[Nettime-bold] Jane Prophet 96

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Women artists and cyber chicks 

© Jane Prophet 1996

Each day more on-line galleries with low 
resolution scans of photographs and paintings, 
appear on the World Wide Web. However, few 
artworks accessed via the Internet actually 
engage with the specificity of the medium, in 
particular its support of two way 
communication. The potential to transfer text
 almost immediately between remote locations 
has been used for many years by academics 
involved in scientific research, enabling them 
to exchange information and collaborate 
internationally. Over the last two or three 
years Internet technology has become more 
accessible, and browsing software developed to 
a point which allows us to roam around the 
World Wide Web and to transfer image and sound 
fairly quickly. As the medium has become more 
image-friendly artists have been quick to 
explore and appropriate it. Over the next few 
weeks, two new on-line art works will begin, 
both of which that are based on the potential 
for the Net surfer to exchange ideas and 
information with the artist, using the WWW as
 an interface. It is the quality of exchange,
 the possibility of adding data to an art 
work, which qualitatively separates the WWW 
from other interactive media such as CDROM and
 CDi. 

In 1773 the Englishman Samuel Johnson 
persuaded his Scottish friend, James Boswell
 to accompany him on a tour of Scotland. 
Throughout this journey, which was to mark the
 beginnings of tourism in Scotland, they were 
both to keep journals. The famous 
lexicographer, Johnson, focussed on the 
journey, while Boswell studied Johnson 
himself. For two years following their voyage
 the Journal was rewritten and footnotes and
 additions made before its eventual 
publication. 

This tour, and the subsequent Journal, have 
become the starting point for artists Nina 
Pope and Karen Guthrie who are currently 
working on "A Hypertext Journal", which will 
be housed on the WWW. During March and April, 
the Englishwoman Pope and the Scottish 
Guthrie, will retrace the route followed by
 Boswell and Johnson, and both will keep 
journals. But here the similarities between 
the travellers and their journey to the 
Western Isles ends. "A Hypertext Journal" 
emphasises the differences that technology and 
tourism has brought to the experience of 
today's travelling artist, separated from 
Boswell and Johnson by over two hundred years. 

Unlike Boswell and Johnson, Pope and Guthrie 
will not have sight of each others diaries on 
a day to day basis but thousands of other 
people will, because their travelogues will be 
kept in a digital notebook and loaded onto the 
Internet each day. This on-line journey will 
also capitalise on the Internet's 
characteristic ability to erode the 
distinction between reader and writer as 
visitors to the Web site can email the artists 
directly either before or during their 
journey, and influence their tour. Emails will 
be collected daily and readers can recommend 
brief diversions (visits to particular places 
or people) in response to the project. 
Wherever appropriate Pope and Guthrie will 
respond by following the suggestion and 
documenting the process. 

As well as the text-based diaries, Pope and 
Guthrie will make use of their portable lap-
top computers to collect further documentation 
of the journey using video, image scanners, 
sound recorders and electronic mail. This 
material will form part of more complex image 
sound and text pieces which they will produce 
intermittently throughout the voyage and 
upload to the Web site every week or so. One 
underlying theme for exploration has been 
borrowed from the original trip by Boswell and 
Johnson: people that they encounter along the 
way (In Real Life and via email) will be asked 
to recount experiences and thoughts about 
second sight, which is, according to the 
Oxford Dictionary, especially prevalent in 
Highlanders. 

Second sight, or seeing prophetic visions, is 
often associated with scrying (gazing into 
reflected light and images as they play upon 
water), and therefore the use of the Internet 
seems especially appropriate. The computer 
image is a play of light from the screen, and 
the World Wide Web allows images and texts to flow one into the other, `transporting' the 
user between Web sites in a way analogous to 
the way witches used scrying to visualise 
events happening simultaneously many miles away. 

"A Hypertext Journal" offers us contact with 
the artist, and the possibility of influence 
the development of an on-line art work. By 
contrast "The Egg of the Internet" gives an 
egg `virtual presence', and makes the actions 
of virtual visitors effect its chances for 
life. This project by Netband (Franz F. Feigl,
 Erik Hobijn, Dick Verdult, Debra Solomon) 
will transport Net surfers to a hen-house and 
enable users to care for a fertile chicken 
egg. A remote camera focussed on the egg will
 send images of the incubating egg to the Web 
site, and hopefully after 21 days users can 
watch the chick hatch. I say `hopefully' 
because people logging on to "Egg of the 
Internet" influence the light, warmth and the 
turning of the egg, and it it remains to be 
seen if they will engage with the project 
and "... get used to the responsibility of 
looking after a living being through the 
digital medium" in the way that the artists believe. 

If it hatches, users can watch the chick grow,
 and they can begin to interact with it, 
indirectly, via the Web site. By selecting 
different functions on the Web pages visitors 
will be able to command tele-robotic devices 
to feed the growing chick, control the 
lighting to simulate day and night, and clean 
out the hen-house. It has even been suggested that users talk to the chicken and send in 
images and sounds to stimulate it. There is 
much rhetoric about the Internet as a medium 
for a new `digital' agora, and not much 
compelling evidence that it is actually being 
used in this way. It will be interesting to 
see whether the users of "Egg of the Internet" debate the social and artistic merits of 
distance-farming, and whether they will vote 
to liberate the chicken from is mechanically 
augmented existence. 

Regular users of the Internet expect Web sites 
to change over time, and therefore most sites 
contain information on the first page which 
indicates when the site was last updated. If 
the most recent update was over six months ago 
it brings the `kiss of death' to a URL, as 
visitors jump straight off, and without 
visitors a Web site ceases to have a function. 
The developmental nature of many Web sites is akin to notions of duration in time based media and is critical to both the works 
discussed here. The Net surfers obsession with 
updates will be taken to a visually 
stimulating extreme on the pages of "A Hypertext Journal". The artists will add new bits of text and images over the top of older 
elements. The pages will take on the qualities
 of a live work, becoming an integral part of a 
four week performance. Viewing the Web site 
will be like seeing a reverse time lapse of an 
archeological dig: as pages load we will see 
the first strata of images and texts appearing on the screen and then other, later additions, 
will obscure them. Duration is used to 
different effect in "Egg of the Internet", which has a in-built sense of anticipation with the 21 day build up to the hatching, and could qualify as an endurance piece for both users and chicken if it continues for the 
entire life of the chicken. 

These projects could also be defined as site-
specific, not in terms of the location of 
their URLs in cyberspace, but in the way that the artists are using digital networks to 
mediate specific geographical locations, 
whether that is the shifting location of 
Boswell and Johnson's route to the Western 
Isles, or the few feet of a German chicken coop that we see through a remote camera. 

We are familiar with interpretations of the 
Internet which use metaphors of the journey, 
of travelling and visiting, pioneering and 
colonising cyberspace. "A Hypertext Journal"
 problemmatises this by basing the Website on a 
real physical voyage, and by retaining a keen
 awareness of the Johnson-the-Tourist, Pope and 
Guthrie may draw out some of the ironies and 
anomalies that surround the fantasy of the 
`virtual tourist'. 

Similarly, Netband are emphatic about the 
importance of the `meat' in their chicken. The 
fact that the egg is alive, rather than being 
an artificial life form, is integral to the 
piece. By asking them to care for it, they are
 hoping that their users will develop a 
relationship with the egg, and subsequent chicken, that is more emotionally involved than that of a user who designs an artificial
 life form in TechnoSphere. 

References 
Egg of the Internet 
A Hypertext Journal 

-- 

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