0100101110110101 on 4 Mar 2001 23:37:21 -0000


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[Nettime-bold] Interview Yourself: 0100101110110101.org


Anti-Post-Net Art

A self-interview of www.0100101110110101.org


0: How would you compare the mutations of your web site - second-last was
   the file directory of "life_sharing" - to the self-referential continuity
   of Net Art in the progression from Heath Bunting and jodi to Lisa
   Jevbratt? Are you concerned with that 'code attitude' and the other
   members of the ASCII school of Net Art?
   
1: There may be superficial parallels, but actually we think we fall closer
to the anti-aestheticist side of this kind of activity. For instance our
early practice of breaking off and stealing little pieces from sculptures
and installations in museums is an example of trying to create similar
ruptures as Alexander Brener's spray can attack on the Malevich painting or
Oleg Kulik's crawling around on all fours with a neck brace on. This kind of
intervention may seem old-fashioned to some people who value the
pseudo-ruptures induced into digital data by Jodi, Heath Bunting and Vuk
Cosic. But we have to reject their surface hype appeal on the basis of our
dislike of the media art hype and the factual Net Art star cult surrounding
them. Actually, some data on the new incarnation of our web site suggests
that Bunting's and Cosic's resignment from Net Art was intentional and
contrived precisely to trivialize their work. You may of course notice that
we have not quit. We are willing to reject the 'easy our' of trivialization
through has-been-Net Art star cult status.
   
0: And clearly this is the connection between your work and that of body art
   actionists like Kulik, the false timelessness?
   
1: Actually it is hard to say. Net Artists have had to take a step back in
order to reflect the digital codes they appropriated, and then another step
back to analyze the first step. This is why we use the term "Anti-Post-Net
Art" instead of simply "Post-Net Art." This term precisely dictates a second
level of removal from the commodity value of digital art - it is not some
mind game, but a clear political statement: We are not willing.
   
0: Would you mind if people see this as a traditional avant-garde attitude?
   
1: Well, you may have noticed that our approach, which is perhaps
situationist if anything, is to take the code of a Net Artists like jodi and
copy them, but altering some of it, like the color of a page, or some words
contained in them... whatever seems marginal. And then this appropriation
becomes the underlying marginality of our own work. Remember Duchamp's
emphasis on the studio-editor. We essentially use it but ignore it
simultaneously, as if to say that these historical links are not what it's
about.
   
0: The most recent incarnation of http://www.0100101110110101.org, "dates",
   is a simple list of Net Artists' names, each printed into one file. When
   you use the names of your current lovers to title each file and record
   your dates as well, are you intending to trivialize Net Art, or is it a
   radical bisexual statement against the predominance of heterosexual
   lifestyles in net and media art?
   
1: Either interpretation would hold water, but we prefer to think of it as a
certain ordering of the universe, simply we dated so-and-so on that day and
thought of that Net Artist at the same time. We don't think it's name
dropping because we take it one step further than that by using our lovers'
names as titles. Also, these Anti-Post-Net Art works are anti-conceptual,
since the focus is on the person and not on the idea.
   
0: In this way, you can avoid two of the major traps of Net Art, the need to
   be innovative and the need to be recognized in the Net Art community.
   
1: We think so, this is the primary mood of our work. The 80's were about
"attitude," the 90's were about "theory," we think the next ten years are
about the synthesis of the performative and the conceptual - about "attitude
as theory." We suspect that we won't see much changing after that in Net
Art, we've set it all up that way.


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