perspektive 43/44

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perspektive 43 // avantgarde_under_net_conditions //

brian kim stefans

flash is an extension of typography
interview - english

[question 1 - perspektive] eric kluitenberg defines avant garde working today as to disrupt the
hegemonial code of society: to "smash the surface." your are working on a
thin - flash - line. disturbing words and letters through net space/r. is
flash or animational poetry/working a way to crash the net commercials
online?

[brian kim stefans]

I think an important facet for net artists, and certainly net poets, is to
leap head-first into the pool of online conventions (most of which have been
created in the commercial realm) and occupy these languages and modes of
communication to expose their functions, or maybe simply to expose how
hegemonic they really are.  It's long been a trope among experimental
writers in the US that they work in the "margins," but it is quite
impossible to work in the "margins" on the web since it doesn't have a
center.  Therefore, the activity of the digital poet online should not be to
create an "alternative" or "oppositional" strand of meaning production and
distribution but a parasitic or co-dependent, perhaps "dialogic" (to use a
phrase of Bakhtin's) relationship -- energy (out of friction) should be
created between what is considered "safe" in the commercial net world and
what is frightening in our own lawless corners.  It is simply truer to what
is happening, since you can't have an isolated island commune on the web
with its own laws and purposes; certain basic agreements are already in
place, such as the commonality of web conventions like the URL, browser,
etc.  

Any site on the web can become part of my art site -- using frames, for
instance, I can take the news site of the North Korean government, Oprah's
book of the week site and ubu.com in the same page (and run a Perl script
the writes a poem based on all of these).  I guess my point is basically
that an oppositional stance is possible, or even an "art for art's sake"
stance is also possible, but for me working in the digital web world is like
working with the earth or clay, and the feel of this material includes the
sense that messages are constantly travelling across it that are not my own
but can be part of the work.  What I would want to do, then, would be to
make sure my meanings get into this flow, infect it in a sense -- the web
art piece then becomes a node of feedback, or a loop structure in the larger
program of the web, and therefore must be noisy.

[question 2 - perspektive] for gene youngblood the last refugium to be subversive is being  absent
and to build up a kind of autonomous zone (like hakim beys TAZ zones). you
inject  new visual stimuli into "ante" concrete poetry and operate on a high
level of techniques  and programming. is the use of programming and media
techniques for you a possibility  to work in an autonomous zone?

[brian kim stefans]

Well, my answer above would suggest that I don't believe "autonomous zones"
can exist in the web in the way that, say, they might have in the days of
the pirates (something else Hakim Bey writes about in one of his earlier
books).  But Flash, especially the longer, more involved pieces like
"Dreamlife," can have the gated-community feel simply because it is
impervious to web spiders, and does not even invite the user in to interact.
My latest piece, "The Truth Interview," which uses all of the imagery from
the National Enquirer website (this is a publication that runs a lot of
celebrity gossip, scandal sheets, etc.) makes all of the ad banners, survey
questions etc. lead to animated poems or other interactive poetic machines
-- i.e. it's meant to be a "safe-zone" from the threat of "toxic tallhouse
cookies" (to quote my advertisement) and other prying salesbot thugs.  

The Hakim Bey concept that I think of more, and which relates somewhat to
Situationist theory, is that of "ontological anarchy" and "poetic terrorism"
(an unfortunate term, obviously) which suggests to me how an art work on the
web which is sort of accidentally hit upon can take over a viewer's entire
sense of subjectivity and mandhandle it for a few moments, uprooting values
and preconceptions and even sense of being.  Examples of this might be the
stuff that jodi.org used to do, which always messed with the browser and
guts of the computer itself, or the more recent Flash pieces of Yong-Hae
Chang Heavy Industries, which are quick downloading, in several languages,
easy to understand and yet demanding something from the reader -- like
grafitti.  It seems to me that some of the practical jokes that people make
and not consider art -- like a Flash file I heard recently called only
"dengdeng," depicting a racing car and a Marinetti-like sound poem that
sounded like the Chipmunks on acid -- more effectively captures the
strengths of the medium than "high art." Since the web is an open space for
wandering, these little pieces make one's half-conscious choices to "follow
the link" into choices with consequences, which in turn livens the entire
field.

[question 3 - perspektive] the signature for your works is "reptilian neolettrist graphics".  your
work is a continuation of debords  "poetry of the moment" and the lettristic
notational  style as visual (flash) manifestations. what is your connex to
lettristic cinematic measures?  is brian kim stefans a lost text flaneur and
is flash beauty the last rule to break ;-)

[brian kim stefans]

I don't think I have any connection with lettristic cinema -- if by that you
mean the films of Debord himself -- since I've never seen them.  I saw parts
of "Society of the Spectacle" at a friend's house, but I've mostly learned
about his films through biographies and such.  But my sense is that --
beyond the obvious Situationist slogan of "breaking down the distance
between life and art" -- his films were tedious and extreme, both qualities
along with the lack of imagery in many of them playing some part in a larger
project extending from Duchamp, perhaps -- the non-retinal, but in Debord's
case extended through time.  I don't think I could force anyone to watch a
tedious and extreme web piece since, after all, one is very free to move on,
smoke a cigarette, do anything they want (they are usually alone, to boot,
so it would hardly be a "situation" in the lettristic sense).

"Flash beauty" would be a lovely rule to break, but there is a huge
difference between Flash and cinema which is that Flash can also run
entirely on action scripts and, indeed, one could make an entirely
"non-retinal" Flash piece that is nontheless a marvel of programming.  To
reject the image in film still permits you the use of sound, of course, but
to reject the image in Flash leaves you not just sound but script -- an
alternative text which can be deciphered as one witnesses its loops, control
structures, randomization elements, etc.  One can learn of an artist's
intelligence and sensibility by simply witnessing his/her scripts in action
and nothing else.  

I think my approach to Flash and poetry might seem extreme to some since I
rarely, if ever, use the illustraional in my pieces -- you will never hear
the sound of rain, an image of falling drops, and the line "He walked slowly
through Brooklyn's alleys thinking of Gloria."  When I see things like this,
I think people are trying to make Flash aspire to the absorptive powers of
cinema but often you get something looking like an info-mercial.  But of
course, in rejecting the illustrational I am left not just with scripts, but
with the ability to work deeply with letters -- Flash is an extensiion of
typography, after all, and the balletic movements of "Dreamlife" would have
been tough in, say, Adobe Aftereffects -- not to mention the ability to work
with the live data of the web.  Because Flash has never had the kind of
culture that film has around it -- the power to manipulate, astonish,
literally push the lives of actors into the lives of the people  -- there is
less reason to take it down, in a sense.  It plays a much smaller role in
the culture, so the iconoclast with an appetite for destruction would
probably turn elsewhere.  One can still critique the image, of course, or
even critique the cinema in Flash, but I'm not sure "Flash beauty" itself --
outside of the more obvious uses to which it is put to use in commercial
websites -- really needs to be broken just yet; in fact, I half believe
that, with the dot-com meltdown, Flash will become, like the Fisher-Price
Pixelvision camera, a tool exclusively for artists.

impressum

43/44/2002							ISSN 1021-9242

-	avantgarde_under_net_conditions (43)
-	zentral_einheit_come_together (44)
-	
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konzeption heft 43 “avantgarde_under_net_conditions”:
	sylvia egger

konzeption heft 44 “come_together_zentraleinheit”:
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