Para-Sites and Host Connections: An Unconditional Love
Who hacked the site?
"Waiting for reply," my friendly Netscape browser told me. I hate when that happens.
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So, instead, I open up a new browser and surf to one of my favorite web sites, uh, that being Telepolis, to read a review of the ZKM show by Josephine Berry who actually was able to go to the physical site in Karlsruhe to see what it was all about.
Her review made some good points, particularly when she said:
"One of the residing feelings one gets from this show is of extreme institutional discomfort intermittently broken by a kind of rebel yell affirming its right to exist. In so far as net art has inflicted such a schizophrenic identity crisis on its adversary, and despite the mist of guilty embarrassment hovering around many artworks, it can be said to have fulfilled its own objectives in the exact moment that it becomes extinct."
Meanwhile, my other browser window, still "waiting for reply," eventually coughed up another clue:
"Proxy Error
The proxy server could not handle this request.
Reason: Host not found"
And then it hit me, like a celestial revelation where the skies open up and the Living Godhead tells it like it is:
"Host not found."
When it comes to web-art exhibitions, "Host" is a generic character that anyone can play, and often is the time that I myself have, in the guise of the Alt-X or Grammatron Host, delivered a similar message to one of my overseas visitors who was trying to feed off of my digital blood.
But when it comes to our contemporary net_condition, the methods for exhibiting art in a world now becoming conditioned by networked forms of instantaneous telecommunication, is totally open to interpretation. One might say that we are all responsible for playing the role of "Host" and that wherever there are "Hosts," surely the parasites will follow.
But then who are the parasites and who are the Hosts in the quickly evolving web art scene? A parasite is properly defined as an organism living in or on another living organism and deriving its nutriment partly or wholly from it, usually exhibiting some special adaptation, and often causing death or serious damage to its Host.
Does this sound like any net artists you know? Or does it rather sound like some of the larger governmental and corporate sponsored art organizations suffering "extreme institutional discomfort"?
I guess it depends on what condition your condition is in.
Net art has proven once again that the art world, a swollen-faced whore addicted to the kind of prestige only good Saatchi-pounds can buy, is ready to "sensationalize" itself for the sole purpose of putting off its inevitable extinction. The only question I have is, "why the rush?"
Being a kind of net art dinosaur myself, I must say that I am happy to spend most of my time these days locating the ever-changing archeological digs I keep navigating my way through when steering my virtual subjectivity through the desert of the real we call cyberspace.
For, as everyone should know by now, web surfing itself is the one true form of net art, the one where you anonymously play the role of hungry parasite (para meaning "beyond," site meaning a "location" or "the scene of a specified event") living inside or on another organism, in this case, the Web. I would like to see Mr. Saatchi try and buy that from me.
But I digress. Let us reconsider our present-day net_condition. First, the role of curatorial practice in web art. In 1997, when Alex Galloway of Rhizome and I co-curated one of the first more serious online exhibitions called Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace our intentions were two-fold: 1) to use the enormous attention our Host site Alt-X was receiving to bring greater visibility to web art projects being created all over the world and 2) to immediately call into question the need for artists evolving a contemporary web art practice to feel dependent on institutional sites for greater visibility and acceptance into the art world establishment.
Essentially, Alex and I were playing Host to a great web-art linking party. We even shared some theoretically deranged essays for our guests, writings that we hoped would help contextualize the present moment which we saluted with phrases like "creative exhibitionism," "digital object," and "virtual republishing." Playing Host was a blast, and never once did I imagine what it would have been like had I had access to the entire interior space of the Pompidou Centre so that we could hold our party there.
Having major art institutions like ZKM exhibit a snapshot of our current net_condition, is like having Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman, tell the stock market that he senses an unconditional display of "irrational exuberance" and then having the stock market respond accordingly (i.e. selling off in a panic state of paranoiac psychodrama). Here's what the ZKM snapshot of our current net_condition says:
"ZKM is now ready to take a snapshot of our current net_condition. You will respond accordingly."
What else does it say?
"Where is the Museum of Modern Art?"
What else does it say?
"What are we going to do now that the parasites are becoming the Hosts?"
Another Host, Randall Packer, is, like so many of us these days, dancing on the borderline that divides the institutional Host from the parasitic artist. Packer's net_condition project is essentially a specially-curated mailing list where he, as artist, gets to play Host by inviting various artists, curators, theorists, etc., to his online party. Which then begs the question: how can the artist host his or her own party while working on the institutional clock?
Packer's answer is to create what he calls a telematic manifesto, or Hypertextual Collectively-Generated Net Document. By far the most interesting piece in the net_condition show, Packer is in search of the 21st Century Gesamttelewerk, a formal convergence of all media so that we may, as utopian dreamers, find ourselves living in the net-work as if it were the social surrealist narrative of all our lives.
The manifesto website cites Baudelaire, Wagner, Roy Ascott (who also gave the keynote for Digital Studies all those years ago), Moholy-Nagy, John Cage, Dick Higgins ("...the social problems that characterize our time, as opposed to the political ones, no longer allow a compartmentalized approach..."), Billy Kluver and Kandinsky.
Packer asks his party guests some very serious questions that he hopes they will consider when hanging out at his at online soiree. He asks:
Will Net artists revive the hopes of previous avant-garde with the power to distribute their message instantaneously and globally?
Does the notion of a Gesamttelewerk suggest the possibilities for social transformation resulting from forms of collective art that engage audiences through involvement, inclusiveness and participation?
Can the Gesamttelewerk serve to defragment cultural separatism, specialization, and the isolationist tendencies within our institutions, encouraging rather a cross-disciplinary interaction between individuals in all fields and walks of life?
He hopes the answer is in what he calls Telematic Art, although others who are invited to the party are encouraged to reshape the discourse into their own visions and terminologies, which they do.
A party guest named Marc Lafia says:
"I don't believe there is anything new to the notion of the distributed self. The self is the self in the world. Leibnitz put forward the idea that the self, a monad, contains the world. Everything of the world is in the individual. Yet the self is always, in all ways, always becoming. We are autopoetic, in search, in flux, between meaning, becoming understood, accreting, desiring machines, unknowing, unbecoming. The understanding of these words, now, are in the context of a distribution of meaning held in the space of understanding and misunderstanding in the singularity of a moment in a vast galactic metabolism, in the ever evolving social techno space of language."
Joel Slayton, riffing on Lafia, elaborates on the notion of autopoiesis:
"Autopoiesis, a term developed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, is a form of system organization where the system as a whole produces and replaces its own components and differentiates itself from its surrounding environment on a continual basis. Principles of this basic system organization appear in more complex systems, what are known as third order couplings or systems that emerge out of social interactions, such as languaging."
To my mind, if I were going to list the keywords in the "meta-tag" I inserted into this Hypertextual Collectively-Generated Net Document, I would come up with a list that started off like this: "social techno space of language, languaging, autopoiesis, distributed self, hypermediated collective consciousness, narrative extension, blurred distinction, consensual domains, networked subjectivity, telepistemologically-enabled kin," etc.
Did someone say net_condition?
Personally, I would call this kind of writing - thinking - playing - networking, Neuromantic Art. "Neuro" as in nerve or the American expression "it takes a lot of nerve." "Mantic" as in pertaining to or having the power of divination. You know you are Neuromantic when your intranet is peaking and you cannot stop yourself from becoming. From becoming "languaging." Or an always emerging model of autopoiesis lurking in a social environment looking for some quick snapshot of a particular scene that leaves itself open to organization. Like, for example, the net-work art scene, that complex system of currency exchanges transmitted via the evolving social techno space of language. Dig?
When the neurological webwork that circulates within your imaginative discourse starts taking you over in ways that make all other facets of your supposed "self" ready to concede, don't. Rather, manifest. Manifesto Destiny. That is where the future is and, perhaps, the most vital response one can have to the critical condition net-work art finds itself in.
As Moholy-Nagy says on the Telematic Manifesto site:
"What we need is not the Gesamtkunstwerk alongside and separate from which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all embracing Gesamtwerk (life) which abolishes all isolation, in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity."
Long live the parasites. May the party never end.
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/3/3448/1.html
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