I want to discuss Beth Stryker's and
Sawad Brooks's DissemiNET webspace + DissemiNETion installation
(http: / / diseminet.walkerart.org). I have chosen this artwork
because it uses the Web to elaborate the issues of displacement
and related issues of diaspora, dispersal, and disappearance.
The artists also use displacement and fragmentation as the artistic
tools and strategies for creating new meanings, identifications,
resemblances and kinships.
DissemiNET webspace opens with the visual metaphor of dissemination depicting the line branching from the point of origin on the left side to a wide, dense, crisscrossed field of pathways widening towards the right side. If touched with the mouse arrow this field flashes the themes (about 30 of them) from the stories featured in the webspace and the smaller branching lines in red color. Upon entering, the viewer has a choice to access 9 stories of displacements from 12 years of civil war in El Salvador or to choose from the list of themes, or write and save her/his own testimonial. The stories may be simply read or approached in relation to searchable themes, distribution of which then can be traced visually across the story space as it evolves.
If the artists had chosen a modernist art practice stand they
would have used the Web technology only as a tool for depiction
and exhibition of a more or less formalized and or aestheticized
subject. Beth Stryker and Sawad Brooks use this technology as
a means of cultural questioning stemming from the position of
"relativist and integral worldviews"(Jones, 1989). They
represent and examine representation at the same time. They do
not discount ìLived Realityî as a "Modernist
Clockwork" Worldview would but embrace it and make it a
focal point.
I have spent several hours on the DissemiNET website reading
all the stories, playing with the themes and writing my own testimonial.
I was frustrated with the site at first until I realized that
the problem is my modernist baggage which is making me judge the
site by its standards and is forcing me to try to organize, analyze
and abstract it so that I can fit it in my canon of knowledge
and perception. Once I decided that in the words of Arthur Danto
this work ìdoes not aspire to be a good aesthetic citizenî
and is more in the realm of ìintractably avant-garde,îI
was able to relax and relate to the site. ìIntractably
avant-garde art intends to change the world, and has no other
reason for existenceî(Danto, 1996, pp. 16-17 ). The experience
of this Website as a dematerialized aesthetic art object is displaced
to the realm of representation as moral adventure.
Rectangular video vignettes shuttling
horizontally under the surface of the text resisted my efforts
to distinguish and predict the pattern of their movement, and
changed quickly my status of a viewer to the one suggested by
Danto "the encounterer" (Danto, 1996, p.16). Their movement
gave me the feeling of instability, of no fixed place of reference,
of being lost without understanding whatís happening and
where to turn, like walking on treacherous swampy tundra. The
harder I tried to stabilize the images, or when I tried to catch
them with the mouse, the faster they moved from me, all the way
beyond the margins of the screen. Only when I gave up my need
to control was I able to interact with the text comfortably. There
was no reassuring instructional manual telling me what to do.
All of a sudden my own feelings, spurred by the moving rectangles
and the text out of control, gave me access to the message in
the confused stories of the refugees who certainly did not have
the manual on how to behave in the chaos of war, and did not have
the access to the "big picture."
DissemiNET site is not a totally digitally
modeled (simulated) representation, since it features real stories,
but the fragmentation of the stories and their reassembling by
returning fragments of texts containing words that are similar
and displaying them on ìCrossroads interface,î uses
modeling based on knowledge. It also simulates the functions of
human memory. The artists certainly accomplish the postmodern
shift to art as information, reflecting their worldview and outlook
on representation, reflecting Barthesís and Foucaultís
ideas of interactivity and intertextuality and deconstructive
strategies. "Deconstructive strategies opened the way to
alternative representations involving social and cultural context
for ideas" (Lovejoy, 1997, p. 82). Electronic nonsequential,
nonlinear viewing influences how art is produced and perceived.
"Creation is dependent on collaboration between the intelligent
system designed by the artist and the actions of the participant
which trigger causal relationships" (Lovejoy, 1997, pp. 163-164).
DissemiNET is such a flexible, nonlinear interactive system,
designed and coded with linking capabilities which allows the
encounterer to choose different paths for independent construction
of meaning. The artist becomes a broker supplying a process for
generating new experiences. By giving up total control the artists
empower the encounterers to enjoy this interactive aesthetic experience.
"The visual, now as information
in a data bank, has entered a realm where art and information
meet"(Lovejoy, 1997, p. 213). DissemiNET is a good example
of this new paradigm of representation allowing for interactivity
as a new aspect of representation, and using modeling of the visual
rather than copying. The artists also use the Internet as a new
kind of public space without boundaries capable of unlimited dissemination
of information, including information as art. This new kind of
representation includes the vocabularies of all earlier art forms
as well as the new phenomenon of simulated images and interactivity.
ìThis new medium of art as communication matters because
it defines a new arena of consciousness and feelingî (Lovejoy,
1997, p. 214). It allows the connection of moral, psychological,
political and aesthetic aspects of art. ìIt is deepening
the challenge to artists struggling to connect visible and invisible,
to create works of independent witness, and to articulate meaningful
responses to contemporary lifeî (Lovejoy, 1997, p. 214).
Telematic communication is open ended and nonconfining.
Interactive artworks such as DissemiNET
replace conceptual systems dependent on centering, margins, hierarchy,
and linearity with postmodern nodes, links, path, networks, de-centering
and other tools of questioning. It fosters not only coexistence
of meanings but also passages, and overcrossings. It does not
interpret but disseminates the meanings by positioning the texts
between other texts.
"Art on the Internet has little
history and no cultural baggage. Its aesthetics are as yet undefined"
(Lovejoy, 1997, p. 215). Even though the part of the above statement
about art on the Internet lacking cultural baggage is certainly
debatable, the aesthetic question of representation on the Internet
is still largely open. In this interactive art environment in
which viewers are participants in an inclusive system for creating
meaning the ìaestheticî has to expand its reference.
It needs to go beyond the formalistic realm of aesthetic theory,
beyond aesthetic judgment tied to categories of beauty, sublimity
and picturesque, and maybe enter a post-aesthetic era to accommodate
the ever expanding definition of what constitutes art and aesthetics.
After all, in its basic definition, aesthetics means a type of
perception and perception changes with societal paradigms and
its constructs. The philosophers of art invented terms as aesthetic
attitude, psychical distance, disinterestedness and other categories
in order to describe the proper (elitist) way to exercise a ìproperî
aesthetic judgment of universal validity. The notion of universal
is suspicious and subject to deconstruction under the post-modern
paradigm and with it the traditional notions of aesthetics as
well. The artists such as Beth Stryker and Sawad Brooks while
using telecommunications technology are faced with the role of
post-modern cultural gatekeepers in a ìspaceî which
eliminated cultural gatekeepers. They become the avant-garde of
new representation with the commitment to keep the public from
becoming just the consumers of the telecommunications technology
exploited ever more by commercial interests. These artists are
becoming the new pathfinders of telematic aesthetic which in its
most general sense will be the opposite of disinterested, psychically
distanced encounters with art advocated in modernistís
past. This new type of telematic aesthetic will strive on involved,
interactive, intervisual, intertextual, interpersonal sharing
of aesthetic space, where multicultural clashing will reelaborate
our use of aesthetic and its meaning. I think it certainly would
not hurt to make an Aesthetic DissemiNET site where people from
all over the world could enter their stories of aesthetic encounters,
aesthetic testimonials, and give their understanding of the aesthetic
realm. This multicultural repository could be then curated by
artists, critics and cultural theoreticians into an even more
interactive site which could be read in relation to different
ideologies in order to map the emerging aesthetic ideology of
Web telematic realm. With interactivity becoming such a powerful
part of contemporary art it seems to me that the traditional western
aesthetic criteria fall short and are unable to accommodate the
changes in art and certainly if used to pass an aesthetic judgment
on letís say DissemiNET, would fail to appreciate this
art form fully.
DissemiNet is an attempt to create art
which helps community-building and building of links between communities,
overcoming the barriers of language and dispelling the notion
of otherness. By elaborating and reelaborating the ideas through
the mechanism of the Web it gives them validity across the boundaries
of group identities. ìTo the extent that technological
tools can generate a more participatory culture, through, for
example, shared story-telling and community building, these processes
can engage the collective imaginationî (Lovejoy, 1997, p.
222).
DissemiNet helps to imagine a larger
scale of creativity across boundaries where the artist has a new
role empowering other people instead of just oneís self.
This kind of representation critical of established forms has
the power to subvert power structures. This site by allowing
anonymous documentation of offenses by totalitarian regimes and
its interactive dispersal does much more then just placing the
artwork on the Net as mere exhibition already coopted and exploited
by commercial galleries and profit making motivations.
Disseminet website is not a richly visual
art. The Web is still basically a text-based medium limited by
the speed of transmission through telephone lines, but with greater
compression of image in the future and the addition of ìreal
voices,î its sensual richness and even its formalistic
aesthetic can be enhanced as well as an interactive unfolding
process.
I could not help to ponder the question
of cultural dominance and language dominance as a possible source
of elitism, when contemplating the DissemiNET site. The stories
were translated from Spanish into English and there was not a
language choice given to the encounterer. I felt there should
have been the choice at least between Spanish and English, after
all,even my monthly utility and phone bills come in these two
languages.
The gallery statement about the website DisseminNET presents it as a broadcast mechanism, a type of billboard and does not speak of its design as beautiful or otherwise aesthetically pleasing (http://disseminet.walkerart.org/html/gallerycredits.html). It does not mean that there is no serious aesthetic investigation going on. The site combines syntax of language and the visual to elaborate the language. It uses visual moving vignettes to mark the theme shifts. The visual metaphor of branching lines and words also explores aesthetic connections of written language and visual expressions. Calligraphy is considered abstract visual art and all written language started as ideograms. Syntax is what brings the art as an art object and art as information together and will probably play an important role in defining telematic aesthetics.