YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES – Αnna Kafetsi: A conversation

ANNA KAFETSI: Flash poems, visual narratives, textual animations, text movies are some of the numerous terms used on the Internet to refer to your work. These, and other, terms describe in effect a hybrid digital narrativity, on the threshold between electronic pictorial poetry and prose, which incorporates words, sound, motion, using Flash computer software, merges artistic genres, leads language into new, exciting territories of aesthetic experience. You call your works simply “web pieces.” Would a distinction between a visual artist and a poet, like you two, still be meaningful? And how is it manifested in your joint work?

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES: Distinctions are especially meaningful to those who make the distinctions. To us your distinctions are revealing because, quite frankly, we don't spend much time analyzing what we do. Distinctions such as yours give meaning to our work. They complete it. As paradoxical as it may seem, our job is to erase or muddle distinctions -- to create something different, to startle you into seeing the particularities of our work, making sense out of it. Once that's done, we all start over again. We muddle, you un-muddle. It's a great relationship.
We also like to call our work stuff.
Just coincidentally we were invited this fall to make presentations to the "digital writing community" at Yale University, to "language driven" digital artists, professors, and students at Brown University, and to "experimental poets" at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theater), in L.A. -- three different writing networks with less overlap than you might think. Our point in mentioning this is that we were pleased to discover what they were all about, pleased to see how they felt we fit into their ways of looking at things, and pleased that we had never considered ourselves from their respective viewpoints. Pleased to be someone they thought we were and we never considered ourselves to be. Pleased to let them make distinctions about us.
Some people also like to distinguish us as pornographers.

Α.Κ.: Anonymity is an Internet condition, to a large extent adopted also by the artists who create on the web. Corporate names (such as YHCHI), pseudonyms, names or photos that do not correspond to actual persons, multiple identities… The point is that anonymity in all its forms affects the writing and reading process each time. Does it liberate the text from its author, or does it restore the author-reader relationship? What is your point of view as Internet storytellers?

YHCHI: Anonymity is both a shield and a weapon, in any case a provocation. Unpunished criminals are anonymous. Good-deed doers are often anonymous. Throughout history artists have also been anonymous. (But are they criminals or good-deed doers?) Anonymity drives good and evil, both in fact and in fiction. Anonymity conditions then not just the Internet, but life, without which there is no . . . mystery. Anonymity is a whodunit, a status that by definition should only be temporary. For us, this means that under the cloak of mystery we can be other than ourselves. The Internet is a great facilitator of the desire in many of us to be someone else. From there it's a mere question of defining (making distinctions) what an Internet storyteller is -- a not-so-easy definition, for everyone on the Internet is telling stories by sharing information, which is also, as may be in our case, disinformation.
Of course, the storyteller's desire for anonymity and mystery can't exist without the reader's equally strong desire for identification and revelation. In our case, we feel that the less readers know about us, the more they will plunge into our stories and reinvent who we are. They will do us a favor by making us other than ourselves.

Α.Κ.: “In the text, in a way, I desire the author: I need his figure […] as he needs mine,” wrote Roland Barthes in 1973 in “Le Plaisir du Τexte,” following his celebrated 1968 essay “The Death of the Author,” and his view had been regarded as a traditional shift. Today’s Internet reader also seeks the author’s identity, through the use of pseudonyms, and this quest can be a liberating process. Without biographical, racial, sexual, social or cultural stereotypes, which restrict the hermeneutical horizon of the works. In the era of anonymity, the biography of the author – or authors accommodated under the same pseudonym – does not reflect his reality; it turns it into fictional narrative. I cannot find a more brilliant example than your own RESUMAY I on your homepage http://www.yhchang.com/RESUMAY_I.html.

YHCHI: Thank you! You're right. What we do is liberating -- for everyone involved. It's one of the perks of the vocation: to be untruthful and irresponsible -- to put it bluntly. And this is ironically what the reader/viewer expects of us. There have always been two essential mysteries to the textual and visual creation: the writer and the writing, the creator and the object created. The virtual reality of the Internet invites the reader to intensify this relationship. The reader wants instant revelation with no responsibility. The writer sees an irreconcilable distance. We feel it. Our desire to connect with the reader is immediately satisfied, yet we've never been further away. This futility leads us to act crazy, much like, relatively speaking, the power of a president to push the button -- the gesture is so small, the target so far away, the explosion so inaudible, yet the results so possibly earth-shattering that you wonder why more people don't do it. Write poetry, that is.

Α.Κ.: In recent years, in addition to your own homepage, in which all of your net works are available, you also exhibit your work in museums, biennials, lectures, as installations with projections or on plasma TVs. Getting out of the internet into actual space certainly brings a web artist out of anonymity and isolation. It moreover entails a different kind of relationship with the reader/spectator, who now has a figure. Is the translation of online works into offline ones and their recontextualization, this in between two conditions or forms, a new creative stimulus for you?

YHCHI: Yes. On the one hand, showing our work offline is a technological regression -- sort of like going from a cell phone to a landline. On the other hand, it accomplishes a major mission of the Internet, which is to bring people together. So although we may be betraying innovation, we're pleased to shut down the computer every now and then and honored to travel to places like Athens to meet people like you.
As for the differences or similarities between our work online and offline, we rarely stop to consider them. We feel it's O.K., even necessary, to try new approaches, especially given the apparent simplicity of our style. In art, size has always mattered. Our online work has always been noteworthy for how it fills up the browser. It's big for the Internet. It's also resizable. So, we tell ourselves, when given the occasion, why not make it really big? Now we have the best of both worlds.
Oh, one other little thing. It's hard to earn a living as an Internet artist. It's all virtual money.

Α.Κ.: Translation, in both its literal and metaphorical sense, is a prevalent element in your digital poetics. A translation not only from one language into another, but also from older art forms, genres, media, practices and semiotics into totally new ones, and vice versa. A fluid sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time is created in the spectator, which first attracts his attention and then lures him, transfixes him in the world of reading. Would you like to comment on this aesthetic strategy?

YHCHI: Actually, if we have an aesthetic strategy, it's one we tripped over (but don't tell anyone, please). Young-hae's background is artistic, Marc's is literary. At the outset we wanted to reconcile our two vocations on the Internet. Our feeling, er, strategy, was that we would combine two mediocre talents into a synergetic superior talent. We came up with text set to music because before broadband it was hard to download images quickly if at all. By using Flash text and mp3 files we were able to present several-minute-long pieces that downloaded in less than 20 seconds and played full screen on your computer.
Although for most writers one language is enough, since the ethos of the Internet is its world-wide availability, from the very beginning of our collaboration we felt the need to write in several different languages, if only to keep up with other Net artists, whose image-heavy work, if and when it downloaded to your browser, had no problem communicating with the farthest corners of the Web. And to be honest, writers are proud of the number of languages into which their writing has been translated. At last count we've done work in 14 different languages, a tidy sum that only the most successful conventional writers can boast about.
As you so correctly remark, a piece of writing translated into another language carries with it a new culture. That is exciting for us, especially because it's a culture we have no hand in. We get it for nothing, and it's something that turns us into strangers to ourselves. Translation renews us. It's funny, too, like when, in Seoul, we watch a foreign movie dubbed in Korean. We imagine Greeks reading a sequence in our piece The Movies where our two heroes are confronted with an Armenian-Russian taxi driver in Los Angeles -- everyone is speaking Greek. Strange and marvellous.

Α.Κ.: Another equally prevalent element is the speed of reading. You address a reader/spectator who is already accustomed, from the wealth of moving information in his daily reality, to quick, rapid reading, from advertising in the city to online news headers. Faced with your works and trying to follow the story that you narrate at such a fast pace, he lets himself surrender, one might say, to a total contemplation that any narrator would envy. Is that your “trap,” or a “play” in this in a way love relationship, between author and reader? How do you imagine the reader of your stories?

YHCHI: We're learning that not everyone appreciates the speed with which some of our texts move. And we hear them. We've been slowing down our texts considerably. We've also been eliminating a lot of the flashing, which can be annoying, it seems. When we started out, it just seemed natural to speed the text along. Speed in life is intoxicating. Slowness is boring. It seemed like speed was the whole point of streaming media and of a certain philosophy of modernity. But now we see, more and more, it's not. Or rather, it's aesthetically pleasing to alternate fast with slow. During a workshop we were giving this fall at Brown University, a student told us that our work was extremely frustrating for her dyslexic boyfriend. Touched by her comment, we told her we would do something that her boyfriend could enjoy, something slow. We intend to do it.
That said, we think that the ideal reader is someone who is so into the text, into a zone, so to speak, that he or she forgets themselves and are carried by the images and the story, much like when you're transfixed by a good movie. This is not so much "playing" with the reader, we feel, as presenting compelling literature in exactly the same way that more conventional writers do it.
Α.Κ.: It is at precisely this point, I think, that the difference, often noted by commentators of your work, between the hypertextual interactivity of most net art works, which requires the reader to click, and the open character of your fragmentary and, in that sense, non-linear narrative, which mobilizes the reader’s cognitive, perceptual and aesthetic experiences, is annulled. Interactivity takes on many forms. The rich intertextuality due to numerous texts and references crossing in your works is one of them, the most profound one. Serious scholars, such as Jessica Pressman, whose essay is featured in this catalogue, have highlighted such relationships in your works. I would like to ask for your point of view on this.

YHCHI: We think it's fair to ask, even at this early stage in the development of the Internet, what the future of the hypertext is in literature. At the advent of the online hypertext, say around the mid-'90s, some in the literary world supposed that it would quickly become an important way of writing fiction and poetry. Instead, most hypertext fiction and poetry seem like novelty acts. On the other hand, the Internet itself has become an overwhelming success. We read somewhere that in the early '90s the World Wide Web had around 500 users. Less than 15 years later it has become a way of life for countless millions. What stands out then is not the failure of the literary hypertext to catch on, but the desire among all writers to exploit somehow the many other possibilities of transforming their writing on the Internet. This includes us. We initially approached the Web not with the intention of writing hypertext but with a vague idea of creating an audiovisual artwork -- of exploiting the Internet's sound and image ambitions -- that reached a virtually limitless public all the time.

Α.Κ.: Let us remain with the text a little more. As a prose narrative in the form of poetry verse, or vice versa, it uses the traditional semiotics of typography, such as smaller/larger letter size, bold/light, regular/italics, punctuation, and always the same Monaco font using capitals, which is the trademark of your works. The image is the written text, with its specific typographical arrangement on the white computer screen, or in horizontal bands, often in two languages. The playful return to forms of printed language, yet in a way that reverses their original use, is your critical stance vis-à-vis information aesthetics and content on the Internet. Do you agree?

YHCHI: Yes, but by default. Your succinct summary of our aesthetic and poetic style validates a literary precept, that the writer have a voice -- a trademark, as you say. You've mentioned the few basic elements of our voice, which we've found is rich enough to express so much of what we'd like to say. We believe in what we do, but obviously also believe that there is room for every other aesthetic voice and content on the Internet. So in that sense we're not taking a critical stand. What we have noticed, though, is that our "playful" way of writing prose poetry on the Internet is in stark contrast to hypertext fiction. So by default we are challenging hypertext fiction writers to write compelling works.

Α.Κ.: In your works, writing moves in an undefined territory between visual and written. Interrelations with older art forms lead us, besides the more recent visual and concrete poetry, to futurism and the Russian avant-garde, and in this sense to a kind of continuity in the history of art, as established through ruptures, appropriations, crossings and subversions. An effort to redefine poetry and writing in general or to transcend the mere fascination exerted by the new media? Or both?

YHCHI: Both, possibly. Every creative writer tries to redefine writing through his or her work. It's the name of the game. What's interesting about Internet writing is that it's the bastard child of technology. The creators of the Internet probably didn't give much thought to how it would influence literature. But by creating such a rich and ubiquitous medium, it has become irresistible to many creators, including writers. So whereas it's the Machine Age that may have inspired futurism and the Russian avant-garde, say, it's the machines themselves that have inspired new media writers. It's technology itself that is redefining poetry and writing. It's hard to escape that realization, especially when the Internet reader needs a little more know-how than the conventional reader. Our work, both on and off the Internet, minimizes the extra know-how, perhaps because we began writing on the Internet with very little of it ourselves.

Α.Κ.: Various media, new and old, mingle, merge, interpenetrate in order to create the verbal/visual/acoustic entity that is each of your stories. A term widely used today is intermedia. I would like to ask you to comment specifically on the role of music and sound in your works. Also, how the shift from a jazz soundtrack to your electronic music came to be, and what media you use in order to create it?

YHCHI: We think music makes everything better -- or worse. It imbues every experience with an atmosphere, and in its most magical manifestations makes certain experiences memorable. Poetry is often discussed for its musical qualities. Somewhere along the line poetry was accompanied by a lyre -- that may have been in Greece. But how do you maintain the musicality of a translated poem? It's hard. Since we were writing from the beginning in three languages -- English, Korean, French -- we made the simple decision not to worry so much about the musicality of the phrase, all the more so since no one would be reading aloud our writing. Instead, we would add a musical soundtrack -- get back to the beginnings of poetry and exploit the audio component of the Internet.
At first we used other musicians' music -- jazz, just our taste -- but after a while realized that any music, not just famous jazz, even any sound, added an element of complexity and pleasure to a text.
We started to make our own music because the digital age encourages everyone to use technology. So we gave it try. We'd love to make jazz, but we're poor musicians, and jazz is a great art. So we make music on the computer with some loops and some midi, add some acoustic drums (drums are the easiest instrument for untalented musicians), and slap it on to a text. In art, what often counts is not so much virtuosity but difference -- that's originality. If you stick with it, that difference becomes a style, a voice.

Α.Κ.: Your profound relationship with language is demonstrated not only by the multiple appropriations, references and tropisms, especially the metaphor, but, much more, by the subtle irony as a principal stylistic choice, the diverse simulations of style, from which I would not exempt the style of your interviews. The spoken English and slang, which you often employ in your works, give me an impression of assumed lightness, as if trying to conceal a theoretical background and eruditeness. In other words, the opposite of a parody. Am I mistaken?

YHCHI: Uh, no. You're not mistaken, you're right. You're right, because the reader and the viewer are always right. And because -- and this is what's beautiful about our profession -- there is no right or wrong. Everyone is right! All the time! So even if you're wrong, you're right, because no one can prove you wrong. There's no math in art, thank God, just taste -- O.K., so there is some math here and there, and classical Greek architecture demonstrates it. But that's another story. You need no special training to be right about our work.
Are we hiding anything? Oh yeah. Aren't we all? The beauty of the Internet is, to get back to your second question, that you can pretend to be someone you're not. It may seem immature and irresponsible, but then, that's what poetry and art are all about. Society is fascinated by arrogant, egocentric, reckless poets and artists. Under this crust of disagreeableness hides an insecure poet and artist. O.K., so not every poet and artist fits this classic stereotype. It takes a lot of blind energy to go on and on about oneself. There's a reason why these brilliant guys die young. It's an exhausting shtick. Now irony, as you mention, is one way of economizing energy, of giving yourself better odds to make it into old age and avoiding what is obviously that great slayer of contemporary poetry and art -- sincerity. It's hard to be a sincere poet and artist these days. It's hard to attack the things that are important in life today with a straight face.
Does this irony end up as parody? And if yes, of what? Yes it does. It's tough being yourself when you don't like yourself. Look at James Joyce and Ulysses. He turned Dublin into a Greek odyssey. Most of us are glad he did.

Α.Κ.: The three-part work Close Your Eyes, 2008 was a commission by EMST for your first personal exhibition in Greece and is intended to become part of the museum’s collection afterwards. Would you like to talk to us about the work, its stories, the tripartite structure that you favoured, your music, and above all the experience of translation into another language, Greek, which is jointly present in the three-part narrative, along with the English original, the language in which you mainly write?

YHCHI: It's been a pleasure, a unique experience, and an honor to make this work for EMST.

Close Your Eyes is about . . . we're not sure what. As with all our works, we're never sure what we're doing. (That's an easy enough artistic strategy.) We know we're dealing with three experiences that occur in a few days time, in three different, dark corners of the world. We're dealing with darkness -- fear, even terror: you're being held in a small, windowless room -- ever been in one? -- or you're in a taxi that breaks down on a barren stretch of midnight highway, in a strange city -- Los Angeles, or an old Chinese guy is peddling you around in a rickshaw through the dark alleys of a Beijing hutong -- Why, you ask yourself, is this city so dark at night? And it's a certain kind of darkness. It's got the whiff of nothingness. Then it dawns on you: this is the way most people live and have lived forever -- in darkness. We noticed that in all three panels of this triptych you're in transit. We noticed that these days people, ourselves included, perhaps you, too, are going places. We live in privileged times. Places that took adventurers weeks if not months to sail or ride to you're landing at in half a day -- that is, if you get there. Hence, in particular, Close Your Eyes, where some poor guy gets pulled out of line and ends up in a gulag.
We like the triptych structure: one projection on each of the three walls that the visitor sees when entering a space, creating what we hope is an immersive audiovisual environment.
We've synchronized the three pieces to one almost 18-minute-long original music soundtrack, and we hope the music brings as much pleasure to the visitor as do the stories.
We're thrilled to be presenting our first work ever in Greek. We want to extend a special thanks to Christina Rizopoulou, our translator, for digging into our writing. We are sure it wasn't easy and feel she did a great job. As for the Greek version of the Monaco font, it echoes the English version nicely, and we think that's beautiful. For this particular work we made the English subtitles very small, because we like the graphic qualities of Greek capital letters and don't want the Greek viewer to be distracted by the English. We noticed in our first day on the streets of Athens that Greek is systematically translated or phoneticized into a less prominent English. That was our goal, too.
Thank you for giving us this unique opportunity.

A conversation between David Claerbout and Daphne Vitali. September 30th, 2008

Most of your works stand between the still and the moving image. You use digital technology to animate photographic imagery in order to renew the perception of time and space. When and how did your interest in the photographic stillness arise?

That would be around 1994-1995 after I had finished my Academy and I did postgraduates studies. I had a very academic training. In Belgium all trainings are essentially academic unless you choose for something that is new media, but if you would choose for sculpture or painting or graphics then it would be all very old fashioned. So, I had never worked with photography or film and essentially I had enough of wanting to be an artist. My whole academy period was a struggle to find an identity as an artist and I went through many different periods of different work. I was in fact a very good drawer; I was always the best in class so to speak. Then, when I was confronted with looking for an own kind of language, I had to abandon, because I found I had none. I felt very much lost. So, what I did is I searched for a number of years and then at the last year of my postgraduate -it must have been in 1995 or 1994- I decided I am going to stop producing objects of art altogether. The day I did that, I felt liberated. I started to put together on my studio walls all the pictures that I had used as a source material that gave me ideas. That was the first time that I worked with found photography.
My very first series was a series based on fitness books. I got fascinated with propaganda about health culture and the body and I was collecting exactly those pictures where the patients profoundly relax, coming to such a state of relaxation that they look depressed and I had singled out all those pictures of those depressed very healthy people. That was my first series somehow and it was titled “fitness, light exercises” or something like that. And from there on, I never actually took up a paintbrush anymore. I thought painting for me was false altogether, was not direct enough and I wanted to do something with existing photography.
So, today, after more than 15 years, I have an enormous digital collection and I have just lost it, last week, by accident, by stupid mistake. I erased the wrong hard discs and then I erased the back ups of those discs! But instead of feeling bad about this, I felt rather good. Actually it was time. I thought ok it had to happen one day, cause it’s always risky and I was always a freak with digitizing. I have been digitizing a lot of imagery as an archive since a very long time. So, all I have left now is my archive as very small thumbnails as small as you little recorder- so I said it’s enough, I will do it with that. So, essentially, I think that answers the question “how did your interest in the photographic stillness arise?” That was, in fact, out of the impossibility, technologically, I had no possibility to do something with photography because I didn’t know how to handle a camera. So I started working with whatever was available to me. Then, later on, you can imagine out of that, started to develop some sort of auto-animation, As if I saw a picture and I… I think I was always very sensitive to the hidden layers in the photograph. I kind of detested film and video because, anyway, they were too expensive, so it was a little bit pragmatic and I didn’t like them. Later on I started to like them because I could handle them, but in the beginning, it was too much for me so I stuck to photography. And I mentally started animating parts of the photograph and that’s how I discovered the in-between fields, in-between different media. And what interested me from the beginning was to be able to unite two media on one surface, which would be the projection. And what interested me more specifically about that, was to unite them in a way, which is without conflict. So this idea of non-war, or non-conflictive situations was always there from the beginning. Sort of not wanting to be involved with an accusing gaze, which looks for the weak point in the picture. I was looking for the point in the picture, which opens up for new interpretations and new stories. I actually always considered the photograph to be an orphan of a reality that is located in the past.

In your early works, narrative derives from silence, duration, contemplation and reflection. Tell us about this kind of narrative in your work.

I think it’s an appearance that in my early works -in the earlier silent works- the narrative is exclusively drawn from duration and contemplation or even reflection. In the later works –actually we could also refer to the third question, to the Bordeaux Piece as well- the narrative in fact also goes back to one of silence, duration and contemplation but is being eclipsed by storytelling, by film narrative. But in fact the film narrative never really takes over from the contemplating structure of the work. Dialogues are some kind of foregrounding, three actors play a game, they talk to each other, there is a story going on, and that becomes the foreground, but in fact, the background is still one of contemplation and one of long duration as the piece lasts for about 14 hours. So, it might appear that structurally that element in my work has evolved over the last 10 years but in fact it hasn’t. I am always looking for certain panoramic feeling attached to time. And in the Bordeaux Piece that would more notably be the length of duration of a day, making physical how filmic time is compressed and nervous. In other works, that would be played out in a different way, like in one of the pieces that is in the exhibition, in The Stack for example, which is from 2002. That would be 5 years into my career so to speak, the homeless person narrative is of course very literal, because the piece looks photographic, and as being photographic it presents itself with the silence that is in fact part of the nature of photography. So, this is of course an opportunity that I’ve had and that I’ve taken with both hands, to discover this rather accidental relation between photography and storytelling. If film were encapsulated in a photographic appearance, it would be able to play out different qualities. They are able to play out their qualities of the tableau because nobody expects the photograph to evolve in time. They maintain the potential of evolution in a story or in movement that film has, and they also provide the certitude of stillness that photography has. In that sense I used of course, consciously, older photographs as the starting point, because they were immediately recognizable as located in the past. So, these are pictures that had no future, they only have a future in the duration that we spend looking at them.

Bordeaux Piece is your first work that has the features of a conventional feature film. However, as you mention, the plot itself as well at the acting is not your central concern. Why did you introduce cinematographic characteristics in you work? What were you aiming at?

I have already more or less answered that…
I must say that today I’m still working on some narrative works which have in common with one another, that their interest lies far outside from the realm of film narrative. Their real goals -of works from Bordeaux Piece on- lie radically far away from storytelling. And in fact are almost ironic -or perhaps even cynical- comments on filmmaking, on sequential montage and storytelling. So, Bordeaux Piece is a work that ridicules the work of actors through the 75 repeated films per day… very exhausting job having to repeat the same lines, and the quality of the film becomes less and less until in fact, is almost completely disintegrate in the early afternoon when actors become to be very tired. So that was all part of the idea. The idea was that the fresher moment, which is the early morning we started filming, from 5 o’clock onwards when it was still dark. Actually we started filming right before the sun would appear and then the acting is still relatively fresh, the light is amazingly beautiful in the morning, because you can see the evolution –you can almost physically feel it- and in the evening as well the light becomes very spectacular. All of a sudden it’s straight into the lens and you don’t see the film anymore but you just see the sun and there she really takes over. But the most boring parts are the parts that are shown during exhibitions of course; because institutions are open from let’s say 11 a.m. until 5 o’clock in the evening or 6 p.m. So, a real purpose of the piece was to show the most exciting parts that would never be part of the museum shows. In such a way, it is not only critique on film but also on exhibition making, in a sense. So, it’s best shown privately if you want… It’s best shown to the people who own the pieces.

In 2000 you realized your first Internet based work. You offered the viewer a choice of three flowers -a pink amaryllis, a yellow gerbera or a red rose- to download and install on a computer. The flower begins in a full bloom and progresses to full decay. In this work you put real time temporality into a digital environment. You used the internet as a means to explore the real and the virtual. Did the internet offer you new ways of experimentation with time? Do you intend to investigate further the opportunities that the internet offers?

That internet piece is called Present and it in fact emphasizes on the internet as a gift-based economy. It’s a free economy in which you can download most of the items for free: knowledge, images, music, etc etc. So, I thought the piece should have something to do with the idea of giving. And as viruses are the most poluted gifts in the internet, I thought I wanted to make a friendly virus. A virus that would be implanted on your computer, would live it’s life, and then would just leave a little seed which then would in fact be a link to the internet. But that friendly virus never actually came into existance because when I talked to the technician –and therefore I think the internet piece is a failure- we were not allowd to make a virus. Because a virus it would mean that as the owner of the computer you wouldn’t be able to find back the seed. I did not want the person who downloaded to be able to see what’s going on or to be able to find where it has hidden itself. I really wanted to think to work as a virus without the intention to destroy something but only with the intention to live on your desktop and you could not erase it before it has lived it’s life. So there were certain things that instead of doing an official project for Dia Center I should have done a real virus .. who knows how to make viruses! But anyway the intention was there.
So, “Do you intend to investigate further the opportunities that the internet offers?”
I have lost interest in the internet somehow. I don’t know why… Maybe I became much more occupied with my own complicated installations...

You are among contemporary video artists who play with the concept of time, exploring its dimensions. Do you find yourself in close artistic dialogue with any of your colleagues? Where does your artistic interest in time lie?

Every artist would tell the same story, but I find that my work on time has become very fashionable with others, who refer to time for no reason… : ‘take your time’, ‘time after time’ and so on….
What I mean is that it seems there is something in the air about time, about slowing down, about speed, about capitalist production and the machinery which has no purpose except to eccelerate all the time. And I remember that yesterday I spoke several times with some of the people that interviewed me and I don’t know why I repeated that and I will repeat it again, because I think it belongs to the same occupation of modern human being, to consider the benefits of a far and better future not as a goal but as a way of working or living. In this line of thinking time becomes an arrow that unavoidably moves forward and at the end of the horizon is the future and today we work for the future but in fact the promise lies in the future and not in today. And I think in my work I have always tried to unify a presence in the past, a presence in the now and a presence in the future. And I have tried to unify them in one surface, which is the video screen, if you want, or anything that I am busy with. Indeed, it is probably in the air that time is of importance to contemporary artists and to many of my contemporaries, except that I would be very unhappy if my work would appear moralizing. I dislike the discourse on slowing down and deceleration, because what those discourses do, is they still take ‘speedyness’ as their reference and then they slow down from there on. So it becomes therapeutic or it becomes a way of making the whole system crashing down, falling apart and disintegrating, refering Arnout Mik’s work for example. It is very much a discourse that is in the air except that in my work, I think, you will never find trace of the desastrous –the tragic. So if I work with decelaration is probably more deceleration of the perception itself, of how you observe. So I still think that you do not perceive the same work when you spend 15 seconds or when you spend 5 minutes. I literally try to include a changing factor even in the photograph that is not moving, that is not evolving. So that it becomes your own perception that is starting to do the work. And you may call that a certain kind of deceleration, but is certainly in opposition to the zapping culture. And it’s certainly an opposition temporal montage, which is always a step ahead of you. It’s always a step ahead in time and space. Therefore, I understand that my work sometimes is associated with melancholy or with slowing down because is the spectator that is being thrown back into her own perception.

Νέα αρχή A new beginning

Εγκαινιάζουμε απόψε στις 20:00 το νέο μας χώρο στο Ωδείο Αθηνών και σας περιμένουμε.

Κλεισμένο στον εαυτό του

...και αντιμέτωπο με τα παλίμψηστά του

Ελένης Εγκώμιον

«…θέλησα να γράψω τον λόγο ως εγκώμιο της Ελένης και δικό μου παιχνίδι».

Έτσι τελειώνει ένα από τα απολαυστικότερα αναγνώσματα, το Ἑλένης Ἐγκώμιον του Γοργία. Προηγουμένως, ο γόης του λόγου έχει προσπαθήσει, εν είδει ρητορικής άσκησης και χαρίζοντας τους μεγαλύτερους επαίνους στην «πρώτη των πρώτων», να ανασκευάσει τα όσα πιστεύονταν για την ωραία Ελένη, κι έτσι να την αποκαταστήσει ηθικά.

Ο αναγνώστης σίγουρα ξαφνιάζεται, δυσπιστεί, το σκέφτεται αλλά και συνεπαρμένος από τη γοητευτική αφήγηση των διαφορετικών εκδοχών της αλήθειας, αφήνεται στην επαναληπτική φούγκα της μεταμοντέρνας αυτής νουβέλας. Κι εκεί στην τελευταία γραμμή, τον περιμένει μια άλλη αποκάλυψη. Το «παίγνιον» του Γοργία.

Ο συγγραφέας παίζει και το ομολογεί. Εξαπατά τον αναγνώστη; Του υποδεικνύει να μην τον παίρνει στα σοβαρά; Παίρνει πίσω τις πολλές αλήθειες; Ή το παιχνίδι παίρνει τη θέση της μιας και μοναδικής αλήθειας, εναντίον της οποίας είχε εξαντλήσει όλα του τα επιχειρήματα και τις λέξεις; Κι αν η ιστορία του παιχνιδιού είναι κι αυτή ένα κάμωμα;

Ο αναγνώστης, είτε πάει γυρεύοντας είτε όχι, κάνει υποθέσεις, δοκιμάζεται. Ποιος όμως μπορεί να αποκλείσει ότι, και από τη δική του μεριά, κλείνει το μάτι στον αμοραλισμό του δεινού σοφιστή; Άλλωστε, αυτό που πραγματικά παίζεται στην ανάγνωση, δεν είναι μόνο η επίδραση της γραφής σ’ αυτόν που διατρέχει το κείμενο. Είναι η επαναφορά στο προσκήνιο της σχέσης συγγραφέα και αναγνώστη. Η απόλαυση του κειμένου, χρειάζεται και τους δύο, για να θυμηθούμε Le Plaisir du texte και έναν άλλο διαχρονικό γόητα, τον Roland Barthes.

Όσο για την ηθική, αυτή έχει το δικό της πεδίο, τις πράξεις μας.

Four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence

Cage wrote in "A Composer's Confessions" (1948) that he had the desire to "compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 4 [and a half] minutes long — these being the standard lengths of 'canned' music, and its title will be 'Silent Prayer'. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape or fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibly."



4'33" by John Cage, Histories and Theories of Intermedia blog

Gates

“…He told me his book was called the Book of Sand
because neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end”

He suggested I try to find the first page.
I took the cover in my left hand and opened the book,
my thumb and forefinger almost touching.
It was impossible:
several pages always lay between the cover and my hand.
It was as though they grew from the very book.

“Now try to find the end.”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand, 1975
(translated by Andrew Hurley)