internet, avant la lettre, if you¢ll excuse the pun.
DT: Contrary to direct-marketeers¢ best efforts, junk email is received
as a pre-eminently impersonal form. But uploading something to the
Tristero strangely invests it, personalizes it. It¢s then reconstituted
as a piece of somebody¢s net.art work. How does the web
perform/intervene in this cycle as a mediating technology?
Simon: The web works as both the means for creating the structure within
which the elements are brought into play and as the means of diffusion
and the point of reception. The first step in this process is not made
by the artist but by the individual who has chosen a particular element
to upload to the Tristero site. The artists then come along and make
their choices and integrate them into their own structures or
strategies. I think this is no different than artists using montage or
collage of found materials. That is an old tactic really.
Steven: I¢d agree ¹ pretty much all the aesthetic strategies here are
prefigured in earlier art movements. Kurt Schwitters and his recycling
of disregarded materials in his ¡merz¢ paintings is also a clear point
of reference. Digital technologies have made the technique of collage,
for example, more speedy and seamless. You could say it was more about
re-purposing some of the invention and spirit of those original
conceptual strategies for the present day. Just another form of
recycling Ä
DT: Your interpretation of the ¡Tristero¢ emphasizes the notion of
recycling, as a platform for the recycling of cyberjunk. Artworks
involving waste very often highlight environmental themes. Are there
environmental issues in cyberspace?
Steven: I was aware of an earlier digital arts project called ¡Digital
Landfill¢ which obviously draws attention to these themes. Simon¢s piece
for ¡Tristero¢, echoes some of those ideas in creating a kind of
zero-gravity landfill, in which all of the rubbish we surround ourselves
with comes back to haunt us, flashing before our eyes. Every time I look
at it, and how it¢s evolving, I think of astronauts in a space station,
floating around in their capsule, sharing their living space with the
waste that they have generated. I guess we are only just coming to terms
with issues of waste-management in cyberspace! Although all the junk
that is deposited on Tristero is weightless and dematerialized, it too
may come back to haunt us, in the sense that none of these files can
ever truly be deleted. You may think you¢re getting rid of a lot of
unwanted or embarrassing stuff, but even as you press ¡auto-delete¢ or
¡unsubscribe¢, those files can still be detectable and readable to
someone somewhere. So, given the impossibility of ever destroying some
of this stuff, why not re-cycle it?
DT: Yet we rail against the barrage of 'unwanted' communication. But
wouldn't our desktops be a bit dull in a world without spam?
Steven: It brings me back to that word serendipity again. 99.9 % of the
unsolicited junk we receive may indeed be completely useless, but if we
only ever get sent material that we want, that simply confirms our
already established worldview, where is the potential for serendipity,
for chance, and change? It is a big question, in an age when media
providers and media platforms are increasingly looking to serve niche
subscriber audiences who can ¡personalise¢ their access to media and
filter their material accordingly.
DT: Does net.art have to be interactive to be relevant?
SIMON: To use computers to make non-interactive art seems a bit
redundant to me. The net functions as a diffusion medium where the
computer is integrated into it, which also allows for interactive
strategies to be used and particularly to set up interactive scenarios
between real people, if remotely. My main interest in interaction is not
that which happens between people and machines but that between people.
DT: Does your 'creative re-purposing' feel like you're redeeming fallen
data, or rescuing it in some way?
Simon: No. It's just stuff. In a sense when I see this material flying
around inside the ¡machine¢ I made for Tristero I am entertained by how
it has all become the same and meaningless. You could view the work as
structuralist in the extreme, as the specificity of the content is
neither here nor there.
Steven: That¢s a very Pynchonesque question: the idea of digital waste
as data that¢s somehow fallen from grace! But then again, the use of
discarded or throw-away ¡low¢ materials has long been a feature of
contemporary art.
DT: Indeed, trash has long been a preoccupation of modern art - one
thinks of the enigmatic objet trouvé, Rauschenberg¢s combines and the
¡10th Street look¢, or to take a more recent (though no less
celebratory) example, the maquettes of Bodys Isek Kingelez. Do you see
your Tristero as part of this tradition which revels in the discarded,
or elevates it?
Simon: I see my contribution as belonging to such a tradition. I guess
if I was to look to suitable precursors I would suggest Rauschenberg, as
you do, but also Schwitters Merzbau ¹ my interest in doing Tristero was
this idea of creating a shared 3D space where stuff could be arranged by
the act of ¡looking¢, which is similar to what Schwitters was doing
(although I hadn¢t thought of his work or this possible connection til
now). I had, however, consciously thought about Braque¢s and Picasso¢s
use of multiple perspective views of the subject and the use of
appropriated material (such as newspaper cuttings). In some respects
this was a jumping off point for what I am doing, although my prime
interest here is not the appropriation of existing material but the
question of what happens when you can see things from multiple points of
view at the same time...through the eyes of others. Similarly, my main
interest in Pynchon¢s story was not the re-purposing itself but the
messaging systems employed and what they revealed.
DT: In the real world, waste is associated with luxury, abundance and
fertility; but also with contagion - does it carry these tensions into
the online space?
Steven: One way of answering this question would be say that since
people started sending us their junk for ¡Tristero¢, our server has been
prone to many more viruses. So there are many real-world parallels here,
maybe not so much to do with the material itself, but maybe more about
where it¢s been.
[September 2002]
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