Seven Items on the Net
Siegfried Zielinski
1.
Now and again unforeseen events burst into the telematic Net. In a
December issue (15.12.1994) of the magazine Fineart - Art &
Technology Netnews, Jeremy Grainger broke the AP news story via
Fringeware that Guy-Ernst Debord had committed suicide. The report
was terse: "He was 62... Little known outside France, Debord
denounced what he called 'the show-biz society' and declared that
performing arts should be based on powerful emotions, passions, and
sexual desire. His ideas were influential among theoreticians and
essayists who achieved prominence in the May 1968 student-led
cultural revolt that shook French society." That was it. That the
co-founder of the Situationist International - who in Society of
the Spectacle had diagnosed more than twenty years ago that all
direct experience had given way to representation, who in the same
book had attested that telecommunication "reunites the separate but
reunites it as separate" - had died by his own hand did not affect
the tidily arranged symbols on the Net one pixel nor their author.
In 1952, at the age of 23, Guy Debord made a film with a dialogue
seemingly organised on random principles. The title was "Howlings in
Favour of Sade". At one point the second voice says, "The perfection
of suicide is in ambiguity." In the script this is followed by a
stage direction: "5 minutes' silence during which the screen remains
dark."
2.
The way language is used on the Net is most affirmative of life. As a
principle, the language is positive, animated, apologetic, smart. It
bristles with energy. It is an electronic fountain of youth. The
computers, their technical designers, and the connections set up
enable and facilitate and support (for example, nature). Programs
lead and organize and select. Landscapes are created as are
populations or generations, that even develop dynamically and are at
liberty to unfold in (self) organization. The interfaces must be
interactive and empathic (in the Aristotelian sense) or even
biocybernetically interactive, that is, they have to organize
something alive within the closed circuit. Their secret agents don't
have trenchcoats with turned-up collars to hide their faces, they're
not up to anything, as yet you will search in vain for them in the
underground; they are tourist guides standing in the spotlights,
inviting us to go surfing, leisurely. Many decades after their
discovery by theoretical physics between the wars, the waves of
possibilities in which quantum truths are now formulated exclude the
violence of contexts/connections, they are not waves of pain nor of
ecstasy. "The linking of sensor data with parameters of user
interaction permits meaningful correlations over and above various
output modalities." In Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, inspired by the
music of Mussorgsky, we encounter a Japanese man who is always
making lists of things, for example, of things that make the heart
beat faster. I started to make a list of phenomena, phantoms, and
modi that I miss on the net, and in the columns of speech on the
subject that are getting longer by the minute. Here are some of the
favourite substantives:
ambiguity
anger
attack
collapse
crime
cruelty
danger
dark anguish of spaces
daze
death
deviance
discomfort
discongruence
doubt
drive
ecstasy
eczema
evil
excess
hysteria
incest
interruption
irritant
lust
macrogenetosomia praecox
monster
neurosis
obsession
passion
pathology
risk
scream
seduction
uneasiness
yearning
3.
Although many differences existed between, for example, Artaud,
Bataille, Duchamp, or Leiris, for all that the dissidents of the
Surrealist movement had a common focal point from which they
developed their relationship to the (intellectual and art) world:
they disrupted their own marginal tributary as well as the larger
mainstream because of their rejection of any kind of functionalized
ethics, their resistance to one-dimensional rationality, their
celebration of unrepressed pleasure, and their aesthetic development
of desire as an existential mode. To them, it was of imperative
significance that their thinking be far removed from any
hierarchical structures and that their aesthetic practices be
immanently and wildly heterogenous juxtapositionings (philosophy and
cultural critique took over these paradigms at a much later date,
notably with the work of the duo Deleuze/Guattari). Particularly for
characters of a passionate and tortured/suffering disposition, like
Antonin Artaud, the focal point of artistic praxis was the
nondispersable duality of experience and sensation (with a
radicalness only comparable to Bataille's work in literature), which
he confronted with the pure praxis of the concept; indeed, this also
essentially shaped the work of Duchamp, for all his extravagances
and craziness. On what does the hyperrealistic avant-garde orientate
itself? What orientation is it capable of elaborating and capturing
for itself? The unconscious appears to have been consciously written
to death after Freud and Lacan (who neglected to adhere to his own
dictum that "there are problems one must decide to abandon without
having found a solution"), and, above all, after their innumerable
adepts and interpreters. In the 1950s and 60s, Activists,
Situationists, and Performance Artists threw their own bodies into
the fray, to the point of (self) mutilation and (self) immolation,
against the discourse and the dispositives of power. So, will there
now be a re-orientation towards concepts, towards the natural and
life sciences, towards the illusion of a continuity, a flow, a
beautiful order in chaos? Or will there be the creation of new,
artificial bodies in the form of bodies of knowledge and their
mise-en-scene as aesthetically experienceable volumes in the
tele-age, moving and ephemeral artefacts in antiquated space?
4.
The experimental work of the group Knowbotic Research suggests one
possible avenue: their creations and workshop processes are
factional, that is, they are extracted both from empirical data and
from the realm of fiction, to which they always seem to want to
return. In Circe's Net they strive to direct its visualization
(knowledge and its organisation) while at the same time hinting at a
seduction, without which art as a sensibilizing terrain for the
experience of the enigma is no/thing at all. In order to develop
this character of the double-agent, the "Knowbots" have been
assigned a second mode of existence that can assume form outside of
the Net: in the event, in the one-off mise-en-scene of publicly
accessible space, they become once again empirical bodies,
sensations.
5.
The most complex mysticism praxis with the most complex language that
I know of is the theoretical Cabala: "a technique for exercizing
reason or, instructions for use of the human intellect... it is
said, that angels gave the Cabala to Adam after being expelled from
the Garden of Eden as a means whereby to return there" (Wolff). The
10 Sephiroth with their 22 connecting pathways constitute a sheer
inexhaustible, network-like reservoir of associations, connections,
punctuations; its construction principle is binary and it is built
of the basic tensions of theoretical reason (CHOCKMAH) and the power
to concretize, to form (BINAH). The only meaningful mode in which
the Cabala can be read and re-revealed over and over again is that
of interpretation. In this, the Cabala and art are akin.
Edmond Jabas Texts are philosophical poems. In a discussion with
Marcel Cohen about the unreadable, he was asked what he meant by the
"subversion" of a text, to which he replied by referring to the
beginning of each and every subversion: disruption/interference. The
paradox, that he himself operates with grammatically correct
sentences and words that retain their connotative meanings, he
resolves cabalistically:
I have not attempted to ruin the meaning of the sentence nor of
the metaphor: on the contrary, I have tried to make them
stronger. It is only in the continuity of the sentence that
they destroy themselves, the image, the sentence, and its
meaning when they are confronted with an image, a sentence, a
meaning, that I consider to be just as strong. To attack the
meaning by rebelling against the sentence does not mean that it
is destroyed. On the contrary: it is preserved because a path
to another meaning has been opened up. All this appears to me
as though I were confronted by two opposing discourses that are
equally persuasive. This results in the impossibility of
privileging one over the other which, in turn, constantly
defers the control of the meaning over the sentence. Perhaps
the unthinkable is just simply the mutual suspension of two
opposite and ultimate thoughts.
There be a key here to how aesthetic action within orders and
structures might unfold; between Pentagon, academe, and the market
which afford only slim possibilities for temporary interference, the
filigree weaving of labilities.
6.
On the Net, there is no art of this kind (yet): it has had no time to
develop a notion of the Other, the vanishing point of which would be
Death. The model for Net Culture is life and because there it has
relinquished its unique existence, it easily and usually becomes a
model. The algorithms used by the engineers and artists who are
working more or less secretly on the orders of the Circe Telecom,
have been copied from the bio-logical, life form(ula)s translated
into mathematics. Genetic algorithms are useful and fascinating
because of their proximity to this life. They are bursting with
strength and confidence. For art, it would be worthwhile to attempt
to invent algorithms of (self) squandering, of faltering, of
ecstasy, and of (self) destruction as an experiment. In full
recognition and acceptance of the risk that perhaps there would not
be much to see or hear, these would be transformed into sounds and
images. In the universal shadow, in the dark halo, where the strong
light bodies of knowledge of Knowbotic Research move but that also
prevents them from dispersing, there is a presentiment of this
secret.
7.
"When art becomes independent, represents its world in dazzling
colours, a moment of life has grown old, and it cannot be
rejuvenated with dazzling colours. It can only be evoked in
remebrance. The greatness of art only begins to appear at the dusk
of life." (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Rebel Press,
London 1992, p. 71)
Siegfried Zielinski has written numerous books in the areas of art,
philosophy and communications, including Audiovisionen: Kino und
Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte. He is the Director
of the Institute for Multi-Media Research at the University of
Cologne.