|
As you started as an artist, media art
or net.art how it was called in this times, was not interested very much
in images.
Yes, film and video-art are new topics for me. It has broadened my cultural
horizons. When I started with Irational, visual representation by itself
was purposefully subordinated – action was the leading principle. I always
resisted visual representation. I was interested in sound, broadcasting,
systems and channels, and would consciously (and unsuccessfully) disavow
the eye. A lot of the other irational members have quite a specific visual
or graphic vocabulary. Heath Bunting has got a very special one, very
idiosyncratic. The insertion of graphic communication into public contexts
e.g graffitti and stickers in the street is a favoured practice of all
irational artists but the action, the site and the context is as important
as the visual image.
Rachel Baker in Dortmund, where irational installed their exhibiton «The
wonderful world of irational.org»
I used to think about media art, not as installation pieces in a gallery,
but as a means of reading, interpreting and intervening in mass media
and communications. A media artist should be as media literate as an advertising
or marketing specialist. But I don’t think that is how media art is generally
defined. The internet brought a new media type, with a new language of
the web, of email, etc, but now the internet is taken for granted. People
are much more blasé about it. Early 90ties it was fascinating and compelling
– like magic. There was something magic about it, as the telephone must
have been once. And now it’s mundane. I was always interested in media
art as a discipline that sought to intervene in mass media as well as
create its own independent forms and languages. The possibilities of reaching
large amounts of people via internet was very attractive, but its not
necessarily instant. In two years you could potentially reach the same
numbers of people with a website as with a mainstream TV broadcast in
two hours, but there may be a more intimate connection or a more a sustained
level of communication over time.
How did you get in contact with media art?
Between 1991 and 1996 I attended art colleges including Exeter College
Of Art and Design, Newport School of Art and Design, and Goldsmiths College
where I completed an MA in Design Futures, studying internet and audio
communications and pseudo-interactive marketing. Roy Ascott was teaching
at Newport. He was very evangelistic about virtual reality, artificial
intelligence and telematics. But the difficulty for us students was that
the technology he was talking about was not immediately available to us.
However, I could understand Ascotts rhetoric and the conceptual basis
of cybernetics or cyberspace in connection with radio – an imagined space,
a metaphor, a means of transportation. My intent was: Combining the reach
of the radio broadcast with the intimacy and connectivity of the internet.
We did some early experiments in streaming audio with a global network
of webcasters and radio broadcasters including Backspace in London and
at Banff with Radio 90.
The exhibition at Dortmund made some of your early
works visible again. One of them is your playing with questionnaire. You
simulated the questionnaire of Brand poll. Inc.
Online marketing questionnaires were endemic on the Net in this times
– you could earn a bit of cash or win a prize. »The
Personal Data Fairy Questionnaire was done in 1997. It was a means
of spamming the marketing companies with nonsensical text responses. The
questionnaires I collected were gathering consumers responses on banal
issues ranging from religion, money, sex and sweets. They would be copied
and hosted on www.irational.org, inviting people to fill them in. On «send»
they would generate this sort of reconstructed poetical text from the
users answers, which was immediately sent back to the databases of companies
like Brandpoll. The users would see a pop-up window: «Beware of data body
abduction». It was a project that I presented as part of a special net
art commission series at Arts Electronica in 97 and it worked for three
years until Brandpoll reacted.
The members of irational, clockwise, starting front left: Minerva Cuevas,
Heath Bunting, Marcus Valentine, Kayle Brandon, Rachel Baker and Daniel
G. Andújar
With club-cards you played a similar, extensive game.
Tesco introduced the Supermarked loyalty credit card. They called their
card a «club-card». Though there was no relationship between the members.
My interest was to create a real club, steeling – or appropriating – their
mechanism of data-gathering, and build my own club where the database
of members was transparent. My questionnaire was full of absurd, personal
questions: Do you prefer sex or shopping? Are you organised or disorganised?
Do you prefer organic food or genetically modified food? Tesco would have
never asked such questions.
Did you have contact with Tesco?
Indirectly with the lawyers. We could see from server analysis that somebody
from Tesco was checking the whole site. The same with Sainsbury. Lawyers
took pictures/screenshot of the webpages that are offending them. There
was a lot of pages and they reprinted them in the legal letters. It could
have been interesting to go all the legal way – to go to court as an early
test case in internet copyright infringement for an art project. I was
not experienced enough to manage this and it could have easily backfired.
I was also not able to steer the press interest that was there – a media
artist needs the same skills as a PR but I had no media strategy of telling
the story of the appropriated Tesco clubcard in a simple soundbite, it
was too complex for the mainstream press. In the end »I
archived the whole site. With Sainsbury I went further. When Tesco
asked to take the stuff down, I kept the project running, I simply swapped
the branding over to Sainsbury. Sainsbury is the UK supermarket rival
of Tesco, and they have their own clubcard. Sainsbury saw this and told:
You have this database, give it to us. So I emailed to the whole club,
shall we give it to them? Shall we sell to them? There were a lot of discussions.
Everybody argreed that we should sell. I cannot remember what amount we
agreed about. We sent a letter, but didn’t get any answer.
Now you’re working as an officer for media art. Did
you retire from net.art, a little bit in the same way like Heath Bunting?
I never considered myself as a professional career artist, I was more
interested in activism and interventions. But as well as being expedient
context of producing work, the art context offers discourse and thats
crucial. I’m interested in systems, that’s why working in the Arts Council
holds some interest for me as a vast bureaucratic financing system – its
incredibly complicated and baroque, almost psychotic. I didn’t really
consider my projects as art at first, but I allowed them to be read as
artwork. I should have been more conscious about the question of context,
back in1997 when lots of journalists were writing about my work. Because
you need to have some control of your context. But I had no experience
then and net.art was a dynamic, exciting, albeit contrived, context. I
think net.art itself retired when people became immune to the internet
and its initial charms.
What is the official understanding of the term «media
art» at the Arts Council of England?
They have their own definitions of media art. It’s quite gallery-orientated
in the conventional way, like traditional forms of art. Media art is genuinely
exterritorial. It’s not very welcome. It’s not approved of. I have to
deal with media artists. And I have very crudely created three categories
so that I can help this artists. The first category fits for artists who
want to be included in that traditional art-system. It is hard work to
bring media-artist in the galleries. It is difficult: The works are process-based,
time-based, so they are unstable. They are not objects, they are dematerialised.
Does Irational in the shape the Dortmund-exhibition
fit in this first category?
The exhibition is definitively an attempt to establish Irational in the
gallery-context. I was very cynical and resistent in the beginning. But
Inke Arns had this vision and she went through with it. The art-galerie
requires strong visual aspects, that’s where my reservations came from.
The two other categories?
The second category fits for people who want to work in the creative industrial
context, in the commercial sectors. That means artists who create to work
with entertainment, music. The third category fits to independant art,
to Do-it-yourself-culture, to autonomous art. Artist who try to establish
alternative systems. That is where I come from. Irational as an autonomous
server. There are plenty of others like Irational, selforganising artists.
I think, the public has to play a role in this field.
|
Impressum