Unsitely Aesthetics

Uncertain Practices in Contemporary Art

Maria Miranda

Unsitely Aesthetics
Uncertain Practices in Contemporary Art

Errant Bodies Press:

Surface Tension Supplement No. 6
Table Of ContentS

Preface 6
Acknowledgements 8
In the Beginning 10
Chapter 1: Unsitely Aesthetics 22
Chapter 2: Network Culture & Mediated Public Space 50
Chapter 3: Site of Unsitely 70
Chapter 4: Present in the Past 86
Epilogue 94
Notes 98
References 112

In Coversation with Artists: An Introduction 128

In Conversation:
kanarinka with Natalie Loveless 130
Igor Štromajer with Norie Neumark 140
Hugh Davies with Linda Carroli 158
Artists from the exhibition Mixed Realities with Jo-Anne Green
and Helen Thorington 174
Brooke Singer with Renate Ferro 194
Deborah Kelly with Bec Dean 214
Barbara Campbell with Norie Neumark 224
Yao Jui-Chung with Timothy Murray 242
Lucas Ihlein with Teri Hoskin 266
Darren Tofts:
Possible Rendezvous – Art as Accident in Urban Spaces 296
Melbourne / Rome 304
6 7

For the book I decided to approach these questions in two different ways,
Preface
through two different foci. In the first part, I let my PhD research, as well
as my own art practice, direct my attention to concentrate on larger forces
operating in art and broader cultural contexts. I engage in conversations
of sorts with historical art practices, network culture as well as the philo-
sophical ideas of John Dewey and Jacques Rancière. In the second part of
the book, I turn to other artists, who shared that same moment, and ask
them to engage in conversations too, conversations of whatever sort work
for them, to help understand the field I’m calling unsitely aesthetics. Their
generosity in conversing around an idea that was unfamiliar to them at
This book started life from within my own collaborative art practice with the time nevertheless resulted in surprising and exciting understandings
sound artist Norie Neumark. The questions raised here were first brought that stretched and deepened my own thinking and added immeasurably to
up in relation to that practice as we found ourselves moving out of a studio the book.
situation – which for us meant chained to our desktop computers – and
into the streets with mobile media. At the time it was thrilling and liberat- Of course being an unsitely project itself, there is an accompanying website
ing to make work on the run, so to speak. It was exciting, too, to learn how where research and discussion will continue.
we could work without depending on the comforts and constraints of a stu- See: http://www.unsitelyaesthetics.com/
dio. It was yet another learning curve1 although this time no manuals were
involved. In a way it happened by chance as we found ourselves in a foreign
city with no media facilities at our disposal and no studio to return to. We
had to improvise with the materials at hand, a process we enjoyed so much
that we’ve continued to work in this way. With this shift in our practice
arose questions as well as a certain urge to articulate what was happening
to us. It also appeared that our own move into public space was not unique
and that similar shifts seemed to be occurring in the world around us, in
particular the media landscape. This twofold shift from within and without
presented questions that this book seeks to articulate, if not answer.
In 2005 I began research on a PhD thesis initiated by the question of
«site» and its problematic position within media art practices. My own art
practice guided my search for a greater understanding of what exactly was
happening to media art as it became untethered – from static computer
workstations – and mobile, in particular as it entered public space in sur-
prising and diverse ways. At the same time dramatic changes were hap-
pening with communication technologies, as the internet became more
enmeshed in our everyday lives. It is that thesis that became the core for
this book.
8

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank all the artists and writers who shared their own
projects and who engaged with the ideas of the book so generously. Their
contributions were always insightful and have enriched the book and its
concept immeasurably.
I am particularly grateful to La Trobe University for giving me the
time and space to continue my research on the unsitely through a Postdoc-
toral Fellowship, and for the stimulating environment that has been created
through the Centre for Creative Arts.
I would also like to thank John Potts and Kathryn Millard for their
generosity and guidance at Macquarie University, and I am grateful for
the support of Macquarie University through the early version of the book,
which was my thesis.
I am also very grateful to the artist’s residencies that enabled me to
make the artworks for the project, for the time and space they afforded to
pursue my work, follow new directions, and engage with fellow artists: The
Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; The MacDowell Colony in New Hamp-
shire; Toos Neger in Dordrecht, NL.
The greatest thank you must go to Brandon LaBelle for his generous
invitation to «follow my discursive desires.» Without his encouragement,
generosity of spirit and unsparing commitment to the project none of this
would have been possible. I would also like to thank Hille Haupt for the
creative design of the book.
Finally my deepest debt of gratitude is to my art collaborator, Norie
Neumark, with whom I have shared so many important projects, stimulat-
ing conversations and adventures; her intellectual generosity, unflagging
energy and incisive intelligence have been critical and sustaining.
10
In the beginning
And how does artistic practice position itself in relation
to notions of public space and the complexity of
audience? In this sense, «site» might function as an
operative term through which to gauge practice – it is
both the physical location of presentation and
the intrinsic negotiations such presentation entails.
(Ehrlich & LaBelle 2003: 10)
In 2004, while on a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris I
began working on the project Searching for rue Simon-Crubellier, with my
collaborator, Norie Neumark. The project’s conceit was an actual search in
the streets and other public and bureaucratic spaces of Paris for an imagi-
nary street, as described by Georges Perec in his book Life a user’s manu-
al (2003). The work itself is ongoing as the search is open-ended and never
finished. However, this work marks the beginning of our exodus from the
studio to the streets and further into «public» space. Ostensibly this was a
movement that seemed to come from our own particular commitment to
engage with the «place» of Paris and the desire to experience the city in all
its strangeness, but also its overwhelming familiarity. Paris is a city that
has been written about, filmed, photographed and imagined (in the Anglo-
phone world) in one way or another for at least three hundred years. Its
streets and buildings exist on multiple levels of perception, encompassing
both the physical and the cultural imaginary. In this sense it is actually far
from strange or exotic, rather it is already highly mediated.2
11
However, our leaving the studio occurred in the context of the then cur-
rent movements of media artists working with Global Positioning Systems
(GPS) and contemporary artists working with notions of social relations
and exchange. In fact it is at the point of intersection of these two move-
ments – media art and contemporary art – that the work and this proj-
ect are located. Drawing on the idea of constraint from OuliPo – the liter-
ary group of which Perec was a member – and conceptual and Fluxus art
practices from the 1960s, we took seriously the description of this street in
Perec’s text, setting out to search for it and deliberately blurring the world
of fiction with the world of actual events. We thought that, as a city like
Paris cannot be seen or known transparently, traversed as it is by fictions,
desires and other affects of the cultural imaginary, the best course of action
to engage with such a place was to take its fictions seriously. Therefore the
constraint we set ourselves was the seriousness of our intent to search for
this street, knowing full well that it did not exist – and yet by following this
initial irrationality «absolutely and logically» mimicking the plight of for-
eigners or tourists in a foreign place, we experienced intimate, intense and
playful encounters with strangers.3
To meet strangers on the streets of a foreign city is not itself unusual.
However, in our case we encountered people while using our low-tech me-
dia. And it was the media that both enabled our ludic encounters and cre-
ated the space for such encounters. In other words, the encounters became
Searching for rue Simon-Crubellier.
Stills from video, 2006.
12 In the beginning
more than private encounters between strangers, but through our portable
media apparatus announced a public encounter of performance. Off the
streets we continued searching online – on Google and through the Perec
list-serv. These online searches and encounters became part of the installa-
tion of the work – and the installations became part of the online incarna-
tion of the street: the more we searched for rue Simon-Crubellier, the more
online references we found to our project and ourselves.
Out of these encounters and the ongoing exhibitions of material ac-
cumulated from our searches arose questions about public space and art,
questions that set this project in train.
In their book Surface tension: problematics of site (2003) Ken Eh-
rlich and Brandon LaBelle work with the figure of «site» to rethink art in
public space and what they call «complexity of audience.» What I am inter-
ested in examing here is how the internet inflects this discussion, not just
for so-called internet artists nor even new media artists, but for a range of
artists who are working across media. After all, the internet is now an ev-
eryday part of the world we live in, and it is changing relations between art-
ists and their publics.
Uncertain Practices
For some time now I have noticed a certain disjunction between the two
fields of contemporary art and media art. This disjunction has a long and
complex history, which I can only allude to here. However as the condi-
tions of «network culture»4 expand across the world many artists are forg-
ing a new relationship with the internet not as a medium, but rather as an-
other site of their work.
In the mid-noughties I also began to notice what seemed like a body
of artworks and artists’ practices working across both the internet and ac-
tual sites – what I’m calling «uncertain practices.» I consider these practic-
es «uncertain» because of both their location – they work across sites and
exist both online and offline simultaneously – and their uncertain position
at the intersection of media art and contemporary art. They are works that
may be thought of as «media art» yet unlike the previous era of «new me-
dia» they are not concerned with technology itself or the notion of inter-
uncertain practices 13
activity. Rather these artists are now leaving the studio, moving and work-
ing in public spaces, in a process that is mobile, nomadic and performative.
They have responded to and developed new audiences and new ways of re-
lating to their audiences, who are defined by networked culture and its me-
diated public spaces.
The book develops a notion of «unsitely aesthetics» as a way to speci-
fy these practices – both in relation to site and public space and audience  –
but also in distinction from other practices in the «same» terrain of pub-
lic space, including practices such as locative media5 and traditional public
art.6 These latter practices focus on either site-specificity, community art
or the use of GPS devices, in contrast to the uncertain practices that are
discussed in this book, where work may be ranged across a number of sites
and address a number of publics spread across the globe.
These works play out in public spaces – including the internet – but are not
considered public art in the traditional sense. Unlike site-specific or con-
textual work, this work exists across sites, across media and is networked
and connected. And in distinction from locative media, the work does not
necessarily use location aware devices. What is its relationship to contem-
porary art? What sort of aesthetics does it enact? How does «site» work
in media art practices that exist across media and in different places? And
is «site» a useful term to employ in the current era of networked publics?
How is the internet a site of art practice and reception?
A major proposition of the book is the recognition that the internet
changes everything, including changing relations between the artist and
their audience/publics. That is, the internet is a site of production and of
reception. Even though some work may also exist in other sites at the same
time, for many audiences it is received only through the internet – an au-
dience spread across the globe in a local context of reception. This point of
reception has become a significant «site» of work. I have approached this
site not as if the real work happens elsewhere, but as a site in and of itself.
I am calling this situation «unsitely.» The term pivots on the tradition-
al history of site – from the site/nonsite of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jet-
ty to the decades long history of site-specificity.7 And «un» is brought into
play to dislodge the fixity of site and to multiply its potential, rather than
discard «site» itself. In this way site-specificity is folded into the notion of
unsitely, both acknowledging its importance and unfolding a new moment
14 In the beginning
as network culture disrupts our common notions of place and being in one
place at one time. It also suggests an expanded site, incorporating but be-
yond Smithson’s site/nonsite. In this expanded and unsitely work there
can be glimpsed new possibilities for artists to work productively at the
edges of the art world and its institutions, rather than at the centre. This
move away from the centre does not mean an abandonment of art institu-
tions but rather a recognition and a renegotiation that as we head down
the highway, with the radical practices and aspirations of the 1960s gener-
ation fixed firmly in the rear view mirror – and realising there is no turn-
ing back – there are nevertheless new possibilities for action, movement
and engagement that are not completely negative, coopted and corporate, as
critics such as the artist Andrea Fraser suggest.8 Rather, there are glimpses
of possible gaps and cracks in the «corporatised» world of art where an art-
ist can work without the controls of art-on-demand biennales and art fairs,
without the veiled nationalism and work-as-charity of government funding,
without the pressures of demanding patrons and dealers. The new public
spaces of the networked world have created new lines of flight (in a Deleu-
zian sense) and in the unsitely aesthetics of some art practices one can per-
ceive this movement away from the normalising pull of corporate art in-
stitutions as artists devise new strategies and tactics, utilising the internet
as a new possibility for public encounter and encountering multiple pub-
lics.9 As the internet is a site of both public and private encounters, media
artwork situated there disturbs the art / life divisions and debates. What do
these spatial media art practices reveal about social space and the produc-
tion of space in this time of networked, mobile media on the one hand and
corporate art institutions on the other?
Media Art in Network Culture and Mediated Public Space
«Network culture» is a term used by Kazys Varnelis to describe the current
moment of internet connections and mobile media. (Varnelis)10 Network
culture, for Varnelis and the contributors to his book, is the contemporary
condition we find ourselves in, «the simultaneous superimposition of real
and virtual space, the new participatory media.» In fact they go further to
describe the network as the «dominant cultural logic» of our era and anal-
Media art in network culture and mediated public space 15
ogous to previous logics and periodisations like modernism and postmod-
ernism. In this book I investigate art practices, including my own, that are
working in and with networked culture, but are not simply using and test-
ing the new technologies of connection. Rather they are works that reflect
in some ways on the new condition created by the network; effects felt ei-
ther of time, space, social relations or the social imaginary. In fact these
«uncertain» practices often employ low-tech strategies with little use for
spectacle or high-end computing power, rather, through strategies of play-
ful intervention and humorous situations they test the cultural logic of ev-
eryday life to peel back hidden layers of significance.
I also use the term «mediated public space» rather than simply «net-
work culture» to point to the contemporary moment (that is crucial to un-
derstanding the work discussed). In so doing I am drawing attention to the
way that people of all ages are carrying media of all sorts everywhere and
using media in public space. I consider this an aspect of network culture
now so taken for granted that the complexity and significance of its effects
can be overlooked. That is, what I am calling «mediated public space» in-
volves a reconfiguring not just of public/private and social behaviour and
relations, but also subjectivity more broadly. In Chapter 2, I parallel John
McGrath’s perceptive analysis of surveillance media and «surveillance
space» in Loving big brother (2004)11 and argue that the ubiquity and
new uses of mobile media are creating a performative space of encounter
in public. With the multiplication of media – besides the surveillance ef-
fect – there are other unexpected and possibly more positive effects which
are changing the relationship between people and media, and which are
producing a more active subject than the more passive subject of previous
technologies. Following McGrath’s argument for a more productive under-
standing of surveillance through the notion of performativity and what he
calls «surveillance space,» I apply his insights to «mediated public space.»
I see this performative space, created by mobile media, as a key condition
for an unsitely aesthetics.
In order to go beyond the limits of traditional approaches to both pub-
lic art and new media art I foreground the situatedness of the making and
reception of the work. I do this through the figure of site – playing on its
situatedness. I use the idea of site as a «fulcrum,» as Ehrlich and LaBelle
(2003: 11) put it, to think through ideas of current media art practice that
16 In the beginning
exist across sites of mediated public spaces. This contemporary art figure
and concept has much to offer us in order to understand a group of me-
dia art practices that in most cases have been understood through media
art theories of distributed aesthetics, or other media theories of commu-
nication. That is, while site has been the subject of extensive and impor-
tant scholarly work in art history, (Miwon Kwon 2004 and James Meyer
2000)12 and sound studies (see Ken Ehrlich & Brandon LaBelle 2003) it
has not been a significant figure for (new) media art theory.13 In this book,
then, I want to rework the figure of site to investigate and present media
art in public places and, in turn, to suggest that media art in public s/plac-
es also opens new questions for scholarship about site and of course im-
plicitly about place and our sense of place. What could place mean in a net-
worked world?14 In returning to the figure of site, my aim is to look again
at the significance and potentialities of site, not to re-locate media art back
again into paradigms of site-specificity but, on the contrary, to understand
site as it relates to and en-frames contemporary media art practice as it
plays out in network culture. And in looking at media art practices in pub-
lic space we will also look again at a particularly important form of public
space as a site of art – the internet.
In this sense «site» is operating much like a thaumatrope, a nine-
teenth century toy that flips between two images.15 For now let us imagine
site here as a sort of hinge and a way to open up and connect two seem-
ingly incompatible histories and discourses – those of contemporary art
and media art. In these discourses site has a distinct meaning. By making
the term work as if a Duchampian door, I am attempting to conjure both
meanings simultaneously and at once. If you swing the door in the direc-
tion of the internet and media art, its meaning is linked to the common
term «website.» If you swing the door in the direction of contemporary art,
site is situated within a rich and complex history of site-specificity, dat-
ing from the 1960s and described and analysed by Kwon in One Place Af-
ter Another.
In investigating media art practices that exist at the intersection of
media art and contemporary art,16 I use the term «media art» in a similar
spirit to that outlined by Darren Tofts in Interzone:
Media art in network culture and mediated public space 17
First, I have resisted using the term «digital art» because it is too reductive, foreground-
ing the computer as the decisive factor in the art-making process … Secondly, I have also
resisted using the term «new media art» because it is the one term most closely aligned
with the concept of interaction and therefore even more reductive than digital art.
(Tofts 2005b: 8)
The term media art invokes contemporary art practices that engage with a range of dif-
ferent media, of which the computer is the predominant mode. (Tofts 2005b: 12)
Tofts assumes media art practices to be naturally part of the landscape of
contemporary art practices, and in a way of course they are. Yet, I suggest
there is also a discord within contemporary art institutions, which have
on the whole been slow to accept the computer as another tool or medium
for art practice. This has created a separate and specific history of the elec-
tronic arts; Tofts’ book is testament to that history in the Australian con-
text. (Tofts 2005b) Instead this book takes this historical separation of me-
dia art and contemporary art as a starting point and invitation to discuss
work that is now ranged across this gap: work that for this very reason I am
calling uncertain.
By foregrounding uncertain media art practices, I am responding to what
has happened to some of the practices once defined as new media art. New
media, especially during the 1990s, existed in a separate art world where
the digital and new media was heralded as either the new avant-garde, or
such a totally new phenomenon that it could only herald the end of art
(again). Both sides share some responsibility for this estrangement of new
media and contemporary art. On the one hand there was the disdain for
new media art and rejection of it by art galleries and museums unwilling
to engage with technology, and anchored in a phenomenological discourse
of «presence» – specifically the presence of materiality. On the other hand
this attitude was up against the hubristic attitude of the new media advo-
cates – artists, technologists and media enthusiasts – unwilling to under-
stand art discourse’s historical concerns and terms. Ironically the position
of media art was (and still is to a certain extent) just as uncertain in the
field of media studies itself, as it was in the field of contemporary art. As
Daniel Palmer remarks:
18 In the beginning
In contemporary media and cultural studies’ obsession with «popular» and «ordinary»
culture, artistic practices are increasingly rare as objects of study. Dismissed as the self-
expression of a niche market for residual high-culture, their analysis is left to the spe-
cialised discipline of art history. (Palmer 2004: 169)
To this end, new media was concerned to map out a terrain that separat-
ed itself from traditional or contemporary art altogether, and out of this
developed new media festivals, art shows and symposiums like the Inter-
Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) and Ars Electronica. However, as
the dot.com crash damped down some of this euphoria, a different direc-
tion appeared on the horizon, the so-called era of social software or Web
2.0. This social turn for the digital arts created a pause. Some (new) media
artists began to reflect upon art discourses, and the connection between
the two art worlds came into view, for instance, with the concern by both
artists and theorists with connecting (new) media to an art historical dis-
course and, in particular, conceptual art.17
In a corollary situation to the corporatisation of contemporary art that
Andrea Fraser critiques in her essay «A museum is not a business. It is run
in a businesslike fashion,» new media art in the late 1990s was called upon
to give technology a human face and artists were considered «content pro-
viders.»18 This can be a depressing scenario for an artist, and for Andrea
Fraser it would seem to be a closed scenario, focused as it is on specific
large museums in the United States. Contrary to Fraser’s argument, which
elides «neo-Fluxus practices like relational aesthetics» with neoliberalism,
I suggest that possibilities still exist for active and vital art actions that can
and do exist «outside» this scenario. (Fraser 2005) Creating just such pos-
sibilities and opening up discourse and dialogue with uncertain publics
is exactly what is at stake for the uncertain practices that I am concerned
with. As I mentioned previously I situate these practices at the intersection
of media art and contemporary art. This is because they are practices that
use media, but are not works about technology itself or concerned with the
innovations of or for technology. Rather they are works that are deeply en-
gaged in the current moment of networked culture, utilising different me-
dia and working methods like cross media to make work that is ephemer-
al, mobile, playful and significantly, given the corporate scenario outlined
by Fraser, using strategies of DIY and low-tech. These strategies make
Media art in network culture and mediated public space 19
these practices uncertain as they are works that don’t exist in one place, al-
though as will become apparent this does not mean that they are not situat-
ed. They are works that can be accessed online without the mediating func-
tion of the art museum or gallery, which does make a difference for artists.
This book has two parts. The first part consists of a theoretical and
historical discussion which contextualises unsitely aesthetics within the
current moment. The second part consists of conversations between art-
ists and writers or between artists and artists.
I begin, in chapter 1, by addressing the notion of aesthetics – a very
contested term and one that is associated with the beginnings of the auton-
omous sphere we call «art.» I look to the philosophical and aesthetic ideas
of John Dewey and Jacques Rancière. Both philosophers contribute impor-
tant ideas that help elucidate what aesthetics could mean in general, and
point to the significance of an unsitely aesthetics, in particular. I then clarify
what is meant by unsitely/unsightly, introducing the amateur as a signifi-
cant figure for unsitely aesthetics. In chapter 2, I elaborate upon the concept
of network culture, looking in particular at the crucial role of the internet
and the current moment of networked publics. One of the things I am point-
ing to here is that network culture is the context for unsitely aesthetics and
uncertain practices. In chapter 3, I expand on the notion of site to include
the situated-ness of both artwork and audiences or publics. I look to the
figure of Robert Smithson – a key and emblematic artist from the 1960s –
whose work existed at a moment of uncertainty before practices had sepa-
rated and congealed into performance art, conceptual art, process art, land
art and other specific disciplines. In the present project Smithson’s work
acts as a significant departure point and reference as his invention of site/
nonsite keeps in tension the relationship between the exhibition and the
world outside the galleries and museums. Smithson not only expanded the
parameters of what art could be about (history, geography, crystallography,
for example) but his complex, prescient, and sometimes very funny uncer-
tain practice interrogated and troubled the site of the art work. In chap-
ter 4, I argue against a technological determinism and suggest that many
of the attributes and features of an unsitely aesthetics were already forecast
and performed in previous eras – in particular Fluxus and the Situationists.
I link the importance of mobility to unsitely and reconsider walking as an
important aesthetic practice for mobile and unsitely artists.
20 In the beginning
Part Two consists of conversations between artists and writers, and art-
ists and artists who were invited to discuss both their own projects and to
reflect upon the notion of unsitely in general. These conversations were
themselves conducted in a range of dialogic forms demonstrating the
rich communication landscape we presently live in. Some communicated
through email, while others used Facebook and Skype, and one set of con-
versationalists used moleskin notebooks sent back and forth through the
regular mail (snail mail). All of these diverse ways of having a conversation
enacted, in their processes, some of the concerns in the book itself. To be-
gin, Boston based artist kanarinka , (a.k.a. Catherine D’Ignazio) discuss-
es her multi-sited projects in email conversation with Natalie Loveless ,
an artist based in Ontario, Canada. In particular they discuss kanarinka’s
most recent project, The Border Crossed Us (2011), a «sculptural interven-
tion» that recreated the US-Mexico fence as a photo mural on the UMass
Amherst campus. Igor Štromajer , an artist working out of Slovenia and
Germany, discusses his net.art projects with the sound artist Norie Neu-
mark , based in Melbourne. Štromajer describes the trajectory of his net
art projects beginning with the performative actions like Oppera Internet-
tikka, where he sang the html code, to his more recent project of «omis-
sive art,» called the Expunction project. Hugh Davies , an artist based
in Melbourne and Linda Carroli , a Brisbane-based writer, have a con-
versation via Facebook. The focus of their conversation is Davies’ collab-
orative and participatory project Analogue Art Map, which swaps social
networking and digital processes for paper, cardboard, wool and pens in
the physical space of the gallery. Jo-anne Green and Helen Thoring-
ton , directors of New Radio and Performing Arts and the online website
Turbulence.org, interview artists from three of the five projects that were
commissioned for the exhibition, Mixed Realities. John Craig Freeman
discusses his project Imaging Beijing, a place-based virtual reality proj-
ect combining panoramic photography, digital video and virtual worlds.
Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott discuss their collaborative and par-
ticipatory project No Matter, where they commissioned builders in Sec-
ond Life to create 40 imaginary objects, which were later re-constructed
in Real Life. Michael Takeo Magruder discusses his project The Vit-
ruvian World, a project that embodied the principles of Vitruvius across
three different forms or «sites» – the Avatar (virtual), the Puppet (phys-
Media art in network culture and mediated public space 21
ical) and the Doll (network). New York-based artist Brooke Singer and
Ithaca-based artist Renate Ferro , in conversation through email, discuss
the collaborative nature of their individual practices. Singer discusses her
collaborative project Counter Kitchen, where she deconstructs everyday
food items to reveal their toxic contents; Ferro describes the evolution of
her participatory and process oriented project Private Secrets / Public Lies
where participants are invited to both leave their secret and at the same
time erase their secret. Deborah Kelly , a Sydney-based artist in con-
versation with Bec Dean , a curator and writer also based in Sydney, dis-
cuss Kelly’s multi-sited and tactical projects, in particular Tank Man Tan-
go, a performative memorial where participants world wide were invited to
learn a dance based on the steps of «tank man,» who confronted the tanks
in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Barbara Campbell , a Sydney-based artist
discusses her participatory web project 1001 nights cast, with Norie Neu-
mark . This project literally spanned 1001 nights and included 243 writ-
ers, who offered their stories, of no more than 1001 words, for Barbara to
retell online, as she herself moved across the world. Yao Jui-Chung , a
Taiwanese artist, in email conversation with Tim Murray , an academic
and writer based in Ithaca, New York, discuss Yao’s artistic practice. The
conversation traverses the many projects made over several decades, in-
cluding Yao’s photographic interventions into Taiwanese social and polit-
ical history with such projects as Territory Take Over (1994), Recover-
ing Mainland China (1997) and The World is for All (1997 – 2000). Lucas
Ihlein , a Sydney-based artist and Teri Hoskin , a writer and artist based
in Adelaide, conduct a «slow» meandering conversation using a moleskin
notebook sent back and forth through that older distribution network, the
Post Office. Their discussions are inspired by Ihlein’s two projects Bilater-
al Kellerberrin (2005) and Bilateral Petersham (2006). Finally, Darren
Tofts , a Melbourne-based writer and academic, performs an experiment
in unsitely aesthetics. In Possible Rendezvous: art as accident in urban
spaces Tofts superimposes the map of one city onto another, so that Mel-
bourne and Rome become an «aleatoric interface» for a «virtual» dérive
with chance discoveries.
22
Chapter 1: Unsitely Aesthetics
The task of [pragmatist] aesthetic theory, then, is not
to capture the truth of our current understanding of art,
but rather to reconceive art so as to enhance its role
and appreciation; the ultimate goal is not knowledge
but improved experience, though truth and knowledge
should, of course, be indispensable to achieving this.
(Shusterman 2000: xv)
There has long been a tension, for the «historical avant-garde» as well
as contemporary experimental art practices, between the desire to open
boundaries between art and life and the desire to maintain a particular
sphere of art and art making. The uncertain practices that I’m concerned
with play at the borders of this dilemma, both of art and life, as well as the
borders of aesthetic understandings. My aim with unsitely aesthetics is to
initiate a more porous aesthetics from the point of view of the maker and
the receiver or audience of the work. To do this I will turn to the work of
John Dewey and Jacques Rancière. Although the definition of aesthetics
for these two philosophers is quite different from each other, both, in their
own times question dominant notions of aesthetics and lay the ground for
just such a porous aesthetics and a rethinking of what art could be. In this
chapter I introduce Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics and Rancière’s philo-
sophical writing, which reconceptualises our traditional understanding of
art history and aesthetics.19 I also locate unsitely aesthetics in relation to
23
other current approaches, such as relational, distributed and remix – fore-
grounding the significance of DIY and amateur modes of practice.
The term aesthetics is derived from the Greek, aisthetikos, mean-
ing things perceptible by the senses, or sensory perception. The modern
use of this term began with the German philosopher Alexander Baumgar-
ten in the 18th century who not only coined the term but also founded the
branch of philosophy called aesthetics. This is usually considered the be-
ginning of an autonomous sphere of art. According to Richard Shusterman,
Baumgarten’s original project of aesthetics went far beyond what is com-
monly considered to be the focus of aesthetics today, that is, «the theory
of fine art and natural beauty» rather «Aesthetica argues for the cognitive
value of sensory perception, celebrating its rich potential not only for bet-
ter thinking but for better living.»20 But as Shusterman notes, «the scope
of post-Baumgartenian aesthetics was reduced from the vast field of sen-
sory cognition to the narrow compass of beauty and fine art.» (Shusterman
2000: 266) However, in the rich tradition of pragmatism, and in particular,
the philosophy of John Dewey, which is currently having a resurgence, this
narrow concept of «aesthetics» is questioned and problematised.21
John Dewey’s aesthetic experiences
Pragmatist aesthetics, considered to have begun with Dewey, invites a
broader understanding of aesthetics, and therefore art, by grounding aes-
thetics in the idea of lived experience, rather than the more common meth-
od of objective analysis used by analytic philosophy. «Analytic philosophy»
refers to the philosophical tradition that dominated Anglo-American phi-
losophy for most of the 20th century.22 For pragmatist philosophy in gen-
eral, there is no objective truth, rather there is a plurality of truths. Prag-
matism seeks to understand each situation as it is presented. Above all
pragmatism asks what is the use value of any given idea or situation.
A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate hab-
its dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficien-
cy, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed
24 Unsitely Aesthetics
systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and
adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiri-
cist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open
air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finali-
ty in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only.
(William James: 1907)
Pragmatist aesthetics, as initially developed by Dewey, has an uncanny
sense of speaking to and about contemporary art, especially art that is con-
cerned with situations and experiences rather than objects and beauty.
Art as experience was published in 1934 and based on the William
James Lectures that Dewey gave at Harvard University in 1931. In it Dewey
outlines in great detail his philosophy of art. He begins, not by addressing
art objects or traditional questions of what is art and how to judge it – in-
stead he discusses what he calls the «live creature» and the idea of «experi-
ence.» Dewey’s concern was to realign the idea of art away from the reified
object and to reconnect art and art-making back again into its context, that
is, life itself. This is in contrast to how art was (and still is in many ways)
separated from ordinary life and disconnected from its original meaning.
He writes:
When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in ex-
perience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general signifi-
cance, with which aesthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is
cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human
effort, undergoing, and achievement. (Dewey 2005: 2)
At the same time Dewey points to the importance of the social role and
function of art. «The values that lead to production and intelligent enjoy-
ment of art have to be incorporated into the system of social relationships.»
(Dewey 2005: 358) In a way Dewey may be understood to prefigure the
concerns of current art practice and art theories that have shifted the ter-
rain of art away from the «disembodied eye» of the gallery-goer to the so-
cial and relational, arguing for the importance of social relations in the
making and enjoying of art, and emphasising the essentially social nature
of art itself. His philosophy, as outlined in Art as Experience, has become
john dewey’s aesthetic experiences 25
an important text for many artists today, especially those working with the
social and relational, but also those artists concerned with the process of
making.23 And it is in these current practices that the significance of work-
ing across sites is often played out, as they are fundamentally interdisci-
plinary and «impure» art practices.24
For Dewey the function and meaning of art is always linked to human
values. This is art’s use value. Art is for enjoyment and its use is to height-
en the lived experience of the «live creature» giving vitality, energy and
moments of intensity. Significantly, Dewey expands the idea of aesthet-
ics to include and indeed privilege the process of making, rather than the
end product, the art object, «Since the actual work of art is what the prod-
uct does with and in experience …» (Dewey 2005: 1) His philosophy is con-
cerned with understanding the aesthetic experience as the lived experience
of the individual, defined as «having an experience.» Dewey’s «having an
experience,» while lived and of the everyday, «does not transport us from
the workaday world into another realm of being. It but reveals the potenti-
ality of the world in which we live.» (Jackson 1998: 61)
To understand art and aesthetic experience, according to Dewey, one
must return to the source of aesthetic experience itself, which for Dewey is
everyday life, «that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with
normal processes of living …Following this clue we can discover how the
work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in
things of everyday enjoyment.» (Dewey 2005: 9) It is here in everyday life
that not only the significance of art can be found, but also art’s beginnings
and its source.
In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin
with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man,
arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights
that hold the crowd – the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous
holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in air
on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. (Dewey 2005: 3)
Here Dewey is describing everyday life in the city, the noise, the colour and
the feats of strength and grace. These everyday occurrences are examples
of Dewey’s aesthetic experience as situated within the world we live in. In
26 unsitely aesthetics
this way Dewey insists aesthetic experience exists not just in Nature or be-
hind the closed doors of art museums but also, as in the dramatic and cha-
otic scenes he describes above, in the life of the city. There is no separation
or break rather there is a continuity of experience from distracted to what
he calls an experience, his term for an aesthetic experience. This is a very
specific notion, to which I will return shortly.
Dewey, like most pragmatists, rejected any sort of dualism: the dual-
ism of art and life or that of aesthetic experience versus ordinary experi-
ence, or popular art and culture versus Fine Art. This rejection of tradition-
al dualisms fits with pragmatism’s rejection of any sort of received ideas or
dogma. It also speaks to today’s «horizontal logic» and expanded practic-
es of art.
But, to my mind, the trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made
compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that «spiritualizes» it out of connec-
tion with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritual-
ization is not a degrading and Philistinish materialization of works of fine art, but a con-
ception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common
experiences. (Dewey 2005: 10)
Dewey claims that art has been separated from everyday experience, cor-
ralled into the specialised spaces of museums and art galleries, «the muse-
um conception of art» where art has become «the beauty parlor of civiliza-
tion.» (Dewey 2005: 357) For Dewey, the separating off of this role of art
into the museums and out of reach of the majority is a crime against the
greater good. Richard Shusterman describing the motivations for the need
to keep art pure, «compartmentalised» and away from everyday life writes,
The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to
denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm
of instrumental value. This strategy, a carry-over of «art for art’s sake,» was to pro-
tect the autonomy of art from unfair competition with ruthlessly dominant utilitarian
thinking, for fear that art could not adequately compete in terms of instrumental value.
The hope was to protect some realm of human spirituality from the crassly calculative
means-end rationality which had not only disenchanted the world but ravaged it with
the festers of functionalised industrialization.» (Shusterman 2000a: 8 – 9)
An Experience 27
Dewey’s response to this was not to disregard the opposition between in-
strumental and intrinsic value, rather he goes back to basics to rethink why
art is valuable and useful – without the necessity of giving specific objects
intrinsic value. The term useful or use value for Dewey is not to be mistak-
en with the instrumentalist logic of utilitarian traditions where useful of-
ten refers to a means-end justification. In the latter sense art is not useful,
rather it is devalued as something of no use in comparison to the achieve-
ments of science and medicine. But Dewey’s pragmatism rethinks the idea
of useful away from this narrow means-ends thinking of rational econom-
ics and efficient living devoid of joy and happiness. As Thomas M. Alexan-
der remarks, «If we were to ask useful for what? We should be obliged to
examine their actual consequences» which Alexander writes «our utilitari-
an obsession with means apart from ends makes us ignore the widespread
poverty and emptiness of human experience, what Marx calls «alienation.»
(Alexander 1998: 4) For Dewey it is through art, in the aesthetic experi-
ence, that we find meaning and value. Art is an activity that «keeps alive
the power to experience the common world in its fullness» (Shusterman
2000a: 10) And more than momentary moments of delight. «They ex-
pand our horizons. They contribute meaning and value to future experi-
ence. They modify our ways of perceiving the world, thus leaving us and
the world itself irrevocably changed.» (Jackson 1998: 33)
An Experience
Dewey develops a specific notion of experience that he calls «an experi-
ence» to denote an aesthetic experience apart from ordinary experience.
An experience, he writes «has a unity,» it is the sort of experience that
stands out in our lives. «It is that meal, that storm, that rupture of friend-
ship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that
pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent
parts.» (Dewey 2005: 38) Importantly an experience for Dewey does not
simply wind up or stop, it has an arc or what Dewey describes as a «con-
summation.» An experience comes to a completion with a sense of fulfill-
ment. Described in this way it becomes obvious that aesthetic experience
28 unsitely aesthetics
is not only experienced in the presence of a (traditional) art object but can
happen anywhere. It can be «a kiss in the morning» as Dick Higgins fa-
mously quipped.
An angler may eat his catch without thereby losing the esthetic satisfaction he experi-
enced in casting and playing. It is this degree of completeness of living in the experience
of making and of perceiving that makes the difference between what is fine or esthetic in
art and what is not. Whether the thing made is put to use, as are bowls, rugs, garments,
weapons is, intrinsically speaking, a matter of indifference. (Dewey 2005: 27)
What Dewey is saying is that aesthetic experience need not be confined to
«fine art» but is an experience, a moment of intensity that can be had doing
even the most mundane activities, like the pleasure of fishing. The func-
tional nature of the objects he describes like bowls and rugs etc does not
make a difference to the aesthetic experience one has, as either a maker or
admirer. Ultimately where we place these objects – in our home or in a mu-
seum – is a matter of cultural judgement that is not intrinsic to the object
itself or the nature of the thing experienced. It is simply how our culture
wants to organise things.
Aesthetic experience has a specific shape and rhythm.
…we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment.
Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of expe-
rience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a
problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eat-
ing a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or tak-
ing part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and
not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing
quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. (Dewey 2005: 37)
Dewey’s conception of an experience may appear too holistic to have any
bearing on contemporary art’s enormous range and infinite variety of what
an art object, situation, event or experience could be. The contemporary
expanded field of art brings with it discord and fragmentation which at
first glance may not seem to fit Dewey’s somewhat «wholesome» ideas. Yet
it is important to remember that Dewey’s theory concentrates on the ex-
perience of art rather than the art object. «Art objects are of importance
An Experience 29
to Dewey principally as they operate within experience, giving it structure
and becoming carriers of meaning.» (Jackson 1998: 111) He does not dic-
tate the subject matter, nor the form that art could take, and this leaves
room for the infinite variety of art events that emerge today.
This shifting away from the object as the focus of aesthetic definitions
to the aesthetic experience itself leaves open an understanding of art that
can now include the radical departures of contemporary art. These depar-
tures would include the contemporary importance of the audience/pub-
lic to a work, especially work that behaves relationally and /or work that
is distributed across sites. It is significant that Dewey includes the expe-
rience of the maker of the work of art into his notion of aesthetic experi-
ence, thus recognizing that aesthetic experience can be experienced by the
person creating the work, as much as by the audience/public receiving the
work. This inclusion is significant to contemporary practices where the im-
portance of the process has long been recognised, at least since the 1960s.
It is particularly relevant for uncertain practices where participation and
making and doing are often blurred, with work initiated by an artist who
may invite others to participate or collaborate or simply be included in the
process of making. The work may be a situation or action rather than the
making of an object.
Importantly the idea of experience is not simply something that one
has alone, «shut up» inside oneself, and that can be reported later, after
the fact. This is emphatically not what Dewey meant.
Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of sig-
nifying being shut up within one’s own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active
and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration
of self and the world of objects and events. (Dewey 2005: 18)
For Dewey an experience is an active sense of being in the moment, in the
present and it includes everything that is part of that moment. The minute
that one reflects on it, one is outside the experience and no longer experi-
encing it. As Jackson notes «Dewey invites us to think of experience differ-
ently. He asks us to abandon the convention of looking upon experience as
something that happens exclusively within us, that is as an essentially psy-
chological concept.» (Jackson 1998: 3) Instead Dewey’s idea of experience
30 unsitely aesthetics
is broad and relational. It includes the person experiencing as well as what
is experienced and it challenges the centrality of the personal and individ-
ual, moving away from any humanist philosophical idea of experience, to
an understanding of how we are embedded in and of the environment. We
are not separate from our environment, and there is no outside for the per-
son experiencing.
Experience, in other words, is transactional. It is not just what registers on our con-
sciousness as we make our way through the world but includes the objects and events
that compose that world. The objects and events are as much a part of experience as we
are ourselves. (Jackson 1998: 3)
Dewey, writing in 1934, could not have imagined the unsitely and uncer-
tain practices of today’s art makers – his own preferences in art, as refer-
enced from his texts, seem quite conservative in comparison to the impli-
cations that his philosophy of art holds. Yet his ideas of an experience and
the importance of the contingent nature of art as part of culture and tied to
experiences in the present, rather than a «museum idea of art» has great
relevance for understanding contemporary uncertain practices.
It is in Dewey’s philosophy of returning art to its sources in the ev-
eryday experience of the «lived creature» that current art practices – espe-
cially those engaged with the social and relational – are finding inspiration.
It is important to note that in expanding the potential for art in the expe-
riences of the everyday, Dewey was not calling for the collapse of art into
life. For Dewey, it was an expansion of art rather than a collapse or disap-
pearance. Shusterman elaborates upon this idea: «The pragmatist project
in aesthetics is not to abolish the institution of art but to transform it. The
aim, to adapt Dewey’s museum metaphor, is not to close or destroy art’s
museums but to open and enlarge them.» (Shusterman 2002a: 140) As
Shusterman points out:
[Dewey] in some ways anticipates Foucault’s more elaborate analysis of disciplinary
power and Adorno’s more embittered critique of the social and personal disintegration
wrought by our administrative society, which dominates by dividing and then homoge-
nizing under its bureaucratic forms. (Shusterman 2000a: 12)
Jacques Rancière’s Poetics of aesthetics 31
The pragmatist aesthetics of Dewey is proving productive for many con-
temporary artists today as it privileges the process of art rather than the
products of art, the aesthetic experience of the individual rather than a hi-
erarchy of codes and forms pertaining to aesthetics of taste. This is an im-
portant departure from both analytic philosophy’s discriminations as well
as the commodity art market and culture industry. Dewey’s philosophy has
a great deal to offer artists as well as art lovers, both «amateurs» and «con-
sumers» in its expansive and egalitarian approach to art and «an aesthet-
ic experience.» In sum Dewey’s work is important for unsitely aesthetics
in several related ways. Firstly, it makes room for DIY and the unsightly.
Secondly, it foregrounds aesthetics and art as a way of life, nourishing the
rapprochement of art and life – for both the maker and audience of unsite-
ly works. Thirdly, it focuses on the experience as the defining charac-
teristic, freeing us from the demands of certainty of art practices. Fourth-
ly, in repositioning the significance of the art gallery and allowing for
art experiences in any setting he prefigures the unsitely work of current
practices.
Jacques Rancière’s Poetics of Aesthetics
For much of the 20th century the term «aesthetics» has been a despised
term by avant-garde artists and radical thinkers. It was considered to be
the purveyor of an elitist thinking and practice linked to classical ideas
of the «beautiful.» The early avant-garde attacks on «art» were often de-
voted to undoing or disrupting established «aesthetics,» undermining no-
tions like the autonomy of art. Aesthetics came to be understood as the
philosophical defence and practice of high art, opposing itself against the
low arts of popular culture. A culmination of this distrust of the «aesthetic»
was the publication of a key text of post-modernism, edited by Hal Foster
and published in 1983 – aptly called «The anti-aesthetic.»25 It is against this
master narrative that Rancière proposes a rethinking of aesthetics and its
relations to politics, and what he calls the politics of aesthetics.
In the philosophy of Jacques Rancière aesthetics holds a completely
different place to that provided by Dewey though a useful one for my pur-
poses. According to Rancière, aesthetics no longer refers to «perceptible by
32 unsitely aesthetics
the senses,» or knowledge through experience. It does not refer to an indi-
vidual appreciation of art at all nor any other sensual experience. Rather, it
refers to a specific regime of art. In Rancière’s scheme aesthetics refers to:
[that] which denotes neither art theory in general nor a theory that would consign art
to its effects on sensibility. Aesthetics refers to a specific regime for identifying and re-
flecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their cor-
responding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships
(which presupposes a certain idea of thought’s effectivity). (Rancière 2006a: 10)
Rancière’s project is to understand the relationship between art and pol-
itics beyond the familiar model of Marxist analysis as well as the old de-
bates on art’s autonomy. This is useful and productive for unsitely aesthet-
ics as he confronts these old debates with a fresh approach that shifts the
ground away from an either/or situation; in fact, he describes the possi-
bility for «critical art» today as a sort of «third way between the two poli-
tics of aesthetics.» The two politics Rancière is referring to are, on the one
hand, art as an autonomous and «self contained» entity, on the other hand
«the indiscernibility of art and life» most often seen through the long pro-
cession of avant-garde activities and aspirations spanning the entire 20th
century. But for Rancière this seeming opposition between the two politics
of aesthetics represents a paradox: for art is both singular and heteroge-
neous, so that «the third way» for critical art practices, must be that of ne-
gotiating and playing on and between the boundary between art and non-
art. «Political art must be some sort of collage of these opposites.» Collage
for Rancière is a key idea, and a «major procedure» of critical art. (Rancière
2009: 41)
In this schema politics itself is a constant renegotiation of «the terms
in which politics is staged and its subjects are determined.» (Hinderliter et
al 2009: 7) For Rancière the political is the framing of what will be con-
sidered common objects and experiences; it is the framing of the spaces
of politics and of what can be seen – in other words, of what is visible and
audible, of what can be said and heard, and therefore our very basic un-
derstandings of our worlds. This «distribution» of spaces and times and
feelings and experiences are what Rancière calls «the distribution of the
sensible.» It is,
Jacques Rancière’s Poetics of aesthetics 33
an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of being, and ways of saying, and
sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an or-
der of the visible and of the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and an-
other is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. Poli-
tics exists when this order is disrupted by those who have no part. (Ranciere cited in
Hinderliter et al 2009: 7)
It is this crucial aspect of what is possible and what can be perceived that
puts aesthetics at the core of politics, because politics is now a struggle over
the possibilities of political reality itself: «Politics is aesthetic in principle
because it reconfigures the common field of what is seeable and sayable» in
a particular political order. (Hinderliter et al 2009: 7)
Rancière understands the work that art does as, of necessity, constant-
ly shifting and responsive to the cultural as well as political moment. In-
deed, Rancière’s philosophy, and understanding of art history, opens up a
space for understanding and engaging with work that may be slippery, mo-
bile and ephemeral – unsitely – as his philosophy is (and here he shares
ground with Dewey) unconcerned with judgements of taste. Rather
Rancière’s concern is the possibility of art staging the political – «where dis-
agreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense.»
(Hinderliter 2009: 19)
In Rancière’s philosophical world the arbitrariness of form and con-
tent is understood through the grid of the current regime of art, that which
he calls the «aesthetic regime»:
The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular
and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and
genres … The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same
time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously
establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses
to shape itself. (Rancière 2006a: 23)
For Rancière «Art» in its singular and now capitalised state occurred two
hundred years ago. Previous eras did not know this form of «Art,» rather it
was a plurality of arts. He identifies three regimes of art within the West-
ern tradition, thus producing a distinct genealogy for art that reconfigures
34 unsitely aesthetics
the usual historical master narrative of modernity – the familiar story of
modernism and postmodernism.
Regimes of Art
Rancière rewrites a genealogy of art to elucidate the different ways that art
has been considered in order to reframe understanding of the relationship
between politics and aesthetics. The first he calls the «ethical regime of im-
ages» exemplified by Plato’s Republic where the prevailing values for the
arts were the «truth content» and the question of their «purpose.» For Pla-
to art was not singular; rather there were «the arts» each belonging to its
own sphere with its own purpose and truth. There was no such thing as a
singular autonomous «art.» The second regime he identifies as «the poet-
ic – or representative.» The guiding value here is the couplet poiêis /mimê-
sis. Within this regime the arts were properly sorted into genres and sub-
ject matters strictly controlled and organised and assessed within a specific
framework as good or bad. Within this regime there is a strict hierarchy of
subject matter and genres. «I call it representative insofar as it is the no-
tion of representation or mimesis that organizes these ways of doing, mak-
ing, seeing, and judging.» (Rancière 2006a: 22) The third regime is the
aesthetic regime, our own regime. This regime begins with the French Rev-
olution and Modernity itself at the end of the 18th century.
Aesthetics is not science or philosophy of art in general. Aesthetics is a historical regime
of identification of art which was born between the end of the 18th century and the begin-
ning of the 19th. The specificity of this historical regime of identification is that it iden-
tifies artworks no more as specific products of definite techniques according to definite
rules but as inhabitants of a specific kind of common space. (Rancière 2006b: 2)
This regime differs from the previous two regimes in that art is no longer
defined by specialised skills or mediums or modes. The separate arts have be-
come «art.» Rancière argues that the well-known modernist narrative (as-
sociated with Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg among others) where art-
works are isolated in a separate sphere of their own «fully misses the point.»
He writes:
Regimes of art 35
The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a
clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationship with the other
spheres of collective experience. The confusion introduced by this notion has, it seems
to me, two major forms. Both of them without analysing it, rely on the contradiction
constitutive of the aesthetic regime of the arts, which makes art into an autonomous
form of life and thereby sets down, at one and the same time, the autonomy of art and
its identification with a moment in life’s process of self-formation. (Rancière 2006a: 26)
Rancière identifies artworks as inhabiting «a specific kind of common
space.» This specific sphere has no boundaries. «The autonomy of art is
its heteronomy as well.» (Rancière 2006b: 3) Thus Rancière delineates the
essential undecidability of art and its existence within the tensions of art
becoming life, life becoming art and life and art exchanging qualities. Ran-
cière sees this essential contradiction where the line between art and life
is constantly shifting as «constitutive of the aesthetic regime of the arts:»
If the end of art is to become a commodity, the end of a commodity is to become art.
By becoming obsolete, unavailable for everyday consumption, any commodity or fa-
miliar article becomes available for art, as a body ciphering a history and an ob-
ject of «disinterested pleasure.» It is re-aestheticized in a new way. The «heterogeneous
sensible» is everywhere. The prose of everyday life becomes a huge, fantastic poem.
Any object can cross the border and repopulate the realm of aesthetic experience.
(Rancière 2002: 144)
For Rancière the question isn’t «are we still modern, already postmodern
etc» but rather, «what exactly happened to the dialectical clash? What hap-
pened to the formula of critical art?» His answer is that the critical forms
or «dissensus aesthetics» has split into four forms: the joke, the collection,
the invitation and the mystery- forms that do not always stage a «dissen-
sus,» but rather problematically can be forms of «consensus» and this is
critical art’s challenge. (Rancière 2009: 44)
Rancière is relevant to unsitely art practices today for several reasons.
First, in shifting the idea of aesthetics away from either the traditional un-
derstanding of aesthetics as concerned with form, content and style asso-
ciated with high art and Modernist rhetoric, as well as the anti-aesthetics
of the traditional and neo avant-garde, Rancière opens a space to re-imag-
ine art practices, broadening their possibilities. This means that artwork
36 unsitely aesthetics
that once would not have made sense – «this is not art» – is now intel-
ligible. Secondly, in re-imagining aesthetics as a regime – the time and
space of this era – he rethinks the relationship between politics and aes-
thetics, understanding that politics is already aesthetic and aesthetics is
always political. This is useful for unsitely artists and practices, as it fore-
grounds the criticality in much unsitely artwork that might be missed or
dismissed. And finally, Rancière’s engagement with the notion of «com-
munities of sense»26 is useful in understanding art’s new publics and audi-
ences – as unsitely works call forth heterogeneous publics rather than fixed
communities of art audiences.
Rancière’s critical theory and continental philosophy may seem in-
compatible with a pragmatist aesthetics like that of Dewey, as pragmatism
suggests the practical and the empirical. In the case of Dewey one could
be forgiven in thinking that an experience points to an essentialism of the
body through experience, which in turn suggests a form of anti-intellectu-
alism and a repetition of the old mind / body dualism. However, this would
be to misunderstand Dewey’s ideas. In fact Dewey, and the American prag-
matists in general, rejected Cartesian dualism in favour of what they called
«concreteness» and the «practical consequences» of a given idea. As Wil-
liam James observed in his lecture on pragmatism in 1907, for the prag-
matist there is no single Truth, only multiple possible truths – «The prag-
matic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing
its respective practical consequences.» (James 1907) Pragmatists opposed
dogma of any kind.
As James announced in 1907, pragmatism is a method. It is not a
closed theory of the world. For pragmatism theory and practice are insep-
arable; thus Shusterman writes:
In seeking to bring theory closer to the experience of art so as to deepen and enhance
them both, a pragmatist aesthetics should not restrict itself to the abstract arguments
and generalizing style of traditional philosophical discourse. It needs to work from and
through concrete works of art. (Shusterman online)
It seems to me that the two philosophical positions are not so much in-
compatible but rather that they operate at different levels and speak from
a different place and time to each other. Rancière’s genealogy of the «re-
Regimes of art 37
gimes of art» offers an analysis that reconfigures art history itself, redefin-
ing the conditions of possibility – much like Foucault’s use of «discourse.»
He shifts our understanding of both the past and the present – and of poli-
tics and art – and redefines aesthetics as a «particular regime of art» rather
than a theory of the senses. Dewey, too, is not interested in a narrow theo-
ry of the senses; on the contrary, as discussed above, Dewey is not at all in-
terested in categorising art objects. Dewey shifts our understanding of the
aesthetic away from the object to our experience of art, be that an object,
situation or event. Dewey’s project has a much broader sweep than tradi-
tional art criticism and, like Rancière, is concerned with a philosophy of
democratic civilization, with ethics and political thinking. Dewey, like Ran-
cière, reconceived what aesthetics could mean. For Dewey this meant mak-
ing aesthetics an essential part of what ethics and politics could mean, thus
refocusing both away from the narrow definitions of politics as a matter for
«political theory» and ethics a matter for «moral conduct and rules of mor-
al judgment.» (Alexander 1998: 16) He stretched the meaning of aesthetics
and in particular aesthetic experience to encompass the whole of life. This
has far reaching implications for both art and politics.
But democracy is not primarily a political theory in Dewey’s way of speaking. It is the
culture of a whole society in which experience is engaged in its power of fulfillment of
life through cooperation and communication. But if democracy is to have a future, it
must embrace an understanding of the deepest needs of human beings and the means of
fulfilling them. Dewey has argued that our deepest need … is for the experience of mean-
ing and value in our lies. (Alexander 1998: 17)
And this is precisely why the role of art and the aesthetic experience is so
important for Dewey. It is to an [aesthetic] experience that Dewey finds
the qualities that he considers most productive for a meaningful and con-
scious life. In this, the two philosophies /philosophers intersect and over-
lap and in particular in their focus on the importance of everyday life as
the site of value and meaning. For Dewey everyday life experience is the
basis for «our experience of meaning and value in the world.» (Alexander
1998: 11)
Dewey speaks to the creative moment of both creation and reception,
the moment of experience. Rancière, on the other hand, speaks to how that
38 unsitely aesthetics
moment reverberates out into the world and its significance in the larger
context of political life. On different levels both philosophies understand
the impossibility of pinning down exactly what is meant by «art» and both
philosophies unsettle the idea of the avant-garde or any notion that art has
a single mission or single ideology. Such an idealistic and heroic position
is anathema to both Dewey’s pragmatism and Rancière’s sense of the
shifting, performative and «heterogeneous sensible.» For these reasons I
think that both philosophical positions are important for understanding
uncertain practices; and both philosophies are productive for valuing and
understanding the mobile, ephemeral and porous nature of the unsitely
aesthetics of these practices.
Unsitely
It was in the midst of a dinner party conversation, sometime in 2004, dis-
cussing internet art and the demise of net.art that I first became aware
that something had seriously shifted with artists’ practices and their rela-
tionship to the internet. What prompted this rethinking was the work of
two German artists calling themselves Empfangshalle (reception hall). The
two artists had made a work in 2001 while in New York City, called Please
Let Us Hear From You.27 This simple but powerful work entailed literally
inserting themselves into private souvenir photographs that other people
were taking while visiting the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City – a popu-
lar tourist site. This is how it was explained on their website:
Empfangshalle requested a photo of one partner taken by the other. And with the cou-
ple’s own camera. The developed photo was to be sent to Empfangshalle later. Please let
us hear from you … The infrastructure that Empfangshalle utilizes lies between intimacy
and public space. A pair of lovers place themselves in the public space of a touristy sou-
venir photo. Actually this would remain a private matter in spite of the public setting if
Empfangshalle had not joined in. (Empfangshalle n. p.)28
The website for this work is simple and minimal, showing photos depicting
the two artists standing astride a «tourist,» (in both cases a young woman).
The images have captions saying «sent from Tokyo» and «sent from Ve-
Unsitely 39
rona,» so it would seem that their «collaborators» (the tourists) did send
their photo back to the two artists in Germany. It is this almost casual use
of the internet and the snapshot together that alerted me to this shift in the
relationship between artists and the internet. In many ways this work is ex-
emplary of the shift that I argue has occurred between artists and the in-
ternet in the recent past, where the internet is now acting as one site of the
work as well as another form of public space. And it is this play between
the online and offline presence of the work that is most significant. That is,
rather than the previous era where net.art or Flash animation played only
online, artists are now leaving the studio, moving and working in public
spaces, in a process that is both mobile and nomadic. The internet is now
part of the everyday rather than being a separate and removed place to
which one can escape. This sitting side by side of the virtual and the physi-
cal world is the hallmark of the new relationship that artists, and especially
the uncertain practices that this book is concerned with, are now utilising.
The form that this type of work exhibits and enacts on the internet
can be described as, above all, simple (although not simplistic). Second-
ly, it displays a low-tech preference rather than high-level computer pro-
gramming or specialised technical skills on the one hand and, on the other,
costly forms of fabrication. This sort of working method is often associat-
ed with DIY and has a certain anti-professional bent to it, both of which
create a distinct sense of intimacy. Intimacy is a quality strongly associat-
ed with both DIY modes of production and the internet itself.29 Significant-
ly, the work exists across multiple sites both actual and metaphorical, but
it is also situated. That is, like the Brooklyn Bridge in the above work, the
site is an actual place and one of several sites of the work. The German art-
ists are also situated in terms of their own place in the world; and the work
exists online and therefore can be accessed globally at any time; and in this
case it was accessed by me in Sydney.
In part it is this paradoxical multi-sitedness and situatedness of the
work and its reception that has prompted the term «unsitely,» thus calling
attention to its lack of presence in the traditional sense and to the «hori-
zontal» logic that it shares.30 The «un» in unsitely resonates with Freud’s
notion of the uncanny or the unheimlich. The uncomfortableness and the
«not at home» feeling, which some work evokes and that can provoke the
question of «where» is the work as well as «what» is the work? This sense of
40 unsitely aesthetics
the «unheimlich» can produce both unease as well as an attendant laughter.
But unsitely is also a pun, referring to the unsightly or unspectacular na-
ture of the work. Following Dewey, unsitely/unsightly suggests both the ir-
relevance of «the beautiful» as well as a shift away from a focus on the vi-
sual altogether, to work that invites participation or engagement through
media. As Arthur Danto notes in his essay on art and beauty, Kallipho-
bia, «If everything is possible as art, everything is possible as aesthetics as
well.» (Danto 2005: 324) In Empfangshalle’s work, the photo is a snapshot
rather than a crafted photograph. The importance of the work does not lie
with any particular harmonious nature of the snapshot, rather it is, firstly,
the concept that prompts a response and, secondly, knowing that the peo-
ple in the image are strangers31 to each other, it is the absurdity of the sit-
uation of the two artists standing calmly astride the tourists and the ridic-
ulousness of inserting themselves into a private, yet very public ritual of
snapping a photo of an iconic place, that solicits a response. Put simply it
is very funny; and with laughter there is a release, which is liberating and
cathartic. This is the power of the work. In discussing the «laughter» of
Fluxus, David T. Doris quotes Conrad Hyers (himself discussing the laugh-
ter that is prevalent in Zen): «The resulting laughter …is an expression of
cognitive shock in the face of a rupture of the expected, the dissolution
of the frame’s authority – an explosive decentring of the self.» (Friedman
1998: 121)
In his book All of a sudden, Jörg Heiser (2008) describes a strong
vein of humour and laughter that runs through 20th century avant-garde
art practices – from Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Jarry to the «joke group»
of Fluxus. He re-thinks the work of artists like Bas Jan Ader and invents
a new term to describe more closely their oeuvre – «romantic conceptu-
alists.» This conflation of two terms normally considered to be opposites
manages to bring together the tragic and the comic – two elements that
slapstick comedians understand well. Heiser in fact suggests a close link
between the birth of slapstick and modern art. He argues that slapstick is
significant for contemporary art, not as theme or subject but as a method:
Slapstick as a technique, attitude, or approach: as something that gets to the heart (or is
it the dark, empty core?) of making and looking at art itself. Slapstick is … a central trig-
gering mechanism, both a premeditated trick and a spontaneous idea. (Heiser 2008: 17)
Unsitely 41
To call something «unsightly» is to suggest disapproval if not outright
disgust – it cannot be looked at, it is something in poor taste, it is some-
thing beyond the pale. In calling work unsitely/unsightly I want to pro-
voke laughter and hold in tension the idea of work that can’t be looked at
because it is a work in motion (whose visual components are not the focus),
against the possibility that the work is outside or beyond current taste or
judgements. It is unsitely because it may be too small and unspectacular or,
like Empfangshalle’s work above, it may call upon the laughter of surprise
and recognition, the sudden explosive laughter reminiscent of slapstick.
The aesthetics that emerge from such practices are by no means a
dominant aesthetics, yet they are a significant and widespread aesthet-
ics. In fact the unsiteliness of some media art is so widespread that at first
glance it might seem not to bear talking about let alone having attention
drawn to it. It is as pervasive as the networks themselves and for some crit-
ics this is enough for it to be irrelevant and relegated to the impure, the un-
gainly, the unsightly, and stuck with the label, «This is not art.»32 Yet this
pervasiveness is exactly why it is important to notice and understand such
work. In many ways this could be considered a 21st century unfolding of
the art and life debate. What is at stake for these practices and this aesthet-
ics is important not only for the artists concerned but for artists interested
in keeping passageways open for work that is small and ephemeral rather
than spectacular; low budget or zero budget and therefore outside the con-
trol and discipline of the major art institutions and funding bodies, both
government and commercial galleries; and most importantly concerned
with process rather than finished product. These works often display a de-
cidedly and suddenly humorous approach rather than the minimalist high
style of current gallery work. «Unsitely,» then, is a term that works on
multiple levels; it is a double entendre and a pun (site/sight). In a literal
sense it means work that is unsited, in the sense that Miwon Kwon (2004)
discusses in her chapter, «The (un)sitings of community» where she ar-
gues for the «impossibility of community.»33 Kwon’s analysis helps shape
ideas around publics as explored in the next chapter, which further prob-
lematises participation and collaboration.
In sketching an outline for a particular (unsitely) aesthetics I want to
first insist that what I am calling an unsitely aesthetics is not a separate
theory of art, neither is it even a formalist analysis dissecting specific fea-
42 unsitely aesthetics
tures or properties,34 nor is it nominating a new «movement,» «ism» or
style. Rather, it is more like a field of practices where network culture is
acting as the context or the backdrop as works emerge willy-nilly. Or per-
haps it could be compared to Dewey’s notion of «significant tendencies.»
(Dewey 2005: 225) For now it is important to note that I see unsitely aes-
thetics as «in conversation» with both relational and distributed aesthetics,
even if these two discourses are not in agreement, and would perhaps not
even agree to being in the same conversation. Nicolas Bourriaud’s relation-
al aesthetics attempted to describe a certain moment, specifically a group
of artists and artworks in the 1990s, as critical art practices began moving
away from tired forms of oppositional politics. Distributed aesthetics, on
the other hand, emerged from the online collaborative journal and group
called Fibreculture35 in particular through the collaborative text, «Theses
on distributed aesthetics.»36 (Lovink 2008) In nominating another aes-
thetics, or tendency, I am hoping to open out a space for art practices that
may play in the gaps and crevices of current discourse. My aim therefore
in pointing to these practices is to highlight their specific aesthetic and to
extend observations, raised initially by Bourriaud and later in distributed
aesthetics, of current practices and their relationship to traditional art the-
ory and history. In short, it is a strategic move to throw light on the signif-
icance of these ways of working and making art, as the very everyday and
unspectacular nature of some of these works can make them less notice-
able to critical evaluation.
In the essay «Theses on distributed aesthetics,» Munster and Lovink
describe distributed aesthetics as «a rethinking of aesthetics beyond the
twinned concepts of form and medium that continue to shape analysis of
the social and the aesthetic.» (Lovink 2008: 227) This could also be ap-
plied to unsitely aesthetics which shares with distributed aesthetics an un-
derstanding of aesthetics as «a philosophical praxis investigating the very
conditions of contemporary life.» (Lovink 2008: 231) As the essay goes on
to describe the conditions that distributed aesthetics must work with, it
outlines, in fact, exactly where distributed and unsitely overlap each other:
Distributed aesthetics must deal simultaneously with the dispersed and the situat-
ed, with asynchronous production and multi-user access to artefacts (both material
and immaterial) on the one hand, and the highly individuated and dispensed allot-
Unsitely 43
ment of information /media on the other. The aesthetics of distributed media, prac-
tices, and experience cannot be located in the formal principles of their dispersal.
(Lovink 2008: 227 – 8)
«Theses on distributed aesthetics» opens the enquiry into «the ‹aesthesia›
of networked events,» an inquiry that surfaced after the demise of net.art
and the rise of Web 2.0. «How do we experience the current wave of blogs,
podcasts, and mobile phone games? What network theory is used and is it
adequate to the task of engaging networks on their own terms?» (Lovink
2008: 226)
The emphasis for Munster and Lovink is on the «networks» and the
social formations that are now multiplying around us with expanded mo-
bile technologies. The focus for unsitely aesthetics is on the paradoxical
situatedness and multi-sitedness of artwork as well as the restored signifi-
cance of place in general.37 The emphasis for unsitely is also the use that all
sorts of artists are making of the internet as a site for practice. For instance
in projects like Let Us Hear From You the artists employ an elegant sim-
plicity that utilises the internet in a very modest yet powerful way.
Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, on the other hand, first published
in 1998, (in English in 2002) was a text that had a powerful effect on art
practices around the globe.38 It was either supremely uninterested in the
internet and digital technology or highly reactive to the perceived threat of
network culture:
These days communications are plunging human contacts into monitored areas that di-
vide the social bond up into quite different products. …The much vaunted «communica-
tion superhighways,» with their toll plazas and picnic areas, threaten to become the only
possible thoroughfare from a point to another in the human world. (Bourriaud 2002: 8)
However, in articulating an aesthetics of relation Bourriaud’s text unwit-
tingly described salient features of emerging network culture and its social
sites, «an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human inter-
actions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent
and private symbolic space.» (Bourriaud 2002: 14).
In short, by developing a new term to describe the aesthetics that un-
certain media art practices are manifesting, I am attempting to open out a
44 unsitely aesthetics
space that I suggest already exists between Bourriaud’s relational and Fi-
breculture’s distributed aesthetics; and it is such a space that unsitely aes-
thetics speaks to. I am also following Lovink’s suggestion that «it would be
better to come up with descriptions for what we actually witness.» (Lovink
2008: 227) In this sense, «unsitely» certainly describes an aesthetics that
current practices are performing; it is an aesthetics that is occurring all
around us and is a concept that is grounded in my own observation of this
shift in artists’ practices.
DIY and the Amateur
DIY and the figure of the amateur are two significant forms of production
operating within network culture. As such they are significant modes of
production and reception for uncertain practices and unsitely aesthetics
and, further, they form the context from which unsitely aesthetics unfolds.
Both are good examples of the «horizontal mode» – a mode referred to by
Bertrand Clavez in relation to Fluxus.39 DIY, the salient mode of network
culture, positions itself against a tradition of professionalism and profes-
sional values. In many ways this DIY tradition is a return to cultural prac-
tices that existed prior to the 20th century, before the mechanical inven-
tions for recording sound and image, as Lawrence Lessig argues in Remix:
Never before in the history of human culture had the production of culture been as pro-
fessionalised. Never before had its production become as concentrated. Never before
had the «vocal cords» of ordinary citizens been as effectively displaced, and displaced,
as Sousa feared, by these «infernal machines.» The twentieth century was the first time
in the history of human culture when popular culture had become professionalised, and
when the people were taught to defer to the professional. (Lessig 2008: 29)
The «horizontal logic» that Clavez associates with first Fluxus and later
network culture, and that Lessig is referring to when he describes Read /
Write (RW) culture,40 is one of participation. For Daniel Palmer participa-
tory media refers to the «modes of address» that are now common prac-
tice in media culture and which «function to blur the line between the pro-
duction and consumption of imagery.» (Palmer 2004: i) He proposes that
DIY and the amateur 45
this creates «individualised exchanges» which are closely tied to contem-
porary capitalism’s «user-focused, customised and individuated orienta-
tion.» (Palmer 2004: i) But for Lessig, the opportunities of RW culture
suggest an active engagement by ordinary people – amateurs – in making
their own culture through access to the tools of production. Lessig notes in
relation to RW culture: «Culture in this world is flat; it is shared person to
person.» (Lessig 28) This is a good description of the «horizontal vision»
that is described by Clavez. The DIY spirit was also the energy behind punk
culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s where professional values were
jettisoned in favour of DIY music, clothes, zines and artists’ books. (Mar-
cus 1989) And as Greil Marcus theorised in Lipstick traces, punk itself was
part of a «secret history» spanning the entire twentieth century that in-
cluded Dada, Fluxus and the Situationists.41
However, it is in the figure of the amateur a key concept for today’s
network culture (shared by Fluxus), that tensions and ambiguities arise
thus pointing to what is at stake for current media art and artists.42 Cur-
rently the amateur is the site of extreme anxiety over fears of either loss (of
cultural standards)43 or control (by large corporations, like Google).44 But
the amateur was already forecast with digital culture as Sean Cubitt attests
writing in the 1990s of digital aesthetic:
The word «amateur,» now most frequently used as obloquy, has its roots in love,
and its glorious head in the air. The amateur escapes from the dialectic of subversion
and resistance to become otherwise than dominated. And so the hobbyist is more rel-
evant to an understanding of digital aesthetics in the networked world than the pro-
fessional and the industrialised. To see such engagement as merely personal is to miss
both the personal politics of amateurism and the endless creativity of ordinary culture.
(Cubitt, 1998: 143)
It should be noted that love of amateurism like DIY does not negate the
fact that artists engaged in such practices and aesthetics are well versed in
art discourses which give them both a particular history and power. For in-
stance, according to Clavez, a basic postulate for Fluxus artists was a refus-
al of professionalism in art. In any case, the amateur was not such a pejo-
rative term prior to the 20th century rise of the «professional class.» In fact,
the amateur scientist, a figure of great respect in an earlier age was consid-
46 unsitely aesthetics
ered a true expert in their field. And as Lessig shows in his book Remix, the
decline of the amateur was a cause for alarm and fear at the turn of the last
century when recording machines (player piano and phonograph) began
to erode people’s ability to play and sing their own music:
«We will not have a vocal cord left.» He [J.P. Sousa] was describing how a technolo-
gy – «these infernal machines»– would change our relationship to culture. These «ma-
chines,» Sousa feared, would lead us away from what elsewhere he praised as «ama-
teur» culture.45 We would become just consumers of culture, not also producers. We
would become practiced in selecting what we wanted to hear, but not practiced in pro-
ducing stuff for others to hear. (Lessig, 2008: 25)
For today’s network culture the «logic of horizontality» ushers in consider-
able opportunity for anyone/everyone, to publish, distribute and «broadcast
themselves» and this in turn is threatening the traditional experts and the
«professional class.» However, today’s «logic of horizontality» shares some-
thing with Sousa’s understanding of a rich amateur culture where access
to production is widespread rather than elitist, thus creating a knowledge-
able and informed audience (public). It also shares with Dewey’s pragmatist
philosophy a profound sense of equality where an aesthetic experience can
be shared, and art is primarily an act rather than an object, thus broaden-
ing the possibilities for art and art-making.
For uncertain media art practices, working in a DIY mode and within
a tradition of experimental and critical art practice, the network’s democ-
ratisation of broadcast media shifts what is at stake from earlier eras. That
is, for artists today using everyday materials/media (low-fi, DIY and off-
the-shelf video) what is at stake is not «Is it art?» or «Could this be art?» –
questions set off by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and then taken up by
successive avant-gardes, including Fluxus. These questions have now be-
come irrelevant. «Today, every form is considered a mere example of a
potentially endless series of forms, each of which is equally deserving of
being considered an artwork.» (Groys 2006) Rather, today’s uncertain
practices are engaged with questions of possibilities between artists and
publics; with keeping open spaces for heterogeneous aesthetic experienc-
es – including the minor and those of various scales – for artists and pub-
lics that include «experimental zones with uncertain and unexpected out-
DIY and the amateur 47
comes.»46 What is at stake is the relationship of art and artists to their
publics, and the relationship of art and artists to the institutions of art. And
the question now is who can use what – following who owns what – as the ex-
panded powers of copyright laws crash against the expanded possibilities
of remix.
In 1993 Douglas Gordon reused Hitchcock’s seminal film Psycho in
his work titled 24 Hour Psycho. At the time this work was made it was con-
sidered «fair use» and therefore did not violate copyright. Yet the question
remains, could such a major and influential work be made today without
the anxiety of possible copyright infringement? Put another way, what is at
stake for remix culture today is this question of legality rather than its sta-
tus as art. The context for these questions is on the one hand the corporat-
isation of museums and art institutions,47 and on the other the uncertain
situation of copyright and copyleft48 in the ongoing battle between private
corporate interests and the artistic practice of remix.49
In this contemporary context the institutions of art are still the priv-
ileged spaces for seeing and experiencing art, with curators positioned at
the gates. However, as some artists have begun traversing public spaces,
both online and offline, this relationship between institutions, curators
and artists has become uncertain. Artists are not only finding their own
publics, but are calling forth publics – «communities of sense»50 if you
will – as they traverse public space; these publics need not be numerous,
as corporate museums demand, but may be singular, occurring in minute
moments of encounter, as well as through the public space of the internet.
On the whole, art institutions are finding this new «horizontal» relation-
ship difficult to fold in to the older «vertical» models of institutional prac-
tice. Vince Dziekan, in a paper titled Beyond the museum walls: situating
art in virtual space, writes cogently about the effect of digital media and
its accompanying «virtualisation» on the traditional spaces of the museum.
He characterises the situation of digital media in museums as that of fol-
lowing a «hard» design format, which is:
unidirectional, predetermined, authored point-of-view and emphasis upon fixed and
bounded constitution or outcome. This approach sets up a clear scale or hierarchy of re-
lations between media; multimedia, in this arrangement, is firmly entrenched as sup-
plementary. Through exposing its non-integration – recognised in the purposing of
48 unsitely aesthetics

multimedia as an enhancement that seeks to compliment the experience of art – such

supplementarity slides quickly into marginality. (Dziekan 2005 n. p.)

Dziekan, writing in 2005 was discussing «multimedia» rather than the in-
ternet or networks in museums; however the position of the internet in
museums today is much the same as «multimedia» once was; it has a mar-
ginal position, usually informational rather than another site for artwork.
Keeping in mind this turn towards the amateur and its accompany-
ing DIY modes I now turn to the idea of network culture, which I see as the
context of an unsitely aesthetics, and further to the idea of «performative
space» which I’ve adapted from John McGrath’s original idea of «surveil-
lance space.»
50
Chapter 2: Network Culture and
Mediated Public Space
During the space of a decade, the network has
become the dominant cultural logic. Our economy,
public sphere, culture, even our subjectivity are
mutating rapidly and show little evidence of slowing
down the pace of their evolution. (Varnelis)
With the growth of the internet and mobile telephony across the world, and
especially in so-called developed countries, we are witnessing new config-
urations of public space and public culture. As more and more people be-
come networked and have access to the network, a new societal condition
is emerging based on both the accessibility of the internet and the wire-
less conditions of mobility. (Varnelis) In his conclusion to the book Net-
worked Publics, Kazys Varnelis describes this new state of affairs as «net-
work culture» and suggests that these conditions have replaced the logics
of both modernism and postmodernism. For Varnelis «network culture»
describes a world where there is a «simultaneous superimposition of real
and virtual space,» many-to-many distribution and peer-to-peer social
networks, including «participatory media.» These are the salient condi-
tions of network culture and as Varnelis argues, today «the network has
become the dominant cultural logic.» (Varnelis)
In this chapter I will focus on the internet as a site of art practices in
network culture and the implications of network culture for art practices
in mediated public space. My concern is to understand the significance of
network culture for the media art practices that play out in mediated pub-
51
lic space, especially as public space is now being reconfigured by network
logic. Network culture is one of the most significant conditions of the cur-
rent moment for the art practices that I am concerned with. Significantly,
it opens quite a different space for art and its publics from the economic
logic where «experience culture» has merged with major government and
institutional demands for large and more centralised public events.51 Thus,
as the traditional institutions of art (thinking here of galleries and muse-
ums) become bigger and bigger, and likewise the budgets for exhibitions
and biennales grow ever larger leading to what many see as the merging of
big art with the culture industry, network culture seems to exemplify the
polar opposite. Instead of big there is networked and dispersed; instead of
the production of luxury objects for wealthy elites, there is a DIY and am-
ateur aesthetics leaning towards casual production values. With the low
cost of digital tools and the easy accessibility of internet connections, net-
worked public culture has opened out onto a horizon that seems to prom-
ise access to more publics than ever before. While this is creating anxiety
for some established cultural institutions, and celebration for others; still
others, with a more critical eye, ponder the new modes of control that the
networks may hide in their appearance of being egalitarian and free.52 This
is very much an uncertain time.
Contrary to much scholarship on the subject of global networks and
people’s ongoing relations to place and local knowledge – including Var-
nelis – it is important to recognise that even though people are connect-
ed and networked, they are still nevertheless situated and located in a
specific place and time.53 Rather than thinking of networked culture as cre-
ating a condition of «placelessness» with people existing in a «space of
flows» with an «authentic» sense of place being lost in the process, I think
it would be more productive to remind ourselves of the complex under-
standings of place already in place. The concept of place is of course a very
contested term with a rich history of scholarship. In the writings of geog-
raphers like Nigel Thrift, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre place is
always already «constituted through reiterative social practice – place is
made and remade on a daily basis.» (Cresswell 2004: 39) In this way of
thinking place is neither authentic nor essentialized, rather «place is per-
formed and practiced … constantly struggled over and reimagined in prac-
tical ways.» (Cresswell 39) In the current moment of network culture – in
52 Network culture and mediated public space
Western countries and first world economies at least – the network is em-
bedded within our daily lives. It is all around us, and we live with these
connections in the specific place wherever we are.
Before exploring the details of network culture more fully I will begin
by elaborating upon the idea of mediated public space. But first I will de-
scribe what I mean by public space.
Public Space
Public space is a highly contested term operating across multiple and dif-
ferent discourses so it is important here to define what I mean by «pub-
lic» and «public space» and then «mediated public space.» First of all I am
using the term public space in a very broad sense to refer to spaces where
the public or publics are encountered. Traditionally these spaces are pub-
lic squares and parks, gardens, streets and alleys – in short, spaces existing
outside and between buildings. They are considered «public» not only be-
cause publics are encountered there but also because they are traditionally
owned and managed by the state, either local municipalities or some oth-
er state body. Today these public spaces are increasingly being encroached
on by private interests, while the idea of public space has itself become
complicated with spaces that are not totally public but are used by the pub-
lic and owned by private interests, like malls, hotel lobbies, airports and
plazas. Liam Gillick refers to these spaces as «semi-public, semi-private
locations» (Gillick 2006a:130), and they have also been theorised as the
«non-places» of super-modernity. (Augé 1995) With the spread of network
culture across the globe the idea of public space or «semi-public, semi-
private space» has become even more complex. In «The politics of public
space in the media city» Scott McQuire notes it is no longer sufficient to lo-
cate public space as a literal place, as it has become a distributed network
of media events, as well as a highly dynamic space:
The public domain of the 21 century is no longer defined simply by material structures
st
such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic
media. Rather, the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material
and immaterial spaces. (McQuire 2006)
Mediated public space 53
McQuire refers to these spaces as hybrid and to the urban spaces they form
as «media cities.» In this «hybrid» space of media cities our commonly un-
derstood meaning of «public space» as the binary opposite to private space
now seems too simple to describe something that is profoundly heteroge-
neous, multiple and unfixed.
In recent years, it should be noted, the museum and gallery have also
been reconsidered as sites of public sociability and discourse, most fa-
mously in Bourriaud’s reference to the art exhibition as a place of encoun-
ter, «at an exhibition … there is the possibility of an immediate discussion,
in both senses of the term. I see and perceive, I comment, and I evolve in a
unique space and time. Art is the place that produces a specific sociability.»
(Bourriaud, 2002: 16) In the catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition
Publicity at Artspace in Sydney, 2007, the curator Reuben Keehan took the
idea of the gallery as a discursive public space even further:
the gallery and its corollary the studio, emphasising the fundamental continuity of these
locations with the public sphere in general, positing them not as hermetic spaces in
some way separate from everyday life, but as discursive fields, sites of social transaction,
public spaces that are, as with the public itself, constantly under negotiation. (Keehan
2007: 120)
I would agree that galleries are public sites of encounter and discourse but
I would, nevertheless, note that the sort of public that enters galleries and
museums are often specific and particular rather than broad and random;
and the space itself is structured and configured by the particular role of
curators in negotiating the relationship between artists, artworks and pub-
lics, so shaping the public discourse in those spaces.
Mediated Public Space
In the introduction I briefly defined mediated public space as involving
both networked culture and the high visibility of mobile media, that is,
people carrying portable devices like mobile phones and digital cameras.
By way of explanation I refer to public space as mediated rather than sim-
ply networked as I am calling attention to the fact that people today are
54 Network culture and mediated public space
carrying media devices – like phones, cameras and audio recording de-
vices and using them in more and more obvious and open ways in public
space. This seemingly simple fact has a more profound implication for the
social production of space than is usually discussed in discourses on net-
work culture – or even McQuire’s project on media cities.54 McQuire’s fo-
cus is the appearance of screens, large and small, on multiple surfaces of
the city – as well as the distributed nature of the networks and its effect
on social experience. McQuire characterises this social experience as one
lived in «relational space» and he describes it as:
a space which has been stripped of inherent qualities, such as stable dimensions and ap-
pearances … but is increasingly experienced as shifting, variable and contingent. Rela-
tional space can only be defined by the temporary position occupied by each subject in
relation to numerous others, which suggests that relational space is not easily unified
since every subject belongs to multiple matrices or networks that overlap and interpen-
etrate. (McQuire 2006)
Instead of privileging large screens on the surfaces of cities, I want to fo-
cus on the high visibility and ubiquity of portable recording devices carried
by everyone/anyone in public spaces. I use the term «mediated» public
space to indicate that this blatant and highly visible use of media is actually
changing the relationship between people and media and is transforming
public space into a performative space of encounter. Being photographed
or taped in public is no longer unusual nor even considered invasive, espe-
cially by a younger generation brought up within a highly mediated world.
Following John E. McGrath’s (2004) argument in Loving big brother, this
has meant a further performative turn for public and social space.
In this book McGrath rethinks the idea of surveillance,55 moving away
from the simple belief that it is bad – viewed either as an invasion of pri-
vacy or part of the problem with the «society of the spectacle» (Debord
2004) – to a new understanding of surveillance as both a productive space
and a performative space. McGrath first recognised the effect of technolo-
gy while working in the theatre:
the presence of the technology could – immediately it was switched on, revealed or
noticed – alter the very feel, the mood, the dimensions seen, of the space that we
Mediated public space 55
were in: our lived experience of space changed as soon as the space became surveyed.
(McGrath 2004: 12)
It is this understanding of the effect of media on people and space that I
wish to draw upon in order to delineate the effect on public space of the
behaviour of everyone/anyone having and using media. This behaviour is
part of a new familiarity and an awareness of media that is qualitatively
different from previous eras and generations. In an earlier time or even a
decade ago, before digital photography exploded onto the marketplace, so-
cial photography in families and with friends was a way to memorialise a
special moment or occasion. The family group photo usually meant that
people would pose carefully, putting a well practised smile on their face,
tilting their heads, standing to attention, their bodies stiff and uncomfort-
able, hoping they were looking their best. The ability to take a picture was
often perceived to be a special thing and therefore only some people could
take a «good» photo. There were quite specific rules as to what entailed a
«good» photo. In the world of social photography – family photos and so
forth – a photo was deemed good when people perceived themselves as
looking good and the composition of the photo was squarely centred and
at a specific distance, usually five to ten feet away from the photographer.
Close-ups or odd angles were considered «bad.» Today anyone could be
carrying and using their mobile phone or video or digital camera to take
photos of everything, at all possible angles, and in all probability these
images will end up on a social networking site like FaceBook, YouTube or
MySpace to be accessed by an unknown public. There is no longer a sense
of a «proper» photo and people do not pose stiffly but rather play and per-
form for the camera. There is a sense that we are living in a mediascape
and this creates a sense of play rather than fear and paranoia, as previ-
ously thought. The younger generation growing up with digital devices ap-
proach them with a casual disregard. For them the photo or video is a per-
formance, there is little fear that they will be «caught» looking bad.56 It is
this behaviour, an effect of the high visibility of media, that is underlined
in the term mediated public space.
In describing surveillance as a space rather than as an image Mc-
Grath goes beyond the usual discourse framing surveillance, where it is
discussed in terms of either crime prevention or privacy rights. Instead,
56 Network culture and mediated public space
through specific readings of theorists like Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefe-
bvre and Judith Butler, McGrath understands surveillance as more than
simply representation or the turning of life into a performance, «the easy
and lazy cliché of commentary on surveillance – the idea that surveillance
is turning the whole of life into a public performance.» (McGrath 2004: 5)
McGrath focuses on the lived experience of surveillance. But the most im-
portant idea for both McGrath and my understanding of how mediated
public space operates is that of performativity.
McGrath reworks ideas on performativity that grew out of a canon
of writers beginning with J.L. Austin and include Jacques Derrida, Judith
Butler and Timothy Gould. These theorists analyse how language can func-
tion as an act rather than as a description of an event. They show how
words can perform rather than describe. As Austin says «words do things.»
This is an important observation and it is this notion of the performative
that has subsequently been taken beyond language studies and into anal-
ysis of cultural situations. For McGrath the most crucial argument for an
understanding of the performative nature of surveillance space is Derri-
da’s idea that «language does something regardless of the presence or ab-
sence of a speaker/writer, and that part of what it does is produce effects
beyond any present intention.» (McGrath 12) It is Derrida’s development
of this argument that underlies McGrath’s contention that surveillance can
be understood as a space rather than simply an image, and importantly
this space is not produced through presence.
In applying the idea of performativity to surveillance space McGrath
uses Timothy Gould’s analysis and elaboration of Austin’s concept of «up-
take» in language to describe in more detail how a performative space of
surveillance comes about. Uptake is the recognition by the auditor that
a speech act has occurred. (McGrath 51) Gould, following Austin, de-
scribes two steps that form an uptake and which he calls «the illocution-
ary» and the «perlocutionary.» The first phase, «the illocutionary,» is the
moment when the auditor understands the dare or bet or whatever, the
second phase is the moment that the auditor acts upon it.57 Between the
two phases there is a gap, and it is this gap that is productive for perfor-
mative space, as it creates the possibility for a space of ambiguity. Gould
dubs this gap an «illocutionary suspense or perlocutionary delay.» As Mc-
Grath notes, Gould saw this gap of suspense /delay as a positive thing as it
Mediated public space 57
allows a space «between the possibility of sense and the possibility of tyr-
anny of sense.» (McGrath 51) In other words it brings a sense of freedom
from the tyrannies of representation that call for absolute truth. In apply-
ing this linguistic understanding of «constative speech» to the ideologies
of representation that dominate surveillance, McGrath shows how images
that are thought to merely describe the events that happened in a straight-
forward way – much like «the police officer’s edict to ‹stick to the facts›»
are not necessarily so straightforward: there is a gap of understanding, an
important gap that leaves open possibilities for different and unexpected
meaning. As McGrath argues, performative spaces can never «stick to the
facts» rather:
They invoke the experience of double meaning, spaces within spaces, transformation of
representation by the circumstances of reception. In the Anglo-American positivist tra-
dition in particular, such transformations will tend to be thought of as secondary to the
empirical, constative truth. (McGrath 52)
In the case of surveillance, what is «uptaken» is the possibility of performa-
tivity: «the acceptance that a space is brought into being which is neither
the original space nor a self-evident representation of it.» (McGrath 54)
The effect of media, including surveillance media, on social relations
is not a new observation; it has been analysed by Joshua Meyrowitz in
depth in his remarkable book titled, No Sense of Place. Writing in 1985
Meyrowitz argued that the «new» medias were having a profound effect
on social interaction. He extended Erving Goffman’s (Goffman, 1959) the-
atrical analogy of social interaction to include the effect of media and the
beginnings of our mediated spaces. His analysis takes as its starting point
Goffman’s description of how social interaction occurs. According to Goff-
man, people base their behaviour on who is present in the room or same
space. Goffman’s framework posited a front room and a back room in a
theatrical analogy for social behaviour. The front room represented being
in public, while the back room was the private sphere or backstage – im-
portantly, people act differently in these different spheres. That is, you may
be polite and reserved in public, but impatient, intimate and unreserved in
the privacy of your home. Meyrowitz takes issue with this spatial emphasis,
and instead proposes a sense of «information-flow» rather than presence in
58 Network culture and mediated public space
space. As Eric Gordon comments, «Social situations are never determined
solely by physical factors – context and media are persistently altering the
boundaries of normativity and acceptability.» (Gordon 2008: 2) Gordon
notes that Meyrowitz’s analysis, published nearly thirty years ago, was re-
markably prescient in its understanding of how media in public spaces –
Meyrowitz cites hidden microphones and television cameras – can «alter
our perceptions of public and private»:
The notion that the inferred presence of mediation might alter the nature of the situa-
tion, might confuse the accepted norms of the front region and the back region has direct
implications for our contemporary media environment, where cameras, blogs, and mo-
bile telephony confuse the boundaries of nearly every social situation. (Gordon 2008: 2)
So far in this discussion of mediated public space and the role of performa-
tivity I have not mentioned the internet, which I see as another site of pub-
lic space. McGrath’s idea of surveillance media as creating a space of perfor-
mativity (surveillance as a space) rather than as generating images can also
be applied to the public space of the internet. Media artwork accessed and
experienced through the internet can be understood as creating a perfor-
mative space, as distinct from previous understandings as cyberspace. Un-
like the concept cyberspace, which understands the internet as a separate
space apart from everyday life, a space that takes you into another realm,
performativity indicates how art on the internet can operate as a constantly
dynamic space of performance, and one which sits beside or even inside the
everyday domestic and work spaces of one’s life. You, the audience, do not
leave the room and enter cyberspace rather, a performative space is creat-
ed between you and the work and this space keeps meanings and interpre-
tations open for different possibilities. As McGrath points out in relation
to «uptake» and surveillance space, there is a productive gap between the
work and the person experiencing the work, thus allowing for an open and
dynamic relationship rather than a closed work of set meanings or mere-
ly «documentation» of past events. Just as McGrath analyses the perfor-
mative as disturbing the «constative speech» with its adherence to truth,
the performativity of online access also creates not truth but possibilities.
Network culture 59
Network Culture
In 2005 the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for
Communication invited thirteen scholars from diverse fields to explore to-
gether the impact on and implications for society and social relations of
the growing networking technologies. In the course of the year the group
published several significant essays online, mirroring the publishing strat-
egies of the networked conditions they were researching. It is from these
researches and explorations that the essays, edited by Kazys Varnelis, de-
veloped the concept of «network culture.» The term «network culture» is
of course not unique to this group of essays. As Varnelis points out many
writers and theorists have also used the term network culture in referring
to the current moment of network complexity, including Tiziana Terrano-
va’s important book Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age
(2004), among others.58 However, for most scholars, including Terrano-
va, there is no distinction between the information age and network cul-
ture. In fact as the subtitle of her book shows the two terms are considered
inseparable. But for the writers of Networked Publics, there is a significant
difference, «Network culture is not merely an extension of the old ‹infor-
mation age›.» (Varnelis)
The argument that Varnelis makes is that networked connections are
now replacing digital abstraction as the dominant paradigm or logic. For
Varnelis this is a paradigm shift away from the commonly understood idea
of the digital and its abstractions and reductions where information and
its representations are reduced to ones and zeros, and where «information
wants to be free.» Instead «information is less the product of discrete pro-
cessing units than the outcome of the networked relations between them,
links between people, between machines, and between machines and peo-
ple.» (Varnelis) And he notes that with network culture the dominant or-
ganisation is no longer hierarchical but networked. Varnelis goes even
further in extending this concept when he writes, «As network culture su-
persedes digital culture, it also supersedes the culture of postmodernism
outlined by Fredric Jameson in his seminal essay ‹Postmodernism, or the
cultural logic of late capitalism›.» (Varnelis) On his blog Varnelis has con-
structed an elaborate table or chart that he refers to as a «network culture
chart.» In this chart he lists the key differences, or what he calls «empirical
60 Network culture and mediated public space
observations about this new condition» showing plainly the differences be-
tween the three eras of modernism, postmodernism and network culture.59
Some of the listed comparisons grasp our present reality with a smart jolt,
their clarity almost hilarious, if it wasn’t so true. For instance under the
term «economy» the three differences are: Modernism – production; Post-
modernism – service and for network culture – «debt,» a sad commentary
on the post 2008 global financial crisis.
For Varnelis, network culture, like postmodernism, has a dominant
aesthetic form. If the dominant form for postmodernism was appropria-
tion, for network culture it is «remix.»60 Following Lev Manovich’s analy-
sis in «Remix and Remixability» (2005), Varnelis sees network culture as
unable to periodise as it ignores both modern and pre-modern styles tak-
ing freely whatever it wants, this is reminiscent of the horizontal logic
that Clavez associates with first Fluxus and later all of contemporary pro-
duction:
If a traditional twentieth century model of cultural communication described move-
ment of information in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the reception
point is just a temporary station on information’s path … Information arrives, gets re-
mixed with other information, and then the new package travels to other destinations
where the process is repeated. (Manovich 2005)
In other words the dominant logic for cultural production is simply remix-
ing existing material. Eduardo Navas defines remix culture as «the activi-
ty of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new
forms according to personal taste.» (Navas 2007)
Instead of focusing on remix as the key to network culture, in this
book I have suggested another aesthetics, unsitely, which though by no
means a dominant aesthetics, is nevertheless fostered by the conditions of
network culture. It is noteworthy that one of the conditions that Varnelis
describes as significant for network culture is the lack of a dominant physi-
cal site, that is, the lack of a fixed desktop computer station. What Varnelis
is referring to, and what I consider one of the aspects of unsitely aesthetics,
is the shift away from a bulky desktop computer with its graphical user in-
terface (monitor) – and its specific and fixed relation between screen and
user – to the currently popular wireless smart devices.61 It is this lack of a
Network culture 61
single, fixed physical site that contrasts the two distinct eras for artists –
digital and networked – and that highlights the idea of unsitely. This fits
with my own sense of how artists are working across sites on both the in-
ternet and in physical spaces so that the internet is now neither a privi-
leged site for art, as it had been with net.art, nor merely an information
portal or site of documentation, like museum and gallery websites. Rather
artists are using the internet as a dynamic form of public space. This is in
contrast to the previous era of net.art and Net art, where the internet was
considered to be a new medium for art.
In privileging the internet as a site of art rather than a medium, sev-
eral things become apparent. Firstly, it reveals the double role that the in-
ternet plays as a site of both production and reception of art. Secondly, if
understood as a site rather than a medium, it is possible to make sense of
art practices that play across different sites, on the internet and in galler-
ies and public spaces, and to see this as a distinct strategy quite apart from
traditional conceptual and performance art practices that relied on docu-
mentation for the work to reach a public. In other words the internet is not
simply being used to document performances or events that happen else-
where. Rather, the work is dispersed across sites, and the internet «site» is
an integral part of the work, that is, one site of many and a public space of
happening and «publicity.»62 In other words there is no privileging of one
site over another, each site is of equal import and each site is equivalent,
rather than a trace of the real work. This way of working across sites, both
virtual and actual is analogous to what Varnelis and Anne Friedberg iden-
tified as «the everyday superimposition of simultaneous real and virtual
spaces [and] the rise of the network as a socio-spatial model.» (Varnelis & 
Friedberg) They see this as a hallmark of networked culture.
Within contemporary art, however, the internet has a strangely unex-
amined position. It is seriously overlooked and associated with either data
or informational systems, or as simply a place for documenting work. Yet
as the artist’s conversations in Part 2 suggest, there are many contempo-
rary media art practices that now exist across sites, with the internet as one
manifestation among many of a project and require analysis beyond com-
municational models or technological categories like new media or elec-
tronic art. They cannot be understood solely through media studies and
new media aesthetics. Nor can they be placed simply into an art historical
62 Network culture and mediated public space
trajectory – and herein lies their uncertainty. They exist at an intersection
of both these discourses and traditions. In his essay on distributed aesthet-
ics Tofts (2005a) uses Bourriaud’s concept of «relational aesthetics» (as
well as Philip Brophy’s 1980s Tsk tsk tsk project63) to describe attributes
shared by distributed and relational aesthetics. In many ways Tofts’ essay
is a starting point for my own investigation, sensing that within the dis-
courses of contemporary art one can find both relevant and complex analy-
ses of the particular media practices that use social, performative and mo-
bile modes. It is this situation that I think needs attention in order for the
significance of the internet in contemporary art practices to be recognised
and understood.
Networked Publics and Participation
Contemporary media imagery may be described as fundamentally participatory, involv-
ing the viewer in a new «viewing» relationship. (Palmer 2008: 9)
Uncertain practices play out in mediated public space and often involve
people (strangers) – unknown to the artist – participating in the making
of the work through encounters, invitations to submit texts or images on-
line, or other interactions that invite play or something else. This, and the
fact that for Varnelis et al. participation is characteristic of network cul-
ture, leads me to turn now to the thorny question of participation. In her
book on participation in art Claire Bishop (2006) describes a trajectory
of art practices since the 1960s, which she describes as «socially-oriented
projects.» She contends these practices anticipate the social and relational
practices of the 1990s – and she firmly separates these projects from «ac-
tivation of the individual viewer in so-called ‹interactive› art and installa-
tion.» (Bishop 2006: 10) However, this separation today is confounded by
the uncertain practices that can exist across sites – both online and in Real
life. Some of these works elicit social interactions like conversations on the
streets as well as online comments, and can exist as installations in gal-
leries. In Bilateral Kellerberrin Lucas Ihlein64, for example, makes a work
that includes chatting with unknown townspeople in a small country town
in Western Australia and then subsequently blogging these conversations
Network Publics and partizipation 63
and his own thoughts – while inviting comments from both the towns-
people and others across the internet. Finally he installs both the blog and
comments in an installation in the town.65
Practices like these that are now using the internet as well as entering
mediated public space and engaging with unknown publics, trouble the al-
ready contested term «participation.» Bishop cites several classic examples
of social art practices using «intangible experiences» like «drinking beer»
with Tom Marioni, or «discussing philosophy» with Ian Wilson and «learn-
ing to funk dance» with Adrian Piper. The question «uncertain practices»
prompts is, if these works had been made today would they also include a
website, not simply as documentation after the event, but like Ihlein, incor-
porated into the work itself? Would today’s Ian Wilson have a blog with daily
updates on his philosophical thoughts and ideas? Would today’s Tom Mari-
oni list his favourite beers with links to favourite drinking holes? Would to-
day’s Adrian Piper post videos to YouTube showing each funky step?
For work that engages a public and traverses mediated public space,
the discourse surrounding «participation» is confusing. On the one hand
for network theorists like Varnelis «participation» is a key concept in net-
work culture, pointing to its normalised and even banal place in every-
day life. But on the other hand «participation» is a well-rehearsed concept
in avant-garde and contemporary art history, where the role of the spec-
tator and their relationship to the work of art has been questioned for al-
most a century – in a sense prefiguring participation in digital media. For
instance, early «interactivity» and «participation» were, in general, firm-
ly situated within a phenomenological discourse, where the concern was
with the subjectivity of the viewer and where the idea of presence was of
supreme value.66 With the expansion of art practices in the 1960s from tra-
ditional media into «art in general» or «generic art,»67 the presence of the
spectator, as a body in space and the nature of the relationship of this body
to the artwork was the privileged site of discourse. As Meyer says:
An underlying topos of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, of the happening and perfor-
mance, Presence became an aesthetic and ethical cri de coeur among the generation of
artists and critics who emerged in the 1960s, suggesting an experience of actualness and
authenticity that would contravene the depredations of an increasingly mediated, «one-
dimensional» society. (Meyer 2000: 26)
64 Network culture and mediated public space
Since the 1990s there has been a significant shift in attention away from
artwork concerned with relations between subjects and objects to work
dealing with the relations between subjects, or inter-subjective work. It is
this «social dimension of participation» that Bishop (2006) addresses in
her book Participation and that Bourriaud writes about and describes as
«relational aesthetics»:
After the area of relations between Humankind and deity, and then between Humankind
and object, artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations, as il-
lustrated by artistic activities that have been in progress since the early 1990s. So the
artist sets his (sic) sights more and more clearly on the relations that his work will create
among his public, and on the invention of models of sociability. (Bourriaud 2002: 28)
Many of the «relational» artworks that Bourriaud discusses take place in-
side a gallery, where the work created «relational» spaces of encounter.68
This is significantly different to the uncertain practices that are often high-
ly mobile, traversing mediated public space and engaging unknown pub-
lics – rather than known communities of either art audiences or specif-
ic community art projects. These works are not necessarily engaged with
the questions of «activation; authorship; or community» cited by Bishop
as the main motivations for participatory artwork since the 1960s. Instead
these works encounter publics as strangers outside the prescribed spaces
of art galleries or museums.
These works use participatory methods at a time when participation
itself has become normalised and an integral part of network culture. In-
deed participation is now well entrenched within both the culture in gen-
eral as well as art practice since the 1990s, when Bourriaud’s text on rela-
tional aesthetics was written. Participation as a method for contemporary
art practices doesn’t necessarily have a specific «motivation,» nor sdoes it
need one. It is no longer useful to ask why participation, given that partici-
pation as a mode is now a condition of network culture. (Palmer 2004) In-
deed, participation plays a large part within the dominant culture itself as
a significant form for marketing and entertainment in the globalised cul-
ture industry, and the «experience economy.» Thus, the previously privi-
leged position of participatory practices as transgressive or oppositional,
have been severely diminished.
Network Publics and partizipation 65
For many writers, including Richard Rinehart, the notion of «participa-
tion» and its accompanying rhetoric have become highly problematic and
suspect.69 In her paper «Participatory art: a paradigm shift from objects to
subjects,» Suzana Milevska reflects critically upon some of the theoretical
discourses that she thinks have shaped the participatory turn in recent art
practice, and particularly relational art. Milevska observes: «While invit-
ing the audience to actively participate, the artists of the participatory proj-
ects create certain interfaces that are well prepared in advance and high-
ly contextualised in a certain social, cultural and political environment.»
(Milevska 2006: n. p.) Milevska suggests a certain limitation to the notion
of open or free participation. Jörg Heiser, in his book on contemporary art,
All of a sudden (2008), is not only highly suspicious of Bourriaud’s idea of
«relational» but suggests that «participation» is itself misnamed or mis-
placed. Instead he proposes a new term, «delegated action» for work that
involves «interhuman relations.» He writes:
when artists work with individuals who they involve in a form of exchange or circulation
of activities, I would like to speak not of «relational aesthetics» but of «delegated ac-
tion.» This term makes clear that besides a relationship being established, there is also
sharing or total relinquishing of responsibility for actions, handing over partial control
either to the participant or to the process itself. (Heiser 2008: 260)
Beside the «social art practices» from the 1960s onwards that Bishop cites,
«participation» as a privileged method was also part of new interventions
into public space in the 1990s – to be distinguished from Bourriaud’s re-
lational art practices – working against the monumentalism of tradition-
al public sculpture. In One Place After Another Kwon discusses «commu-
nity art» and courageous attempts to create a public art that «focused on
the active participation of residents in diverse communities in the creation
of the artworks.» Her discussion centres on one such project in particular,
Culture in Action (a public art project in Chicago in 1993 directed and cu-
rated by Mary Jane Jacob) and dissects some of the grittier problems that
arose from this early attempt to break with older forms of public art:
it tested the territory of public interaction and participation; the role of the artist as an
active social force; artist-driven educational programming as an essential part of the
66 Network culture and mediated public space
artwork; and projects that existed over an extended period of time, not just as specta-
tor-oriented objects for brief viewing. (cited in Kwon 2004:100)
Culture in Action was conceived as a new model for public art that would
take the city of Chicago as its stage and it was part of what became known
as «new genre public art.» (Lacy 1995) But at the core of these radical as-
pirations was always the question and problem of community. Kwon iden-
tifies what she calls «the idealized spectre of community» as «highly prob-
lematic» a dream that «expresses a desire for selves that are transparent
to one another, relationships of mutual identification, social closeness and
comfort.» (Kwon 149) For these ambitious and idealistic community art
projects the idea of «community» was based on problematic notions of
transparency and wholeness and as feminist social theorist Iris Marion
Young argues, this notion of «community» is untenable because it «priv-
ileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over
recognition of limits of one’s understanding of others from their point of
view.» (Kwon 149) And this «fantasy» of an ideal community based on
transparent and unmediated relations, «participates in the ‹metaphysics
of presence› or ‹logic of identity› …that overlooks difference between sub-
jects and denies difference as a constitutive element in the process of sub-
ject formation.» (Kwon 149)
Although the projects that I am concerned with in this book involve what
may be considered participation, the mode of participation is quite differ-
ent to the discussions of community participatory art that have dominat-
ed art discourse since the 1990s. These works, on the whole, do not pos-
it a stable community, nor do they seek to create one. Rather their focus
is on relations with strangers in general, and unfixed even mobile publics
and for some in particular it is on possibilities for intimacy with strangers.
One of the defining elements of modernity, in my view, is normative stranger sociability,
of a kind that seems to arise only when the social imaginary is defined not by kinship as
in non-state societies or by place (as in state societies until modernity) but by discourse.
(Warner 2002: 299)
Network Publics and partizipation 67
In the project Talking About the Weather70 – similarly to Searching for rue
Simon-Crubellier – Norie Neumark and I used the strategy of «performa-
tive encounters» as a way to «engage» an unknown public. Aware of the
problematic and complex nature of both «participation» and «communi-
ty» that Kwon so lucidly outlines in her chapters on community art, «The
(un)sitings of community» (and that I briefly outlined above) we wanted
to rethink participation as performative and gestural – rather than direc-
tive or collaborative. At the time we didn’t consider our project «participa-
tory» in the usual sense. That is, there was no intent either to «give people
a voice» nor «help» or even alert people to the issue of global warming –
although that said, there was a sense of urgency for us, both in the issue
and in our own need to «talk» about it.71 The project was organised around
the playful – metaphorical – idea of collecting breath «to blow back global
warming.» The act of breath collecting was then performed in many differ-
ent countries, including The Netherlands, France, the USA, New Zealand
and Australia; and in many different places, both in public spaces, mainly
public parks and gardens (the lungs of the city) and private gatherings like
art residencies. In the work we invited people to donate their breath to our
breath collection – «the largest in the world, in order to blow back global-
warming.» The encounters were temporary, playful and performative so-
cial interactions engaging people bodily, through their breath, in the fear-
ful spectre of global warming. The actual breath «collected» was the sound
of people exhaling and inhaling into a microphone. When the work was ex-
hibited the sound of these breaths followed each other in a haunting rhyth-
Talking About the Weather. Second Breath. Collecting breath on
Still from video, 2006. Second Life, Screenshot, 2008.
68 Network culture and mediated public space
mic «breathscape» that permeated the entire space of exhibition with a vis-
ceral intimacy that sometimes felt painful. In her essay on Talking About
the Weather, «Towards a micro-revolution» Anneke Jaspers comments:
the concept of communality is relevant nonetheless in that the work, by its nature, gen-
erates a community of sorts. Each contribution to the artists’ breath collection is the
trace of an interaction, however fleeting, that forms part of a dispersed and evolving
network of subjects … Indeed, the strong resonance of Talking About the Weather with
[Jean Luc] Nancy’s concept of a community as ‹being in common› as opposed to consti-
tuting common beings is perhaps one of its most compelling aspects. (Jaspers 2008: 3)
Rather than addressing a «unified community» with such a specific and ur-
gent topic of concern as global warming, we considered our interventions
as «playful,» following Debord’s privileging of the playful as a productive
tactic for moving through unfamiliar cities and engaging unknown pub-
lics72 – although unlike the Situationists we were wary of placing ourselves
in the role of «waking up the spectator» rather, we imagined that through
our intervention and performative encounters we would both, that is, the
breath donators and us, wake up together. Or perhaps it was, as Jaspers
notes, following a suggestion by the curator Charles Esche that,
the sphere of art can act as a «modest proposal» for the world at large, a parallel zone
in which existing orders can be re-imagined, change pre-empted, and the value of spec-
ulation nurtured. Perhaps this is a zone where affect and effect meld into one another.
(Jaspers 2008: 3)
Instead of «audience» or «participants» we turned to the idea of «publics»
as a more appropriate term for the relations in the work. «Publics» seemed
to us an appropriate term of address given the transitory and temporary
coming together of this micro-event. «Publics» is also an appropriate term
of address for the relationships that manifest across the online networks,
as networks are capable of creating temporary and shifting publics that
come together for particular events, or that gather at particular (web)sites.
These shifting publics and /or «micro-publics» are highly mobile and frag-
mented; as a member of a micro-public you may belong to many differ-
ent publics simultaneously which may also overlap. In a way these shifting
Network Publics and partizipation 69
publics – «communities of sense» even – are not new, but are a sort of ul-
timate unfolding of the «new» public life initiated by printing at the begin-
ning of modernity itself. According to Michael Warner:
Much of the texture of modern social life lies in the invisible presence of these publics
that flit around us like large, corporate ghosts. Most of the people around us belong to
our world not directly, as kin or comrades or in any other relation to which we could give
a name, but as strangers. (Warner 2002: 7)
For contemporary media art, an art action can be singular and public.
As I argued previously this is a feature of the unsitely aesthetics that has
emerged as artists use the internet as one site for their work thus calling
forth a dynamic, non-fixed public that is not necessarily an art audience
with all that that implies. Media artists working in public space today call
forth uncertain publics (rather than previous small but educated art audi-
ences). These publics are diverse rather than homogenous; and given the
widespread use of media through film, TV, games and radio, audiences are
very willing to engage with artists in public space in an unprecedented way.
In some ways this playfulness attests to the success of the populist art pro-
grammes of biennales and blockbuster art exhibitions as well as the famil-
iarity that people in general have with media of all sorts. Media is not exot-
ic or separate from everyday life. The site of the work today can be multiple
and the work of art a space for conversation. It is this «public-ness» that al-
lows for dialogue and an ongoing engagement with a public or publics. It is
this capability enabled by the internet not just to engage existing fixed «au-
diences» but to call forth its own (dynamic) «public» that is signaled in the
term publicity, which authors like Kwon are now turning to.73
In the next chapter I will turn to the site of these encounters and in-
teractions and discuss how the notion of «unsitely» helps address the par-
adox of work that is both situated and multi-sited. I turn to Robert Smith-
son’s invention of site/nonsite as a productive way to understand current
practices that exist simultaneously across multiple sites on and off the in-
ternet. I also discuss how work considered as unsitely can disturb common
notions of documentation and the archive, and I explore how the figure of
site can, paradoxically, help maintain a sense of the situatedness and locat-
ed-ness of both the work and the audience.
70
Chapter 3: Site of Unsitely
In the new networked world that we now inhabit it is not only our relations
to people that are affected but also our sense of place and especially being
in one place at one time that is disrupted. Although site suggests a fixed
place and a fixed temporality, I am using unsitely to unhinge this fixity and
to suggest a troubling and opening of not only the place of the work of art
but the «place» of the audience’s aesthetic experience as well. Hence un-
sitely evokes a space of tension, ambiguity and potential for both artwork
and audience.
Being in two places at once, or the «superimposition of real and vir-
tual space,» is now a common experience. In considering the internet as
a site of artwork that exists side by side with other sites of the work, it be-
comes a public space where the public encounters the work – and where
specific publics for the work are called forth and aggregated. The relation-
ship of artwork and audience is no longer that of contemplative gaze or
even the interactive or navigational engagement of previous technological
or new media artworks. Instead, and parallel to the experience of the artist,
the audience’s relationship with the unsited artwork, often through net-
work connection, could be characterised as mobile and connected, no lon-
ger an escape hatch into cyberspace. The relationship of the artwork and
audience, now called publics, is highly fragmented and displaced. If art-
work is no longer an object located in one place, like a museum or art gal-
lery, the public too is also dispersed. Yet, paradoxically within these pub-
lics, each person, accessing work, even if mobile, is also situated. This is
an important paradox to which unsitely points. And this paradox is deep-
ened by the fact that the situated places of the work and places of the au-
dience may not be synchronous. That is, the audience is also not simply
71
somewhere else, but is in many different places – and temporalities. Pub-
lics are fragmented and dis-located. This multiple situatedness of the art-
work and its audiences is why the notion of site, in these practices, is un-
done and becomes an «unsite,» holding in tension both a situatedness and
a dispersed-ness. Site can no longer be reduced to one place or even one
time for a work or its publics.
In the project Never Been to Tehran this tension between the place of
the work, the places of the audience and the place of the artist is succinctly
played out across multiple sites that reverberate back and forth.
In Never Been to Tehran, Andrea Grover and Jon Rubin invited twen-
ty-nine international participants to contribute photographs of the city of
Tehran as they imagined it to look – on the condition that they themselves
had never been to Tehran.74
Imagine a city that you’ve only seen in reproductions or perhaps have merely heard
about. A place, like many others, that only exists for you through indirect sources & me-
dia; the nightly news, hearsay, literature, magazines, movies, and the internet. Using
these second-hand clues as firsthand research materials … Contributors will upload
their photos daily to an on-line photo sharing site, which will be projected as a slideshow
simultaneously in galleries and public spaces around the world (including Tehran).
(Grover & Rubin)
The project utilised a sort of reversed site-specific logic where participants
imagine a place, a specific place that they themselves have never seen or
visited, through another place, which was their own. The context is no lon-
ger the actual city of Tehran, but the imaginary place that presents itself
through the filter of media by an international group of people living out-
side Tehran. In this work the network becomes the context and cultural ge-
ography. This reversed use of site-specificity displaces James Meyer’s no-
tion of «the functional site» where the site was characterised as «a process,
an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and tex-
tual filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist’s above
all).» (Meyer 2000: 25). In contradistinction to Meyer’s «subject who
passes through it, mobile and contingent» the makers of this work might
be mobile and contingent, but they are also situated – elsewhere. That is,
the photographic work is made in one place, the artist’s place, about an-
72 Site of unsitely
other place. In this project the place of the work is no longer singular; it is
spread across multiple locations – and this is emphasised by the display
of the artist’s location under each picture, as well as the map index on the
website. In a parallel fashion to Meyer’s emphasis on the artist’s body, the
project works from and through the artist’s geographically situated posi-
tion, but rather than a phenomenological body, it is the artist’s position as
a link in the many connections and nodes that makes up the social imagi-
nary of Tehran.
The photos, all 408 of them, evoke a place through landscape, deco-
rative motifs, ephemeral objects from daily life, the flotsam and jetsam of
the everyday as well as the monumentally built environment – all of which
are images of where the artist lives, and in which they imagine Tehran. It is
a networked collaboration that creates a dynamic shifting mosaic of imag-
es of not just an imagined Tehran, but conversely, of the people and plac-
es that participated. The specificity of where-in-the-world each image was
taken is highly significant. Each image bears the name of the author and
their location beneath – Francesco Nonino, Italy; Cedric Bomford, Cana-
da; Levin Haegele, London, England, and so on. Knowing where the pho-
tos were taken gives the audience a point of reference creating a strong
counterpoint that holds the images in tension, at the same time creating
humour and pathos.
Watching the flow of soundless images, Tehran becomes multiplied
(as of course it is). It is luscious and banal, strange and enigmatic and
sometimes very funny – a street light, a Persian carpet shop, a diamond-
shaped brick from the pavement, a backyard full of broken pottery, bare
feet on Persian carpets, modernist skyscrapers, women wearing scarves
glimpsed through the rear-view mirror of a car, geometric patterns in pub-
lic places, walking the dog, a watermelon. In these scenes «Tehran» can
be the stony mountain landscapes of New Zealand, the deli windows of
Brooklyn, the carpet sellers in Italy, the diamond-shaped paving stones
in Denmark, or stacked supermarket shelves in Japan. This very tension
between the pictured Tehran, the imagined Tehran and the «real» Teh-
ran can create, for viewers not in Tehran, a shock of recognition at some of
the shared cultural imaginings of what Tehran might look like. Yet the im-
ages are obviously not «real» representations of Tehran, rather they per-
form the place called Tehran by calling forth images and scenes from the
Site and nonsite 73
immediate world of each artist – in this non-stop kaleidoscope one could
call performing Tehran. These performances are subtended by the audi-
ence’s own situated imaginings of Tehran, which the work provokes and
throws into relief.
Site and Nonsite
An emblematic historical figure for what I am calling uncertain practices
and unsitely aesthetics is Robert Smithson. His concept of site/nonsite is a
useful tool for comprehending a relation to place and a relation to sites of
work that hold in tension notions of presence and absence, two terms that
have become disturbed and undone with network culture. In 1969 Smith-
son travelled to the Great Salt Lake in Utah where, just south of Rozel
Point, he constructed the legendary Spiral Jetty. Immediately on securing
the site «a cameraman, was sent by the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles to film
the process.» (Holt 1979: 112) Smithson then had the work filmed from a
helicopter. This film would become part of his «nonsite» – just as the earth
and rocks and stones which he gathered from previous sites like Mono lake
in California in 1967 and Pine Barrons, New Jersey in 1968 would be sent
back to a gallery in New York city to also be exhibited as a nonsite.
In the nearly forty years since these seminal events took place the
idea of «site» has gone through many twists and turns as artists have grap-
pled with the relationship between art and the context of its exhibition.
This shift in focus from the object of art to the site of art unfolded out of
the «lessons» of minimalism. In the 1960s and 1970s the site or place of
art – the gallery and the museum – became the focus of critical art practic-
es attempting to disrupt the easy commercial transactions of the portable
painting or art object. By focusing on site, through what became known as
site-specificity, artists were attempting to both critique and resist the com-
modification of the art market by literally tying the work of art to its site.
This was initially a phenomenological and experiential exercise where art-
ists understood the site as a literal place for work. Later, for artists such as
Hans Haacke75 and Michael Asher, the institutions of art became the fo-
cus of their ongoing critique with projects that disclosed the entangled re-
lationships between the institutions of art and the economic elites through
74 Site of unsitely
both economic and social networks. These sorts of work became known as
institutional critique. But, significantly, from the beginning of what would
become known as the neo avant-garde, art and artists left the space of the
«white cube» (O’Doherty 1976) and ventured out into the infinite possi-
bilities of the world itself. This movement out of the gallery (and the stu-
dio) has been a hallmark of contemporary art practice since the early ex-
perimental works of the late 1950s and 1960s, when, for instance, Allan
Kaprow staged his happenings in abandoned parking lots, the backyards
of apartment buildings as well as a myriad of other places and spaces – ur-
ban, regional and suburban.76
In leaving the gallery for remote and inaccessible locations Smithson
nevertheless maintained an ongoing relation with the gallery. Smithson’s
remote sites were often industrial wastelands, places left abandoned by in-
dustry, but which he considered available for re-imagining as sites for art.
He developed the significant idea of site/nonsite for this series of work –
understanding the relationship between the gallery and the remote loca-
tion as a dialectical one. In his most well-known work, Spiral Jetty, Smith-
son complicates the relationship between sites of work, so that as Gary
Shapiro writes,
the Spiral Jetty is difficult to locate. For there are three things to which Smithson gave
that name: the rock structure whose construction he arranged … a film that he made
while the spiral was being built; and an essay (first published in 1972), a text that dis-
cusses both the spiral and the film in a language ranging through mythopoetic, art his-
torical and geological modes. (Shapiro 1995: 7)
And significantly for current networked art practices Shapiro argues
against the common observation about Smithson’s work that «the works
depend heavily on documentation of various sorts (maps, photographs,
descriptive materials, films, and so on).» For Shapiro there is «no prima-
ry, authentic object (the spiral) to which the film and the essay are merely
ancillary. There is no pure Spiral Jetty, no work uncontaminated by lan-
guage or other supposedly non-sculptural media.» (Shapiro 1995: 7) And
this impurity and unsiteliness resonates strongly with current networked
artwork that exists across countless sites both actual and virtual, and in
Site and nonsite 75
myriad forms, «one work existing simultaneously in a number of modes.»
(Shapiro 1995: 7)
As Shapiro understands with Smithson’s multiple modes of making,
the traditional understanding of the document, as linked to presence, is
problematic. This idea was based on essentialist notions of presence and
absence, suggesting that documentation could only be a secondary expe-
rience to the «real» thing. It was thought that if you were not there, you
could see the documentation of the work after the event, but the fact was
your experience and relationship to the work was displaced and under-
stood as a secondary experience. This idea of documenting and documen-
tation has been well called into question by performance theory, in particu-
lar through the writings of Philip Auslander and Amelia Jones. In «On the
performativity of performance documentation» Auslander (2007) argues
against the claim of authenticity of «being there» in receptions of perfor-
mance art. Instead he argues that using the concept of performativity indi-
cates «the act of documenting an event as a performance constitutes it as
such.» Thus, for Auslander «presence» can no longer be a privileged state
of reception. In «‹Presence› in absentia: experiencing performance as doc-
umentation,» Jones (1997) argues that «there is no possibility of an unme-
diated relationship to any kind of cultural product,» therefore the specif-
ic knowledge gained from being present at a performance «should not be
privileged over the specificity of knowledge that develops in relation to the
documentary traces of such an event.» (Jones 1997: 12) It’s worth noting
that these important insights speak not just to the unsitely site of the work,
but also of their unsitely audiences.
This troubling of the traditional understanding of the «document» or
specifically the archive in relation to electronic art is taken up by Timo-
thy Murray in his essay «The archival event: thinking electronic art via Cor-
nell’s Goldsen Archive of new media art.» (Murray 2005) In discussing the
work of contemporary Taiwanese artist Tsui Kuan-yu, who describes his
work as «action art,» Murray observes that «corporeal ‹presence,› so cru-
cial to performance, makes way for the temporal complexity of video ‹event,›
as it moves between the now of witnessing, the past of the archival moment,
and the future of the unfolding track.»77 For Murray, the document has be-
come an «archival event» something that can no longer be considered sim-
76 Site of unsitely
ply of the past, but instead is re-activated for each viewer. For him, «the
archive is less a repository, in the traditional passive ‹document› bound
sense, than a site or collection of ongoing exchange and interaction.»78
In Spiral Jetty (the text) Smithson defined the relationship between
the site and nonsite in terms that bring this relationship into sharp relief:
The range of convergence between Site and Nonsite consists of a course of hazards, a
double path made up of signs, photographs, and maps that belong to both sides of the
dialectic at once. Both sides are present and absent at the same time. Is the Site a reflec-
tion of the Nonsite (mirror), or is it the other way around? The rules of this network of
signs are discovered as you go along uncertain trails both mental and physical. (Flam
1996: 153)
Smithson’s sense of the «uncertainty» of these trails to be discovered mir-
rors today’s uncertain practices as artists move between disciplines, no
longer tied to a specific medium and as they move between actual sites of
work. Like Smithson’s mobile works these current practices are often mo-
bile and ephemeral practices. Significantly, Smithson, working before the
advent of the internet and its networked capabilities, does use a small por-
table instamatic camera to capture the «ruins» of New Jersey.79
Like DIY aesthetics today, the instamatic camera represents a turn-
ing away from a certain preciousness and quality of the image to an image
that matches the ruins he is describing – distressed, layered and ephemer-
al. For Smithson, in his writing and in the works, site is always a relation-
ship between here and there, between centre and periphery, and between
entropy and its reverse where the centre cannot hold; by the many acts of
displacement the work becomes dispersed and multiple. As Craig Owens
points out in his essay «Earthwords»:
All of Smithson’s work effected a radical dislocation of art, which was removed from its
locus in the museum and gallery to remote, inaccessible locations. This displacement is
not only geographic, but economic as well: the «value» of the work of art is no longer de-
termined by its status as a portable commodity; it is now the work itself which bestows
value (upon the depreciated site where it is installed). (Owens 1979: 123)
The unsitely Audience 77
The Unsitely Audience
While Smithson opens key questions about site and nonsite and while
there is something similar happening today in mediated public space, it is
of course different. If Smithson displaced the site of the work he also took
for granted that on the whole the work would be seen and experienced in a
gallery context (nonsite). The relationship between the two sites may have
been a dialectical one, but the site of reception for the work was based on
the assumption that not many people would make it out to Rozel Point to
see the actual spiral jetty. For Smithson it was a dialectical relationship be-
tween only two sites. For today’s unsitely work the relationships have mul-
tiplied; rather than a dialectic between two sites there are many sites of
work and many sites of reception. The work is not only received across dis-
tances, it may also be dispersed and fragmented. In these uncertain me-
dia art practices the work is often not a single website, nor is the work sim-
ply online and offline, in a simple mirroring of Smithson’s dialectic of site/
nonsite. Rather there is a complex play between many sites of work, an ag-
gregation of numerous appearances, actions and links. As in Please Let Us
Hear From You and Searching for rue Simon-Crubellier the internet may
be pulled into play in multiple and various ways, but it will not be simply
a mirroring.
In the early noughties (2002 – 2004) MTAA (aka Mike Sarff and Tim
Whidden) two New York-based artists, made a series of performative «up-
dates» where the relationship of today’s networked audiences to artwork
was humorously critiqued. The Updates reworked seminal performance
art from the 1960s and 1970s, updating them for our current era, «replac-
ing human processes with computer processes.» Their most infamous up-
date was One Year Performance Video (aka samHsiehUpdate) which re-
works Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978 – 1979 (aka Cage
Piece).
In the original work by Hsieh, the artist lived in a cage for an entire
year. The cage was built in his downtown New York studio. Hsieh commit-
ted himself to a regime of extreme deprivation where for the entire year he
didn’t talk, read, listen to the radio or watch TV. To pass the time he took
photos of himself and marked the wall of his cell – like a prisoner in soli-
tary confinement, his physical needs – food and sanitation – were attend-
78 Site of unsitely
ed to by an assistant, «with whom he did not exchange words.» In contrast
to MTAA’s Update, the work was enacted as a durational work in an essen-
tially private space, that of the artist’s studio, with no audience.
MTAA’s update was commissioned by Turbulence in 2004, and has
been available online ever since.80 However, whenever you access this
work the artist statement announces the date you logged on as the start of
the work. In other words, the work begins when each viewer commences to
view the work. For MTAA, the work has shifted from the «act of living in a
cell» to «images of ourselves living in a cell.»
First, we’ve taken the act of living in a cell and transformed it into images of ourselves
living in a cell. These video clips are edited dynamically at runtime so that every viewer
sees a slightly different cut. The clips are organized according to the clock: if you access
the piece in the morning, you see us doing morning things; if you access late at night,
you see us sleeping.
Second, we’ve transferred the onus of a 1 year commitment to the work from the
artist to the viewer. The piece will be realized fully only when a viewer runs it for one
year. (MTAA website)
This work shows immediately the enormous shift in practice and aesthet-
ics from traditional performance art of the 1960s where the presence of the
body was of supreme value, to the layered and networked sense of «pres-
ence» we live with today. As James Meyer suggests, it was the expansion of
telecommunications and increasing mediation that brought forth the well-
known 1960’s obsession with presence, and the longing for «actualness
and authenticity,» where «presence became an aesthetic and ethical cri de
coeur.» (Meyer 2000: 26)
MTAA’s update points to an unsitely – and untimely81 – aesthetics
in the work and in the work of the audience. It is the audience/public who
now «does the time» rather than the artist. For MTAA, the work is not one
of endurance or duration, two outstanding features of Hsieh’s earlier piece.
MTAA suggest that endurance, like duration has disappeared from our dig-
ital, image-saturated existence. Instead of bodily endurance and duration
MTAA have made looped video pieces showing each artist alone in a small
cubicle-like space – and this time round the «cage» is furnished with a lap-
top computer and desk. In this update the artists’ perform not only the up-
date of Hsieh’s lonely piece, but ironically the audience watching. That is,
Site and nonsite 79
their performance reflects back to the audience an image of themselves –
the audience – who at that time, 2004, were more than likely sitting in a
room alone, looking at a computer screen of MTAA performing sitting in a
room looking at a computer screen. This infinite spatial iteration of thou-
sands, perhaps millions, of computer users accessing the site singly, at dif-
ferent times and spaces spread across the globe, performing their own ver-
sions of «the Cage piece» is, MTAA suggest, our current social and cultural
reality. «The choices made in updating the work we believe speaks to how
our society, culture, and the creative process has changed since the orig-
inal was created.» This update was made in 2004 when, no doubt, most
people – in Western countries at least – accessed their computer (alone)
in a room, sitting at a desk. However today that relationship, between the
work and the audience, has shifted again. Rather than the static worksta-
tion of the digital era, people today, in network culture, access the inter-
net from their mobile phones as much as laptop computers. They may
still connect singly and alone, but now, not only the public but the mak-
er /creator could be anywhere, anytime. Hsieh’s other one-year endurance
piece might be more appropriate for the mobile and networked era, One
Year Performance 1981 – 1982 (Outdoor Piece).82 In this work Hsieh spent
a whole year outdoors, roaming around New York with a backpack and
sleeping bag. This could be adapted to one year roaming around looking
for hotspots to connect.
MTAA’s canny understanding of the new relationship between audi-
ences and artwork, where it is the audience or public «who do the work»  –
and do the time, in their own situated locations – is fully realised in anoth-
er unsitely project by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher titled Learning to
Love You More.83 Between 2002 and 2009 July and Fletcher maintained
a website where quirky, even «arty» assignments were posted – 70 assign-
ments in total – and where they invited people to participate by accept-
ing an assignment. Assignments ranged across the whole gamut of every-
day life, encouraging participants to engage with the fabric of their own
lives. Assignment #58 Record the sound that is keeping you awake or As-
signment #53, Give advice to yourself in the past. As the website notes, in-
structions and assignments can be highly productive allowing people to
be creative without prescribing the outcomes. They can be «like a recipe,
meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these as-
80 Site of unsitely
signments was intended to guide people towards their own experience.»
This sort of work gives the transformative potential of art, as a creative act,
directly to the audience in a do-it-yourself service. Rather than a trans-
formative experience occurring in front of a work of art in a museum, this
project opens an aesthetic experience for the audience, while acting as an
instigator, inviting the participants to be creative for themselves and then
providing a space for display and sharing of the experience. The project
spanned multiple sites, it was both a website and a series of presentations,
exhibitions and screenings presented at many different venues across the
world, as well as a hardcopy publication depicting selected entries from the
online site. In all the different «sites» of the work what was depicted was
the participants’ completed assignments. If you go to the website today you
can no longer submit an assignment, however you can scroll through the
many projects made by the thousands of participants. The assignments or
directives are both self-healing type popular advice as well as suggestive of
art strategies that you might have performed at art school, reminiscent of
the «making strange» or «ostranenie» art technique that became a central
concept for avant-garde artists throughout the 20th century. In this proj-
ect everyone becomes avant-garde unleashing their own «making strange»
for themselves and for others. The role of July and Fletcher is that of art
therapists making up assignments, which strangely – scrolling through
the directions for the assignments – seem just as exciting and provocative
as watching people perform the assignment. «Take a picture of strangers
holding hands,» «Re-enact a scene from a movie that made someone else
cry.» «Ask your family to describe what you do.»
By using the figure of site not only art historical notions of «pres-
ence» are unsettled, but also the tension between centre and periphery.84
Significantly, rather than understanding public as a universal and unify-
ing concept as imagined by Jürgen Habermas in his influential text on the
public sphere, the situatedness and locatedness of unsitely allows us to
maintain a sense of the significance of difference between centre and pe-
riphery, with their different unstable publics. The sense of the situatedness
of where artwork is received resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s understand-
ing of the relation between bodies and space where he writes, «our body is
not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space … Through it we have
access to space.» (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 5) That is, the situated viewer is
Situated and located 81
not just referring to a sense of place as location, but recalls Merleau-Pon-
ty’s understanding of how we have access to the world through our bodies,
including our memories and personal histories which carry specific feel-
ings and thoughts. As signalled earlier, the sense of place that I am calling
upon is not an essentialist notion of place with a unified subject based on
a fixed community or nationality. Rather, it is a recognition of the speci-
ficity of place in all its richness and confusion. It is also a recognition that
where you are in the world does make a difference to the reception of the
work and to how you understand the artwork, which in turn may affect the
artwork itself. As an artist living and working in Australia, the question
of centre and periphery remains an important consideration and one that
cannot be ignored.
Situated and Located
What do these understandings of the site of unsitely contribute to the larg-
er debates about network culture? While I see network culture as the con-
text of unsitely aesthetics, I would suggest unsitely in turn allows us to
thicken the debates around local /global within the discourse of network
culture. In their essay «Place: networked place» Varnelis and Friedberg ar-
gue that global connection can mean a certain disconnection from the local
world around us where the immediate environment fades as the seeming-
ly more present voice on the phone becomes urgent. For example in re-
search on mobile phone use in Japan, where the mobile phone is known as
«keitai,» Ichiyo Habuchi describes the way teenagers stay in constant con-
tact at a distance through their keitai as «telecocoon.» «The ‹telecocoon›
maintains intimacy at a distance, facilitating private encounters in public
spaces.» (Varnelis & Friedberg) But, in a way that the concept telecocoon
occludes, there is also conversely a sort of transient intimacy with strang-
ers who unwittingly overhear the phone conversation or the sound leaking
from an iPod. Brandon LaBelle suggests this leaking of sound from mobile
phones and iPods «contaminates» the spaces that people move through.85
We have all experienced this «contaminated» and leaky space as we sit on
a bus or train or sit in a waiting room awkwardly listening to other people’s
conversations and other people’s leaking music. These spaces, once theo-
82 Site of unsitely
rized by Marc Augé as «non-places» (Augé 1995) and thought to be emp-
ty of social and personal interaction, are now filled with either private con-
nections or noisy activity. This layering of the virtual and real, complicated
by noisy sound devices, is reconfiguring Augé’s «non-places» into layered,
noisy and even intimate spaces of temporary encounter; that is, a tempo-
rary public is created as strangers are oddly connected through fragments
of shared and overheard conversations.
For Varnelis and Friedberg global connection is also in many ways
displacing the presence and pre-eminence of the local context as people
connect across networks with others who share their interests and values,
rather than with people who may live close by, but who don’t share val-
ues. Varnelis and Friedberg see this as having a detrimental effect on the
relations between people living in the same geographical location, result-
ing in a narrowing of relations between local people. This has been called
the «balkanisation» effect, or the «echo chamber,» meaning that people
no longer need to encounter different opinions or any sort of challenge to
their worldview. Instead, through global connections it is possible to com-
municate with people just like you – and so, much like the telecocoon, you
are cocooned from difference. While Varnelis and Friedberg’s argument is
useful in pointing to the excesses of online life, which can create isolation
and separation from real life, this too occludes the complexity and persis-
tence of the local and its continuing importance86 – and which unsitely aes-
thetics points to.
The idea that the local, or one’s sense of place, will simply be dis-
placed by network relationships or knowledge87 is usefully brought into
question by Eric Gordon, for instance, in «Towards a theory of network
locality.» (Gordon 2008) Gordon argues against this common perception
and suggests that the local still matters. He writes, «the majority of schol-
arship on this topic has emphasized the displacement of local knowledge
in the wake of networks. Places are relegated to a subordinate position in
a new system of organization that never ceases to look at global flows even
within the most intimate social interactions.» (Gordon 2008) For Gordon,
this clearly misunderstands the significance of the networks in our every-
day life. Rather than displacing the local, as many pundits feared, Gor-
don suggests it extends local knowledge. He writes, «that neighbours share
ideas on a listserv, or share secrets on Facebook’s neighbourhood applica-
Situated and located 83
tion [which serves to] enhance the structure and extend the boundaries of
situations from which placeworlds are constructed.» (Gordon 2008) Thus,
he does acknowledge the important influence of network culture on every-
day life, in particular the volume of information available through the net-
work on places, both close and far. However, arguing against major theo-
rists such as Manuel Castells, the pre-eminent network scholar, he argues
that local knowledge is not the same as information about a locality. He
understands that, «People are located. And this simple fact continues to
influence social interactions.» Citing Jochai Benkler, another key scholar
on network culture:
Human beings, whether connected to the internet or not, continue to communicate
preferentially with people who are geographically proximate than with those who are
distant. Nevertheless, people who are connected to the internet communicate more with
people who are distant without decreasing the number of local connections. (Benkler,
2006 cited in Gordon 2008)
The importance and specificity of the local and situated in network cul-
ture is significant for the emergence of artwork that plays across sites both
online and off, and underlines the fact that the local context is still an im-
portant factor in people’s worldview. This became apparent to me as we
travelled in France and The Netherlands and accessed the internet in lo-
cal internet cafes or local libraries while making Searching for rue Simon-
Crubellier. To our surprise each search of the fictive street brought up very
different results depending on the country we were in. In fact the particu-
lar language group that you belong to, is probably the most significant fac-
tor in where and how you connect and what networks you belong to.88 Ac-
cording to Geert Lovink,
English content has dropped well below 30 percent … Growth has also led to further
nationalization of cyberspace, mainly using national languages, in contrast to the pre-
sumed borderless internet that perhaps never existed. The majority of internet traffic
these days is in Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese, but little of this seems to flow into the
dominant Anglo-western understanding of internet culture.» (Lovink 2007: xi)
84 Site of unsitely Situated and located 85

In other words there is a situatedness for people connecting that must be Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specifici-
acknowledged and taken into account because the local context is an im- ty that can hold in tension the distant poles of spatial experiences described by Bhabha.
portant aspect of how people receive and understand the «information» This means addressing the differences of adjacencies and distances between one thing,
one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking
moving through the internet. The sense of being situated that I am refer-
equivalencies via one thing after another. (Suderburg 2000: 58)
ring to is that of the social and relational body, not simply «the body» of in-
dividual sense perception. This means that the local context, in which you
are situated, does affect how you read and understand things. And receiv-
ing art on the internet is an important case in point. Thus, where you live –
apart from the connections you make online – is still important and does
affect your subjectivity.
Networks online often mirror networks offline. So-called global net-
works can be firmly rooted in a specific geographical location. An exam-
ple of this would be artists’ networks initiated in North America and other
Northern European centres, which, although they strive to be internation-
al, often work through the local networks of people living in those places
and friends nearby. In my own experience living through the excitements
of new media in the 1990s when Australian artists played a significant in-
ternational role, it was disturbing to witness the histories of early digital
art being told through the networks of Britain and North America, thus
leaving out key people and events that happened in Australia. (Greene
2004, Paul 2003, Tribe & Jana 2006)89
Site may at first seem a contradictory figure for the era of network cul-
ture and Varnelis’s project of networked publics. It suggests place rather
than space, contained rather than distributed. It is a term that suggests the
static rather than the mobile, the fixed rather than the fluid. However, in
this book it is brought into play – following Ehrlich and LaBelle – as a piv-
ot point, a way to think through the place of both the making of art as well
as the aesthetic experiences of its audiences.90 And it hopefully adds an im-
portant aesthetic dimension and complexity to understandings of network
culture, opening a still necessary complexity about situatedness and inter-
subjectivity and its effect on subjectivity. And the sense in which it is uti-
lized owes much to Miwon Kwon’s analysis in her essay One Place After
Another:
86
Chapter 4: Present in the Past
I can’t understand why people are frightened of
new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
John Cage (Kostelanetz 1994: 207)
In discussing today’s networked culture as the current condition and the
context for an unsitely aesthetics I do not wish to imply a direct cause and
effect relationship or a simple technological determinism between techno-
logical innovation and unsitely behaviour. It’s also true that many of the at-
tributes and features of unsitely that I have discussed were already forecast
and heralded in previous art movements and art moments.
Indeed, the network as an idea and mode of art practice is not new to
today’s network culture. It was in the 1960s that the Fluxus artist Robert
Filliou wrote of an «Eternal Network» where friends and artists participat-
ed in an ongoing network exchanging art and ideas. «Before the internet,
Mail Artists were communicating across vanishing borders, establishing
contact with an international network of cultural works …» (J.Held Jr.
2005: 89) Mail art presaged the internet and electronic communication
long before the internet was born. According to Mail Artist Mark Bloch
also known as AA Bronson, «… it was already in progress without there
being an electronic technology in place.» (Held: 92) Mail artists had al-
ready worked with many of the ideas that I am now pointing to as unsite-
ly. The work was often small and DIY, using existing forms of postal ad-
dress, like letters, postcards and stamps. It was playful, inventive and often
humourous. And importantly mail art worked across the network send-
87
ing and receiving «art» in a constant relay of communication. There was
no one «site» for the work. In 1980 two California Mail Artists, Lon Spie-
gelman and Mario Lara published a manifesto of what they called Mail Art
«considerations.» One of their major points was the way mail art was not
simply an object. «Mailart is not objects going through the mail, but artists
establishing direct contact with other artists sharing ideas and experiences
all over the world.» (Held: 101) Ulises Carrión, a prominent writer on Mail
Art, wrote that «Mail Art shifts the focus from what is traditionally called
‹art› to the wider concept of ‹culture›. In opposition to ‹personal worlds›,
Mail Art emphasizes cultural strategies.» (Held: 93)
Mail art overlapped with another network of artists, working mainly
in North America, called Fluxus. Fluxus artists also presaged many of the
attributes of unsitely. Like unsitely artists, Fluxus artists understood art
to be an activity and an event rather than an object. The event score was
a prominent Fluxus form which used the idea of a music score to frame
mundane everyday activities like eating a sandwich, or lighting a match.91
These events could be surprising, inventive and delightful. They could be
performed at home with friends or at Fluxus events open to a wider pub-
lic – usually a small community of friends. Fluxus artists placed a value on
the extraordinariness of the ordinary and the everyday, and they paid at-
tention to life as it is lived. They created small DIY events in the everyday –
Fluxus strips away the plethora of junk and theatrical posing found in Happenings, and
their often elaborate scripts, creating instead events of small, ordinary, and simple ges-
tures, considered deadpan, humorous and often on the verge of imperceptibility.
(LaBelle 2006: 60)
It is this honing in on the minutiae of everyday life, «a conceptual rigor
and attentiveness to ‹insignificant› phenomena» as described by LaBelle,
as well as its «deadpan» and «humorous» gestures, and its disregard for
conventional or received taste that predicts the activities of today’s unsite-
ly artists – and it is what makes Fluxus still exciting and relevant. Like un-
sitely artists of today, Fluxus artists understood art in a very Dewey-ian
sense of an experience. In fact Hannah Higgins refers to this philosophy as
empirical and argues that it is this empiricism that Zen Buddhism, Ameri-
can pragmatism and Fluxus shared:
88 Present in the past
Both American pragmatism and Zen Buddhism are radically empiricist, based in the
principles of direct sensory perception of everyday life and the sense of connectedness
to the world that results, and in a commitment to attaining that sense of connectedness
by using what is at hand. The same empiricism and pragmatism lie at the core of many
Fluxus Events … (Higgins 2002: 83)
If Fluxus artists worked with networks before the arrival of the electronic
network92, it was another group of artists that theorised and revolutionised
thinking about public space and mobility. This group was the Situationists,
a motley crew of artists, adventurers and writers living and probably not
working in Paris. («Never work» was one of their infamous pieces of graf-
fiti scrawled across a wall during the revolutionary days of May 1968.) The
Situationist strategies of the dérive and psychogeography are key strat-
egies for unsitely artists working in the «media cities.» These strategies
have entered the popular imaginary as alternate forms of walking the city
and alternate forms of engaging with public space in general. The Situa-
tionists mainly walked and worked in the urban environment, in particular
Paris. They were interested in the city and urban development specifically.
For today’s unsitely artists, these strategies inform work that may happen
in any environment or public space, be that city, country, rural or desert
or even sea voyages. Beyond these immediate strategies of urban mobility,
the Situationists also presaged an engagement with urban space that im-
portantly understood space as produced transforming traditional ideas of
space (and place) as a separate thing «out there» to an awareness of space
as above all a social space – which may not be far from Scott McQuire’s
«relational space» of today’s networked cities.
Social Space and the City
In Situationist Space Thomas McDonough93 describes two distinct tradi-
tions in French Geography that places in context the Situationists ideas
on urban space, in particular their radical conception of the «social pro-
duction of space» and their interest in mapping. Both traditions emerged
from the aftermath of the 1870s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and
the debacle of the 1870 Paris Commune. The first tradition is that of aca-
Social Space and the City 89
demic geography founded by Paul Vidal de la Blache, a French historian.
This geography imagines space as a container and a «thing» already ex-
isting out there and that therefore merely needs to be discovered and de-
scribed. It was a geography of description. «Vidalian geography consid-
ered itself a ‹science of landscape› whose goal was taxonomic description.»
(McDonough 2004: 249) As McDonough suggests this is the source of the
«homogenous, abstract space of the Plan de Paris» the canonical map that
is itself the source of Debord’s cut ups. It is the ideology of this «abstract»
mapping that Debord is contesting in his own détourned map.94 In con-
trast, the «social geography» of Elisée Reclus, a communard and socialist,
«is not an immutable thing. It is made, it is remade, every day: at each in-
stant, it is modified by men’s actions.» (McDonough 250) The social geog-
raphy of Reclus recognised what Lefebvre, writing nearly fifty years later,
has called «the social production of space.» Space, in Reclus’s terms, is not
abstract nor can it be simply described, instead it is indivisible from social
relations. It is unclear whether Debord knew of Elisée Reclus’s work, but as
McDonough suggests, in understanding these two traditions one comes to
understand just what was at stake for the Situationists in the battleground
over post-war urban space. It is also an indication of what is at stake, if
largely unspoken, for unsitely practices, as they intervene in the complex
public spaces of today.
In a situation not unlike that of the early Situationists – unsitely art
practices today are no longer tied to the arts of representation. They tra-
verse public space in practices that engage with the «real» spaces of the
city, rather than creating imaginary representations. The form that these
works can take is beyond ideas of style or medium, rather it is the social
and networked spaces with their connections and disconnections that are
of interest.
In Buscando al Sr. Goodbar,95 Michelle Teran took a group of peo-
ple on a bus tour through the Spanish town of Murcia in search of the
authors of various geo-tagged YouTube videos produced in the city. The
search was conducted simultaneously on an actual bus and online through
Google Earth and YouTube where one could follow the bus as it made its
way to each author’s house. «If the longitude and latitude coordinates are
included with a video when publishing it on YouTube, then this video auto-
matically appears on a GoogleEarth map and connects it to a physical loca-
90 Present in the past
tion. A link is therefore made between the YouTube video and where it was
produced in the city.» (see Teran website)96 The bus tour, in this instance
is a sort of détournement and play on the more common forms of the tour-
ist bus tour. To call a work «Looking for Mr Goodbar» – in Spanish – af-
ter the eponymous film from 1977 starring Diane Keaton seems rather om-
inous. In the film Keating was murdered after visiting a bar in New York
City. This seems to suggest a very grim view of current online social rela-
tionships where the revelation of personal information can sometimes be
automatic. For instance by geo-tagging their location these YouTube per-
formers enabled a busload of strangers to turn up at their door. This is cer-
tainly an awful result for those authors, or perhaps not. Perhaps Teran is
suggesting a new ending for the once murderous search for a sociality de-
nied single women in the city in the past. This time round, social relation-
ships conducted between an online world and the accompanying urban en-
vironment will be safer, maybe even more sociable. Whatever the artist’s
intentions are this work, like situationist interventions of the past, engages
the actual world of urban social relations denying any imaginative or cre-
ative representation.
From the point of view of unsitely art practices there is a strong con-
nection – an animated conversation – between Dewey’s pragmatist philos-
ophy, Fluxus art and philosophy and the Situationists. Perhaps it is in this
sense of art as a way of life and as an attitude (rather than a precious ob-
ject); perhaps it is their expanded vision of where art could be experienced
(not just in designated art galleries) that all three overlap and connect. The
rich and diverse art actions and writings of Fluxus and the walking prac-
tices of the Situationists reverberate with many of the attributes of unsite-
ly aesthetics.
Mainly Walking: From Gallery to Unsitely Practices
In many ways «site-specificity» is a North American phenomenon, emerg-
ing out of the radical art practices of the 1960s – specifically minimalism
and its aesthetics of space and the body. Out of these discourses «site» be-
came the privileged concept around which art practice and discourse spun.
At the same time in Europe the Situationists were walking the streets of
Mainly Walking: From Gallery to Unsitely Practices 91
the city. They had inherited a walking tradition from first Dada, and then
the Surrealists, but from the mid-fifties they too began developing their
own approach and rationale with distinct concepts. For two of the three
distinctly Situationists concepts, the dérive and psychogeography, walking
was a privileged mode of aesthetic enquiry – as well as a weapon of politi-
cal resistance to post-war European consumer culture.
«I walk. Mainly I walk.» Michelle Bernstein
What becomes obvious on viewing the journals and Situationists projects
is how walking is central to the situationist sensibility and aesthetics. It
underlines the thoroughly process-oriented way of working that the Situa-
tionists favoured and one that connects them to today’s mobile media art-
ists. In a memorable conversation between two key characters in Michèle
Bernstein’s novel Tous les chevaux du roi (All the king’s horses), this sense
of walking as process and working method is depicted with lovely spare
prose:
«What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.»
«Reification,» he answered.
«It’s an important job,» I added.
«Yes, it is,» he said.
«I see,» Carole observed with admiration. «Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with
thick books and papers.»
«No, « said Gilles. «I walk. Mainly I walk.» (Bernstein 2008: 33)
Motion, movement, mobility and importantly walking, are activities im-
plicit within the «un» of unsitely. This movement can be the movement
between sites, or the movement that is effected by the work as it moves
across sites, or the movement of the audience/public as they move be-
tween sites of work. It can also mean the movement of the artist them-
selves as they walk through or across a space. James Meyer first explored
the artist’s movement between sites and its significance in his perceptive
article on the «functional site.» Meyer distinguished two distinct notions
of site that were already operating for artists in the late 1990s: «the literal
site and a functional site.» The «literal» site connoted the well rehearsed
92 Present in the past
idea of «site-specificity» dating back to the 1960s, where the site of artwork
was a specific and «singular place.»
In contrast, the functional site may or may not incorporate a physical place. It certain-
ly does not privilege this place. Instead, it is a process, an operation occurring between
sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between
them (the artist’s above all). (Meyer 2000)
If walking for the Situationists meant primarily urban walking or walking
the city, for artists today there are no such limitations as artists walk in
suburbia, rural areas and isolated parts of the world. One such remarkable
project is that of Mark Minchinton’s 2002 work /walk called Void: Keller-
berrin Walking. In this work Minchinton walked from Busselton in West-
ern Australia – where his grandmother was known as black – to Keller-
berrin WA – where his grandmother was known as white – a distance of
approximately 500 km. Along with food, clothes and shelter he carried a
digital camera, a handheld computer and a GPS device and mobile phone.
«A modern nomad.»
Twice a day I stop, take a GPS reading and five photographs and write about what I hear,
touch, see, smell, taste, find, feel, think or imagine at the place I have stopped. Each day,
I choose two of these photographs and send them with a text to a website.97
Walking for Minchinton is a performance and an act of love, above all it
is an act of awakening to his once suppressed indigenous identity. For
Minchinton walking is a way not only to acknowledge that history, that
link to identity – but is also a way of knowing through his body the coun-
try that he traverses.
Walking occupies an important place in both current mobile prac-
tices, and it could be argued, in the history of Western art in general. In
fact in sixteenth century Europe, as Rebecca Solnit reports, new mansions
and palaces were equipped with «galleries – long narrow rooms like cor-
ridors, though often leading nowhere … They were used for exercise in-
doors.» (Solnit 2000: 86) Solnit goes on to say that what began as a place
for walking indoors eventually became what we, today, know as a picture
Mainly Walking: From Gallery to Unsitely Practices 93
gallery. Perhaps it was to relieve the boredom or maybe it was simply a
decorative urge, whatever the reason, paintings and other artworks were
placed on the long empty walls of the gallery. As people took their healthful
stroll inside, during bad weather, one imagines them looking and admir-
ing the paintings on the wall. «The gallery eventually became a place for
displaying paintings, and though museum galleries are still a place where
people stroll, the strolling is no longer the point.» (Solnit 86) Walking then
has an intimate and intrinsic connection to contemporary art, even if it is
not quite what we imagined. Walking too is associated with William Word-
sworth and his sister Dorothy, both great walkers. William Wordsworth
is an important figure for contemporary mobile practices as we are all in-
heritors of his passionate rejection of eighteenth century classicism and
neo-classicism, which despised the everyday and anything pertaining to
it. Wordsworth and his fellow poets, like Coleridge, turned instead to the
«common place» to the ordinary everyday world in which we live for «di-
vine» inspiration and one of their most important activities was walking.
In the strange circular movement that history can sometimes make,
walking as an aesthetic practice has again gained prominence. It has re-
turned and it seems, if one considers Wordsworth and the English Roman-
tic poets, Modernity and Modernism began with a walk. In fact, as Rancière
theorizes, art as a separate and precious object of contemplation has been
questioned since the beginnings of modernity itself. It seems there has al-
ways been an «other» modernism – perhaps beginning with the walking
Wordsworths – and then running underneath or alongside the status quo
of «high» culture or High Modernism.
As I have tried to argue here, in the specific practices of Fluxus art-
ists and the Situationists, networked ideas were already theorised, imag-
ined and prophesised. What this indicates to me and what I have attempt-
ed to articulate in this book is that there is a widespread aesthetics, an
unsitely aesthetics, of making and receiving art, not so much initiated by
the internet and network culture, but nurtured and promoted and above
all played out through today’s electronic networks. This unsitely aesthetics
thrives and survives in the context of network culture where more artists
and «amateurs» than ever before are making work across and between the
networks, whether online or offline.
94
Epilogue
I was with de Kooning once in a restaurant and
he said, «If I put a frame around these bread crumbs,
that isn’t art.» And what I’m saying is that it is.
(John Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 1988: 211)
A point of departure for this book has been the question posed by Ehrlich
and LaBelle in their book Surface Tension: «… how does artistic practice
position itself in relation to notions of public space and the complexity of
audience?» Today this question is inevitably posed in the context of net-
work culture, where the network is now the dominant cultural logic and
significantly it is reconfiguring public space into what Scott McQuire has
called a «complex, interaction of material and immaterial spaces … hybrid
spaces,» that he calls «media cities.» (McQuire Abstract: 2006)
One of the things this book draws attention to is the tension between
media art and contemporary art. The separation of contemporary art and
media art loomed large as I began thinking about these practices. I found
reading across the divide a productive if sometimes confusing endeavour
as each field brought a different perspective to the mix. Of course such a
separation is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact the earlier separation of
new media from contemporary art allowed for growth and development
of media techniques and directions – a sort of incubation period – that
may have been hampered if waiting for approval from traditional art fo-
rums. However, with the enormous shift in computer use after the dot.
com collapse and the predominance of social networking sites, that sepa-
95
ration has now yielded to a much more malleable and porous border. Me-
dia of all sorts can now be seen in galleries without needing to be defended
from «this is not art» claims. Nevertheless I maintain there is still a ten-
sion and it is in this place of tension that the uncertain and unsitely prac-
tices play out.
In attempting to evaluate practices that fall outside disciplines and
traditions of making, these practices can suffer, not only from the lack
of value placed upon them, but also from a lack of commentary, discus-
sion and engagement. If art, as both Dewey and Rancière posit, is a so-
cial and dynamic activity then a dearth of critical commentary and pub-
lic discourse can make these practices invisible – when they need not be.
I think that critical discourse is an important element in any art practice
as an art practice engages with ideas and dialogue that occupy the culture
as a whole. What I have tried to do in this part of the book is to contribute
to the discourse surrounding these practices, to open up ways of engaging
and thinking about these practices, drawing upon both discourses of con-
temporary art and media theories simultaneously. I hope that in opening
up discourse for practices that seem beyond critical discourse I also open
up further questions for art criticism and art in general and ask what is im-
portant for us as a culture, or as Paul Carter puts it «what matters» (Cart-
er 2004) What do we value and what do we dream of? This is the stuff of
art and art making.
In using the term «site» to understand the unsitely practices that are
now playing out across media and the internet, this book points to a para-
dox that looms into view in both current practice and our actual lived ex-
perience – the paradox of being in a place and not in a place; of being lo-
cated and elsewhere at the same time. I have used «un» to undo the fixity
of site without losing sight of «site» and to above all focus on this para-
dox of place. On the one hand «unsite» foregrounds the lived experience
rather than the technology that is often the focus of media theories, and
on the other it troubles the notion of «place» as it is used by writers in-
tent on a singular or essential relation with place. It is this situation that
we as a culture find ourselves in and that is embedded or announced in the
unsitely artworks that follow in the second part of this book. There have
been many and varied responses to this situation. Some responses imbue
a longing for a connection with place that would deny the complex and
96

multi-faceted way we now live, which is through, in and with media. In

this response there is nostalgia for another time without media, that is of-
ten falsely thought of as unmediated, pure and «real.» On the other hand,
for some technophiles there can be a longing for a future unconstrained by
the materiality of human/animal life. This can sometimes seem to me like
a triumphant desire for the end of life.
Any project involving the internet is bound to feel the paradox and
frustration of studying something that can sometimes seem to be a «mov-
ing target.» And this project is no different. As I contemplated it, the world
changed around me. During the process of bringing the book together I wit-
nessed remarkable changes in the larger world of media art and technolo-
gy. Within a matter of a couple of years mobile phones, although not new,
achieved a new acceleration and saturation and became much more than
simply «two-way voice communication.» We now take for granted smart
mobile phones equipped with «web connectivity, location awareness, and
operating systems.» (Gordon, e Silva 2011: 41) Social networking sites are
also surprisingly recent developments. For instance Flickr was launched in
2004, Facebook in 2004 and YouTube in 2005. What this means for the
book is that what at first seemed like a slightly off-centre idea, even odd,
that of understanding artists engagement with the internet through site
and its historical meanings, became an idea that found its time. Site is in-
deed important for network culture and place matters.
98
Notes
Preface
1 I’m referring here to our move in the early 1990s into computer art and the need,
then, to learn new computer skills.
In the Beginning
2 On commenting on Djuna Barnes book, Nightwood, Rebecca Solnit writes, «Such
a density of literature had accumulated in Paris by the time of Nightwood that one
pictures characters from centuries of literature crossing paths constantly, crowd-
ing each other, a Metro car full of heroines, a promenade populated by the protag-
onists of novels, a rioting mob of minor characters.» (Wanderlust 2000: 210)
3 In his 1969 text on conceptual art, «Sentences on Conceptual art» Sol LeWitt writes,
«Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.» (Alberro &
Stimson 1999: 106)
4 «Network culture» is a term used by Kazys Varnelis in the book Networked pub-
lics to describe the current moment of internet connections and mobile media.
5 Locative media emerged in the early noughties as artists began making work out-
side the studio and gallery system using GPS devices. The term was initially coined
as a title for a workshop in Lativia in 2003 that focused on GPS, mapping and posi-
tion technologies. A report from this workshop describes succinctly the trajectory
of locative media: «Inexpensive receivers for global positioning satellites have giv-
en amateurs the means to produce their own cartographic information with mili-
tary precision … As opposed to the World Wide Web the focus here is spatially lo-
calized, and centred on the individual user; a collaborative cartography of space
and mind, places and the connections between them.» Quoted in «Beyond loca-
tive media» (Marc Tuters & Kazys Varnelis).
6 In her curatorial statement for «One Day Sculpture» Claire Doherty describes tra-
ditional public sculpture as «permanently sited, monumental and commemora-
tive.» This is in contrast to the uncertain media art practices that I am concerned with.
Available:  http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz/ODS_programme_cstatement.
html [accessed July 2009].
99
7 In 1970 Smithson made the work Spiral Jetty – a name he used for three quite
different outcomes. The work was at once an actual spiral jetty constructed by
Smithson located at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, as well as a film of
the lake with its stony spiral and the essay that Smithson wrote called Spiral Jet-
ty. In the footnotes of the essay Smithson describes his ideas of site and non-site,
ideas that expanded the idea of artwork being located in one site, instead creating
a network of sites – actual, imaginary and discursive – all of which could equally
be called Spiral Jetty. I return to Smithson’s significance for unsitely aesthetics in
chapter 3.
Site-specificity emerged from the radical art practices of the 1960s, specifically
Minimalism. It has been an important concept and nomenclature in art practice
ever since. See Miwon Kwon’s One place after another: site-specific art and loca-
tional identity (2004).
8 See Andrea Fraser «A museum is not a business. It is run in a businesslike fash-
ion» (2006) for a description of the corporatisation of American art institutions
and how this is effecting the production and display of art.
9 «Un» magazine, a Melbourne-based artist initiative and «grassroots» based publi-
cation is one such attempt to redress the lack of «official» critical media space, cre-
ating their own «space» both online and offline. See: http://www.unmagazine.org/
10 Networked publics, edited by Varnelis, was published by MIT Press in October
2008. However, I was able to read it online twelve months before print publica-
tion. It is no longer available online at the original url, though individual chapters
which I reference are still available at the time of this writing.
11 In his book Loving big brother John McGrath outlines an alternative way of un-
derstanding surveillance than the traditional account of crime prevention or the
traditional critique which posits surveillance as either an invasion of privacy or
part of the apparatus of a spectacularised society intent on total control. Instead,
McGrath proposes a surveillance space where public and private are no longer ap-
propriate terms and our relationship to it is performative.
12 Kwon’s book One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity is
an exemplary guide through the tangled and contradictory history of site-spec-
ificity. The book traces the notion of site-specificity from its emergence out of
1960s radical art practices, in particular North American practices associated with
minimalism, to the 1990s Culture in Action public art exhibition on the streets of
Chicago. Site-specific art was an art strategy of resistance and a reaction against
what artists perceived as the commodification of art and the accompanying dilu-
tion of progressive and political commitments to radical social change. In making
work site-specific artists were attempting to subvert the market place by insisting
on the «inseparability of the work and its context.» As Kwon writes, «Site-speci-
ficity used to imply something grounded, bound to the laws of physics. Often play-
ing with gravity, site-specific works used to be obstinate about ‹presence,› even if
100
they were materially ephemeral, and adamant about immobility, even in the face
of disappearance or destruction. Whether inside the white cube or out in the Ne-
vada desert, whether architectural or landscape-orientated, site-specific art ini-
tially took the site as an actual location, a tangible reality, its identity composed
of a unique combination of physical elements: length, depth, height, texture, and
shape of walls and rooms: scale and proportion of plazas, buildings, or parks; ex-
isting conditions of lighting, ventilation, traffic patterns; distinctive topographical
features, and so forth. If modernist sculpture absorbed its pedestal /  base to sever
its connection to or express its indifference to the site, rendering itself more auton-
omous and self-referential, thus transportable, placeless, and nomadic, then site-
specific works … forced a dramatic reversal of this modernist paradigm.» (Kwon
2002: 11) In his essay, «The functional site» James Meyer recognises a shift in art-
ists engagement with site in the 1990s. He argues for two notions of site, a liter-
al site and a functional site, suggesting that the «‹functional site› – in contrast to
the actual and literal site – does not privilege place.» (Meyer 2000: 25).
13 «New media» was the favoured term for digital artwork during the 1990s; I am
using it here, in parenthesis, to acknowledge that history rather than current
practice.
14 Site is a term associated with the history of art practice, nevertheless by focusing
on site, what becomes apparent is an implicit acknowledgement of a shift to spa-
tial thinking in general, and site heralds a geographical turn in thinking about art
practice and networked culture.
15 A thaumatrope was a popular toy in the Victorian era. It consists of a disk, usually
cardboard, with a picture on each side attached to two pieces of string. When the
strings are twirled the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to
persistence of vision.
16 As noted by Sven Lütticken in Secret publicity (2005) the term contemporary art
has replaced the older term, «postmodern art,» but just as «new media» was a
placeholder for the electronic arts in the 1990s, the term «contemporary» is use-
ful but problematic. «‹Contemporary› is the term now used everywhere for the art
and culture of the moment. It is the label of preference for the spectacular occa-
sions and edifices of the official creative industries, as it is for those who critical-
ly contest them … From a larger perspective, these developments may signal that
art, now and from now on, will be, first and foremost, contemprist. And that it will
emerge from a general situation, which is no longer subject to periodization? A
condition, perhaps, of permanent contemporaneity?»
Available: http://www.mc.pitt.edu/overview.asp [accessed January 2008].
17 See «Art in the age of digital distribution» in New media art (Tribe & Jana 2006).
For a contrary view of new media and its connections to conceptual art see «Re-
flections on conceptual art and its relation to new media a month long conversa-
tion on the new media list Empyre» where Navas argues that the premises of con-
101
ceptual art, as it is understood according to its origins in the New York scene, is
practically irrelevant in new media practice. (Navas 2005).
18 According to Andrea Fraser the corporatisation of art institutions in the United 
States has meant that art has become big business «with a growing emphasis on
income-producing activities,» with the result that museums are pushed into cy-
cles of ever expanding growth. «The influence of this logic in art-making is also
increasingly evident. Bigger spaces demand bigger art. Bigger art demands bigger
budgets and bigger backing.» (Fraser 2006: 88, 89)
Chapter 1: Unsitely Aesthetics
19 My aim is not to reconcile their views, nor is it to develop a unitary philosophy of
aesthetics. Instead, I bring the two philosophers together in order to shed light on
uncertain practices and their accompanying unsitely aesthetics.
20 Shusterman points out that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica has still not been translated
into English (Shusterman 2000: 265).
21 Richard Shusterman is the most influential philosopher of this recent resurgence.
His books include Pragmatist aesthetics: living beauty, rethinking art (1992) fol-
lowed by Performing live (2000). For other examples of this resurgence see ​
Hickman, L. ed. (1998) Reading Dewey; Alexander, T. (1987) John Dewey’s the-
ory of art, experience and nature: the horizons of feeling; Campbell, J. (1995)
Understanding John Dewey: nature and cooperative intelligence; Jackson, P. W.
(1998) John Dewey and the lessons of art.
22 Key analytical philosophers are G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
23 For examples of artists working online with the social and relational and influ-
enced by Dewey see Sal Randolph’s website, In the Conversation: http://inthe-
conversation.blogs.com/, LeisureArts blog: http://leisurearts.blogspot.com/ and
the website of Australian artist Lucas Ihlein: http://www.lucazoid.com/bilateral/
24 The idea of purity in art harks back to modernist art theories of medium speci-
ficity, in particular the writings of Clement Greenberg. «It quickly emerged that
the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was
unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate
from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be
borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered
‹pure,› and in its ‹purity› find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its
independence. ‹Purity› meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in
the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.» (Greenberg 1960)
25 Foster, H. ed. (1998) The Anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture. New York:
The New Press.
26 See «Introduction» in Hinderliter, B. & Kaizen, W. et al. (2011) Communities of
sense: rethinking aesthetics and politics.
102
27 For more information on Empfangshalle, Corbinian Böhm & Michael Gruber, see
their website. Available: http://www.empfangshalle.de/sites/e_projekte.html
[accessed November 2008]
28 For this specific project see their website. Available: http://www.empfangshalle.
de/sites/projekte/e_proj_bittemeldedich.html [accessed November 2008].
29 Norie Neumark writes of the «aesthetics of intimacy» in discussing the voice in
media art, in particular through the internet in «Doing things with voices: perfor-
mativity and voice,» in Voice: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media (95) See
also Norie Neumark, «Between you and … Voice, intimacy, and memory in media
art» in Toi/You, la rencontre, Manif d’Art 4, La Biennale de Québec (38)
30 Appropriately for any discussion of site and location the term «horizontal» is
above all a geographical term. In The Emergence of Social Space, Kristen Ross
discusses the uprising of the population of Paris in 1871, commonly referred to
as the Paris Commune, as a «spatial event» with a «horizontal effect.» The Par-
is Commune is an important episode for contemporary spatial art practices as it
posed spatial problems that are still important issues today, for example as Henri
Lefebvre once asked «who has a right to the city.» Ross elaborates on this «hori-
zontal» moment as an attack on hierarchy itself «… here I want to consider a more
general ‹horizontal› effect of the Commune: the way hierarchy came to be con-
tested in the realm of the social imagination of the Communards before it was at-
tacked on the political and economic level. … the Commune was not just an upris-
ing against the political practices of the Second Empire; it was also, and perhaps
above all, a revolt against deep forms of social regimentation. In the realm of cul-
tural production, for instance, divisions solidly in place under the rigid censorship
of the Empire and the constraints of the bourgeois market – between genres, be-
tween aesthetic and political discourse, between artistic artisanal work, between
high art and reportage. It is these anti-hierarchical gestures and improvisations,
what was entailed in extending principles of association and cooperation into the
workings of everyday life, that make the Commune a predominantly ‹horizontal›
moment.» (Ross 2008: 5) The 1871 Paris Commune was to have a profound ef-
fect on the Situationists and their revolutionary aspirations and engagement with
public space. For a discussion of «horizontal logic» in art discourse today see
Bertrand Clavez (2005: 246); see also Boris Groys «Hence, it is not to the ‹verti-
cal› infinity of divine truth that the artist today makes reference, but to the ‹hori-
zontal› infinity of aesthetically equal images.» (2008: 17)
31 It’s not coincidental that «strangers» should feature in this unsitely work, as the
figure of the stranger has shifted with network culture as people «relate» across
the networks with more strangers – distinct from previous eras when people relat-
ed face to face. This makes the figure of the stranger more ambiguous and there-
fore interesting, again, for artists.
32 Playing on just this problematic notion of «art,» as something that exists only in
103
the white cube of a gallery or when sanctified by a curator, a very prominent an-
nual Australian art festival calls itself This is Not Art or TINA. Initiated by Marcus
Westbury in 1998, it incorporates a wide range of experimental and independent
artists, writers and musicians who converge on Newcastle NSW every October to
perform, read, present, play and workshop their projects or learn new skills. See
the festival website: http://thisisnotart.org/ [accessed September 2009]
33 In this chapter Kwon problematises the notion of an essential community as it has
been used in traditional community art practices in the last several decades. For
Kwon (and I would agree), community is never a pre-existing or transparent enti-
ty that the artist can simply pick up and work with.
34 Lev Manovich provides the most prominent and thorough formalist analysis of
new media with his book The language of new media (2001).
35 Fibreculture is an Australian online journal engaging in critical discussion of new
media and information technology. See «Distributed Aesthetics,» Issue 7, 2005.
Available: http://www.fibreculture.org/ [accessed June 2008].
36 «Theses on distributed aesthetics» is a chapter in Geert Lovink’s Zero Comments.
However it is also «a classic example of multiple authorship.» Lovink explains,
«The concept ‹distributed aesthetics› emerged within the Australian Fibreculture
group. During the preparation of the Fibreculture Journal issue on distributed
aesthetics, editor Anna Munster and I wrote a number of theses on this matter.
These formed the basis of a workshop that was organized by Anna Munster and
me on May 2006 … in Berlin. The theses presented here were initially written to-
gether with Anna Munster around mid-2005, and then rewritten after the Berlin
workshop.» (Lovink 2008: 225)
37 Recent developments in online mapping capabilities like Google Map etc have
meant that the local, and location in general, are far from disappearing or dimin-
ishing in importance, as was once feared. In fact according to Eric Gordon and
Adriana de Souza e Silva geography has become the «organizational logic of the
web.» (Gordon & de Souza e Silva 2011: 3)
38 «Relational aesthetics has come to be seen as a defining text for a generation of
artists who came to prominence in Europe in the early to mid 1990s.» (Bishop
2006a: 160)
39 According to Clavez, «The ‹instantaneity› that McLuhan conceptualized by elec-
tric information shapes a horizontal vision of the world and replaces temporality
with spatiality. Therefore, historical verticality no longer interferes with the con-
cept of the artwork, aiding a generalized appropriation of images that are the eter-
nal limbs of a continuous present.» (Clavez 2005: 242)
40 In explaining the origin of the term «read/write culture» Lessig says, «The anal-
ogy is to the permissions that might attach to a particular file on a computer.»
(Lessig 2008: 28fn)
41 Greil Marcus’s Lipstick traces: a secret history of the twentieth century is a
104
sprawling narrative with myriad diversions bringing together avant-garde art – in
particular the Situationists – and popular culture especially Punk Rock of the late
1970s.
42 In «The amorality of Web 2.0,» Nicolas Carr coins the term «the cult of the am-
ateur» to describe the Web 2.0 phenomenon that he worries will undermine
high standards of both knowledge and journalism which he suggests can only be
reached through a professional economic model. For Fluxus artist and theorist,
Dick Higgins, it was a concept carefully mulled over. «I do not believe in amateur-
ishness: that isn’t what it is all about. But in amateurism, is simplicity.» (Smith
2005: 123)
43 See Andrew Keen’s The cult of the amateur for a passionate, some say mournful
lament against what he considers the loss of standards with the explosion of on-
line blogs and the celebration of the «noble amateur.» (Keen 2007)
44 In Zero comments, Geert Lovink warns that a lack of economic models could be
dangerous as the internet «frees» up traditional industries: «Amateurs are less
likely to stand up and claim a part of the fast increasing surplus value (both sym-
bolic and real money terms) that the internet is creating. Professionals who have
been around for a while would understand what the implications will be for con-
tent producers if one giant such as Google instead of book publishers ends up con-
trolling money flows. What is important here is to envision sustainable income
sources beyond the current copyright regimes.» (Lovink 2007: xiii)
45 John Philip Sousa was an American composer and critic of early copyright law.
46 Christopher Pinney «Photography and the transformation of culture», public lec-
ture; University of Technology; September 17, 2008.
47 The artist and theorist Andrea Fraser says, «I would argue that the corporatisa-
tion of museums in the United States was first presaged and then proceeded hand
in hand with the professionalization of art institutions and their curators and ad-
ministrators. Ironically, I believe that both have their roots in public funding.»
(Fraser 2006: 91) In her discussion of the corporatized museum Nina Möntmann
writes, «The problem today is that politicians and sponsors still work to a large ex-
tent with a homogenous, populist concept of public, and institutions are entrusted
with a similar brief by those who finance them … visitors are seen as global con-
sumers.» (Möntmann 2006: 9)
48 «Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copy-
right law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of
a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified
versions.» Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft [accessed July 2009].
49 With the shift into «remix» culture, the relationship between artist’s work and
notions of publics is complicated through network culture’s modus operandi of
copying – a mode that is seen as a threat by corporations and industries that con-
trol copyright. See Lessig’s analysis in Remix, for a lucid explanation of what is at
105
stake if corporations are allowed to control ownership of culture; significantly Les-
sig sees the current activity of copying as the equivalent to an earlier era’s quoting.
50 See «Introduction» in Hinderliter, B. & Kaizen, W. et al. (2011) Communities of
sense: rethinking aesthetics and politics.
Chapter 2: Network Culture and Mediated Public Space
51 In their book The experience economy: work is theatre & every business a stage
(1999) B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, posit a new economic model for
our current moment that they call «experience economy.» In this model, econom-
ic value no longer resides in the commodity or goods or services but is placed in-
stead on engaging customers in a personal way through «staging events.» This
economic figuring of «experience» is, of course, quite different from Dewey’s idea
of experience.
52 This is the argument that Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker propose in their
book, The exploit: a theory of networks (2007).
53 «According to [Manuel] Castells, the network has become so pervasive that what he
calls the ‹space of flows› has all but replaced the primacy of the ‹space of places.›»
(Cited in Gordon 2008: n. p.)
54 An altogether different focus for some artists working in public space is that of
«hertzian space.» The term, «hertzian space» was coined by industrial designer An-
thony Dunne (2005) to describe the invisible electro-magnetic radiation that is
emitted from electronic devices, such as mobile phones, etc. This can also effect so-
cial behaviour and the social production of space as people in public space move
around looking for «hotspots.» For instance, in Michelle Teran’s project Life a us-
er’s manual the invisible radio waves transmitting surveillance images are made
visible through Teran’s walking the city streets with a device that translates the
waves into video images, which can be seen on the monitor she brings with her on
the walks. However, in this instance I am using the term «mediated» to refer to
visible devices, rather than their invisible traces. See Maria Miranda, «Uncertain
spaces: artists’ exploration of new socialities in mediated public space» in Scan,
vol. 4, no. 3, 2007.
55 Surveillance is a complex system of devices and apparatuses maintained to be
watched, to watch over and to monitor. My concern here, however, is with porta-
ble media devices, specifically recording devices – whether mobile phones or dig-
ital video cameras – carried by people into public spaces, which is quite different
from that of surveillance, commonly understood as a monitoring system, from the
French «to watch over.» Portable media devices carried and used by the general
public also occupy a different place to traditional broadcast media –including the
screen culture that McQuire writes about – as they are specific to individuals and
can be networked, thus creating what I am referring to as «mediated» public space.
56 One example of this shift in attitude towards media representation is the phenom-
106
enon of camgirls, «women who broadcast themselves over the Web for the gener-
al public,» chronicled and analysed by Theresa Senft (2008) in Camgirls: celebri-
ty and community in the age of social networks.
57 The example that McGrath cites is «hearing someone say to me, ‹I dare you to
kick that policeman,› I understand that a challenge has been issued – even if it is
a challenge that I choose to ignore …» (McGrath 51)
58 See also, for example, Perez, C. (2002) Technological revolutions and financial
capital: the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages and Castells M. (2000) The rise
of the network society, the information age: economy, society and culture.
59 Varnelis’s «network chart» is available online: http://varnelis.net/old_network_
culture_chart [accessed May 2007]
60 As I neared the end of this book Mark Amerika’s project remixthebook was pub-
lished. It is an exemplary remix project that simultaneously performs remix as it
theorizes remix. It was published in 2011 as both a book and a website. The web-
site features the work of artists invited to remix selected pieces from Amerika’s
texts. Through Amerika’s expanded strategy of working across print and different
medias the project also becomes unsitely. See: http://www.remixthebook.com/
[accessed December 2011]
61 With the bulky computer work-station the relation between screen and user is al-
ways that of a body positioned in front of the screen as if looking through a win-
dow. This position creates an immobile, almost motionless body facing forward
and leaning into the screen.
62 I use the term «publicity» here to mean a sense of public-ness, rather than the
more commonly understood usage of advertising. This is in line with current art
discourse. See Kwon (2002b) and Sheikh (2004).
63 See more on the Tsk Tsk Tsk project here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsk_
Tsk_Tsk and Philip Brophy’s website: http://www.philipbrophy.com/
64 Bilateral Kellelrberrin website, http://kellerberrin.com/
65 See Part 2 of this book. Lucas Ihlein in Conversation with Teri Hoskin.
66 In Participatory media: visual culture in real time, Palmer argues that the differ-
ent «real time» arts have, over the course of a century or at least since the advent
of photography in 1839, progressively shifted the position of the spectator and
viewer from «visual contemplation to various forms of participation.» (Palmer
2004: 169)
67 This is a term that Thierry du Duve uses in Duchamp after Kant to refer to post-
sixties art. See also Sven Lütticken, Secret publicity (2005: 8).
68 One of the most celebrated being Rirkrit Tiranvanija’s Untitled (Still) where he
made Thai soup for the art-going public.
69 In a post (2008) to the Empyre list Richard Rinehart deliberately conflates the
terms «interactivity» and «participation» and suggests that computer «interac-
tivity» – like the flawed concept of participation in general «are actually just rel-
107
ative historical terms for speaking about the same egalitarian aspirations … our
shared aspirations about democracy simplistically rendered as the most interac-
tive (read: participatory) form of government.» (Rinehart 2008: n. p.) And Rine-
hart notes in relation to participation that «more often than not it seemed sim-
plistic and worse, misleading, with numerous examples of the viewer/ voter being
granted the illusion of agency in both art and politics.» (Rinehart 2008: n. p.)
70 Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda: Talking About the Weather (2006 – 2009).
See: http://www.out-of-sync.com/weatherwebsite2012/index.html. The work was
enacted across sites and media, including breath collecting events on Second Life.
See: http://www.out-of-sync.com/sl.html
71 The project was sparked by Tim Flannery’s writings on the urgent need to address
climate change, as Flannery says, «every breath you take makes you part of a dy-
namic system called the atmosphere, or the aerial ocean.» (Flannery 2005)
72 «One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid pas-
sage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful constructive behavior and
awareness of psychogeographcial effects, and are thus quite different from the
classic notions of journey or stroll.» (Debord 2006: 62)
73 According to Miwon Kwon «publicity» emphasises modes of communication, «dif-
ferent models of communicative practices or forms of public address (rather than
genres of art).» (Kwon 2002: n. p.)
Chapter 3: Site of Unsitely
74 The project can still be viewed online: http://www.neverbeentotehran.com/
75 «To this day, Haacke has continued to scrutinize contemporary political issues –
attacking companies like Philip Morris, Mobil Oil, Mercedes-Benz and Deutsche
Bank among others – and thus the art world’s Achilles’ heel: its complete depen-
dency on big money.» (Frieze, issue 106: April 2007)
76 George J. Leonard argues in Into the light of things that the 1960s conceptual art
movement was the culmination of two hundred years of attacks on the «art ob-
ject» as an «elite» and «superior» object separate and superior to the mere com-
mon things of everyday life. Leonard reads Wordsworth and Carlyle against John
Cage to advance his thesis that what changed at the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, and culminated in 1960s America, was more to do with religion and the loss
of god than about art. Beginning with Wordsworth nature became the source of
inspiration – turning away from Classical and Renaissance ideals of beauty. And
walking, in particular in nature – although not exclusively – was an intrinsic part
of this overall philosophy.
77 Murray notes, «It is no coincidence that the accurate translation of the Chinese
phrase, ‹action art,› is ‹action recording.›»
78 Tim Murray’s comment on Empyre list; November 20, 2007. Available:
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2007-November/000135.
108
html [accessed November 2008].
79 In 1967 Smithson published a text in Artforum called «A tour of the monuments
of Passaic, New Jersey.» This text described a walking tour of Passaic that Smith-
son took one Saturday in September as he returned to the place of his childhood,
a place that was in the midst of redevelopment and the mammoth task of high-
way construction. «Passaic seems full of ‹holes›… and those holes in a sense are
the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an
abandoned set of futures.» (72). Smithson understood these gouged and ruined
landscapes as not only worthy of our attention, but as places that one needs to ac-
cept – they are part of our «natural» history. He thought of them in terms of a di-
alectical relationship between nature and human intervention; on a par with the
destructive powers of volcanoes and earthquakes. His black and white instamatic
photos show each monument. «The great pipe monument» for instance is an in-
dustrial pipe lying across the rivers edge surrounded by industrial debris. Smith-
son describes these pieces of construction equipment lying idle as «mechanical di-
nosaurs stripped of their skin.» His «monuments» were in fact engineering feats
and engineering machinery, the true «masterworks» of our time. Into this prosaic
«suburban odyssey» Smithson injects imaginary links with other geological times,
other artistic movements like romantic landscape painting, calling Passaic «ruins
in reverse» or «the opposite of the «romantic ruin» because the buildings don’t fall
into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.» (72)
His vision lifts Passaic out of the morass of its time and into the greater movement
of geological and historical Time. The last monument Smithson visits on this wry
travelogue of «ruins in reverse» is the sand box «or a model desert.» Smithson’s
«mythopoetic» language makes the sandbox a metaphor for the vastness of geo-
logical time, for the time when all will be transformed into dust. «Under the dead
light of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration
and forgetfulness.»
80 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate) by MTAA. A 2004 commission
of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (a.k.a. Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web
site. See: http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/index.php
81 According to Norie Neumark, «Monica Ross’s concept of untimeliness provides a
useful way to approach documentation, memory and performance, that resonates
with the uncanny and performativity. Ross says ‹untimely› points to the way per-
formance and its documentation trouble our sense of both time and of the ‹orig-
inal.› She argues that performance is in fact always/already untimely because of
its uncanniness, ephemerality and premonition of absence.» (Neumark 2012)
82 See Tehching Hsieh’s website for documentation of all the «one-year performanc-
es.» http://tehchinghsieh.com/
83 See: http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/
84 Global /  local tensions are not new. In a great story recounting the roots of mod-
109
ernism, retold by Sean Cubitt, the tension between centre and periphery looms
into view – the view from here. In his essay «From internationalism to transna-
tions: networked art and activism,» Cubitt realigns the commonly understood re-
lationship between centre and periphery – one that assumes the centre to be the
site of origin. Instead he gives a fascinating description of the roots of modernism
pointing directly to the work of South American artists and theorists working at
the turn of the last century on the «radical» concept of «seeking roots in the an-
cient world … founded not on Greece, but the indigenous histories of Latin Amer-
ica.» ( Cubitt 2005: 425 – 426) Cubitt suggests it was this rethinking that led Pi-
casso to spend many hours studying the arts of Africa and the Pacific islanders in
the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, thus producing the canonical modernist painting
Demoiselles d’Avignon. Cubitt concludes, «Civilization may be the triumph of the
centripetal, but art and invention have always surged from the periphery.» (Cu​bitt
2005: 425) For artists living at the periphery of the art centres, geographical loca-
tion is still an important consideration.
85 Artist presentation by Brandon LaBelle, CMAI at UTS; October 30, 2008.
86 To emphasise this point, as I was nearing the end of writing this book another
book appeared titled Net Locality: why location matters in a networked world
written by Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva. They propose a new theory
of «net locality» and argue the importance of location for not only how we use the
web today but how «the web is all around us.» According to Gordon and de Souza
e Silva «Location matters, but our locations are now embedded within networked
connections. And the social interactions motivated by those connections are part
of our locations.» (Gordon & de Souza e Silva 2011: 79)
87 See for example Castells M. The rise of the network society: economy, society and
culture. Vol. 1. The information age (2000) and The internet galaxy (2001); Ha-
buchi (2005) «Accelerating reflexivity»; Matsuda (2005) «Mobile communica-
tion and selective sociality.»
88 Taiwan is a case in point. According to the Taiwanese artist Hogi Tsai, the inter-
net in Taiwan, though not directly restricted by China’s infamous firewall, is indi-
rectly effected due to their shared language. (In conversation with the artist)
89 Very few Australian media artists are listed in these survey accounts. For a crit-
ical account of Australian new media art and artists during the same period see
Tofts 2005b.
90 In Surface tension Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle write, «the centrality of the
term ‹site› functions more as a fulcrum across which the desire to make is coun-
tered with the desire to receive.» (Ehrlich & LaBelle 2003: 11)
Chapter 4: Present in the Past
91 For instance, Yoko Ono’s Lighting Piece, «Light a match and watch it till it goes
out» from 1955, and later in the 1960s Alison Knowles and Philip Corner per-
110

formed Identical Lunch at the diner Riss Food on Eighth Avenue, NYC.
92 Fluxus artists insisted on being called a network rather than a movement.
93 McDonough, T. (2004) «Situationist space» in Guy Debord and the Situationist
International texts and documents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
94 In 1957 Guy Debord and Asger Jorn produced the now iconic map, The Naked
City. This «map» was détourned from the classic map Plan de Paris. The title
was détourned from the eponymous American crime film from 1948, directed by
Jules Dassin. It shows the results of a psychogeographic walk through Paris where
specific places remain – places still not developed and ruined by urban redevelop-
ment – while the rest is blank and filled with red arrows indicating directions and
passage ways.
95 See project  website:  http://techformance.blogspot.com/2009/02/michelle-teran
buscando-al-sr-goodbar.html
96 Michelle Teran: Ubermatic. See: http://www.ubermatic.org/?p=225
97 A description of Minchinton’s project can be found at New Internationalist Mag-
azine. See: http://www.newint.org/features/2004/02/01/born-white/
112
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128

In Conversation with Artists:

An Introduction

The following section of artists and writers in conversation can be read as

a sort of remix or perhaps a poetic translation or poetic conjecture of the
notions of unsitely and uncertain. Artists took hold of these concepts and
made them their own or reshaped them to speak about their own practices
and their own understanding.
It’s important to mention that the contributors were invited to con-
tribute without in-depth knowledge of what exactly I meant by unsitely.
My invitation included a brief outline of the salient points and important
ideas, like unsitely. But it was not an exhaustive explanation at all. I chose
artists who I thought were already making work that could be considered
in some ways as unsitely. They are works that could be placed underneath
this umbrella term within a field of work that is emerging all around us.
This field of work is broad and the work discussed varies widely, with some
work existing on the outer edges of what I would consider unsitely, while
other work seems to exemplify my points with an alarming clarity.
However the art projects or artists practices are not meant to prove
the existence of unsitely aesthetics in any way. Rather it was as if I had
thrown an unsitely stone into the waters to see what sort of ripples would
break the surface. For me it was an experiment of sorts, somewhat risky –
wondering what people would make of these ideas. In the end I think you
will agree the experiment has generated lots of exciting thoughts and lines
of flight as artists engaged in all sorts of ways and with great generosity to
the ideas. The results are a rich encounter with a wide range of contempo-
rary practices that share this uncertain ground.
130 131

in conversation: kanarinka with kanarinka is an artist, software developer and

educator. She is a co-founder of The Institute for
Natalie Loveless Infinitely Small Things whose recent body of work
focuses on the contemporary landscape of
Homeland Insecurity: the ways in which fear has
permeated the nation’s public spaces and
the implications that has for our professed ideals of
democracy, freedom of expression and equality.
kanarinka is currently a Research Assistant in
the Civic Media program at the MIT Media Lab.
She lives and works in Waltham, Massachusetts.
See: http://www.kanarinka.com/
Natalie Loveless is an assistant professor of
contemporary art and theory in the department of art
and design of the University of Alberta (Canada).
Her current academic, artistic, and curatorial
projects share a commitment to feminist
embodiment, and material entanglement in
the everyday. Issues addressed in previous work
include the politics of representational practice and
«participatory dissent» as a reframing of
pedagogical discourse.
See: http://www.loveless.ca/

In this email conversation kanarinka, a.k.a. Catherine D’Ignazio talks to Natalie

Loveless about her many diverse and multi-sited projects from Funerals for a
Moment (2004) to her most recent project → The Border Crossed Us (2011). → See: http://www.ikatun.org/kanarinka/the-border-crossed-us/

< natalie loveless  > To start, can you speak a little bit about the role of the In-
ternet in your work? Do you consider it a medium, a site, or both, and why?
How do you conceive of the relation between the online and offline aspects of
your pieces (including both performance and exhibition aspects)?

< kanarinka  > The Internet has figured in many of my projects from the early
2000’s up till now. I guess I would say that I consider the Internet both a me-
dium and a site, though I’m more inclined towards it being a site for staging
various kinds of encounters. More and more these days our experiences of
physical places are overlaid with our networkedness – i.e. the way that we
are connected via email, text and phone wherever we are. So I’m buying gro-
ceries but I’m also chatting with a friend in another state. I’m at a concert but
I’m uploading the video to my YouTube channel or streaming a live podcast
to an online audience. These spaces can’t be neatly separated into catego-
ries like «real» and «virtual» or «physical» and «cyber.» There’s also a way The Institute for Infinitely Small Things:
in which constant networkedness dissolves the distinctions between original The Border Crossed Us. Fence, sound installation,
and copy, act and document, material and immaterial. What I mean by this is website and public programs, 2011.
Photo: John Sobol.
that the Internet can serve a much different purpose than simply document-
ing something that happens in «real life» for the Internet is already a site for
the unfolding of real life.

< natalie  > I wonder about your use of the word «dissolve.» Do you really mean
dissolve – that is, a loss of distinction between elements – or do you mean
that these distinctions and spaces, if taken seriously, start to fold into each
other in multiple ways that cannot a priori be scripted or predicted?

< kanarinka  > Yes – I mean the latter. It’s because of this kind of multiplicity
that many of my projects are conceived with multiple sites (and audiences) in
mind for the work. For example, in the project Funerals for a Moment (2004) I
invited people on the Internet mailing lists to submit their lost or inconsequen-
tial moments to the project’s website. They were asked to detail where and
132 133

when the moment happened in New York City. Then, as part of the Conflux
festival, I led a small parade of mourners around to the sites of these passed
moments and performed funerals for the moments. Finally, I compiled all of
the moments into a book. Those who experienced the project may have sub-
mitted a moment online, may have participated in a funeral, may have seen
the procession go by, may have read the book or may have simply looked at
the project website after the fact.

< natalie  > Would you say that, in this context, what emerges is a kind of re-
sponsiveness between these multiple sites? I’d love to hear you say a little
more about how the different aspects of a piece like this fold into each other,
and how that multiplicity is central to the work.

< kanarinka  > Absolutely. A more recent project, The Border Crossed Us (2011),
was a sculptural intervention that erected a photo mural replica of the US-
Mexico fence on the UMass Amherst campus across a busy pedestrian walk-
way. The project recreated the part of the international boundary fence in
southern Arizona that was erected in 2008 across the ancestral homelands
of the Tohono O’odham indigenous people. The situation along that border is
outrageous – many O’odham are regularly detained and arrested just going
about their daily lives. For the project, I wanted to create a parallel situation
of community division that could be experienced by students on the North-
South boundary of their territory. So the project was the fence but it was also
bringing a delegation of Tohono O’odham to campus to speak about their ex-
periences, and it was also partnering with the Native Studies program on pro-
ducing a powwow, and it was also working with faculty to design writing as-
signments for students in their classes, and it was also re-purposing a map
kiosk to ask the students a different «border question» each day to which they
could respond by texting their answers to a website, and it was also the web-
site which served as a site of conversation and documentation of the multi-
ple ways the idea wove its way through the UMass community. In this case,
the website was a kind of archive of the multiple performances of the project
which took place in different locations and at different times.

< natalie  > I am really interested in the way your multiple sites almost chiasti-
cally fold into each other, articulating a complex and rich form of «artistic re- The Institute for Infinitely Small Things: The Border Crossed Us, 2011.
search.»
You started off by saying that «the Internet is already a site for the unfolding of
real life.» In this respect, we can think of the Internet as a kind of polis –
a public space. But, as you point to, it is never simply a «public» space dis-
tinct from the intimacy of private space – if that distinction ever really held giv-
en the dense materiality of everyday life. Do you see a distinction between
work that happens in and with public space and public art? Do you consider
Funerals for a Moment or The Border Crossed Us – pieces that unfold in pub-
lic space and with participation from the public – as pieces of public art? Or,
would you consider the pieces to be «social practice» pieces instead of
134 135
«public art» pieces? If so, what is the distinction for you and why does the dis-
tinction matter?
< kanarinka  > In regards to → The Border Crossed Us, it was very important
to me that the piece not just be, to use the public arty term, «plop art.» Home-
land Security already did plop art in the Arizona desert. I didn’t want to just
abstract the fence out of its original geographic context in southern Arizona
and plunk it down in a new location. It felt important to not only build a fence
but to build a context, community and relationships around that structure so
that the project would have a chance of having greater affective impact. There
was also an aspect of storytelling to the project – how to bring a geography
and people that are far away into the context of everyday life for college stu-
dents in New England. And the story is not my story – it’s the story of the peo-
ple who live with and experience the fence everyday – the Tohono O’odham
– so it was essential that we craft a way for them to come and speak on be-
half of the fence. And, being in a college environment, it also felt important to
work with faculty to design opportunities for student reflection. I guess for me
it is not only about the design of an object but also about engineering the cir-
cuits of reception and reflection that make that object really mean something
for others. In this sense, I believe you could call the work «social practice» of
a sort although it’s different from some of the typical examples like artist-as-
meal-provider or artist-as-foot-massager. (Just kidding, I don’t know foot mas-
saging art projects but I’m interested in finding some.) Social practice occa-
sionally feels to me like Duchamp for the experience economy – i.e. found
experiences instead of found objects which are then made into «art» because
of being put into an art context. But those experiences happen all the time in
more meaningful, committed and sustainable ways outside the art context so
I sort of don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve been calling work like The Border
Crossed Us «temporary public art» because it happens outside, relates aes-
thetically to other works of public art (Christo, Serra) and it is for a particular
community. Also, in this case, it had to pass through the campus’ public art
committee, which was a real learning experience for me. But in regards to the
terminology, I guess I would say I’m wary of both of those terms and use them
when politically expedient depending on the audience.
< natalie  > I love the way you put the following: «it is not only about the design
of an object but also about engineering the circuits of reception and reflection
that make that object really mean something for others.» That is so beautiful-
ly put. What really strikes me is the political thrust, not only of this statement,
but linked to this, of the kind of multiplicity – multidiciplinarity and multilocali-
ty and multimodality – that you invoke in something like The Border Crossed
Us. While you insist on the multidisciplinarity and multimodality of The Bor-
der Crossed Us as a central aspect of the piece, is it also central to its poli-
tics? (I am thinking here about the extraordinary work feminist political theo-
rist Chantal Mouffe has done with the notion of the political – both for radical
democracy and in relation to contemporary art.) Can you say more about the
role of politics in your work and how you understand and work with the polit-
ical? I also am curious about how important collaboration is to your practice,
and whether your understanding of politics informs how you think about and
work in collaborations?
< kanarinka  > Regarding the political, multimodal and multivocal – we have in-
herited a tradition of individual authorship in regards to works of art which I
feel is very connected to our conception of the individual, rational actor in rep-
resentative democracy. I feel (and by feel I mean in my body not my head)
this idea of individual authorship to be deeply and intrinsically untrue. I even
find the idea that we are individuals to be extremely suspect as I do not feel
myself so separated from the things around and inside me. So I author things
collaboratively as The Institute for Infinitely Small Things and try to remain as
open as possible to the different manifestations, tanglings and directions a
project can take in its unfolding. I have this idea of doing a project that would
try to imagine how we would be and relate to each other if we took joinedness
as our first operating principle instead of individuality. If anyone is reading this
and wants to think about that together, please get in touch.
< natalie  > I think this is an extremely important way to think about things, and
it is one that, in my work, I approach through the artist and psychoanalyst
Bracha Ettinger’s notion of a «matrixial ethics.» A matrixial ethics starts with
relation – a kind of responsive enmeshment – and only works with anything
approaching individuation from that starting point. This primary relation is
something that feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway regularly in-
vokes when she says (drawing on the work of Karen Barad) that relation is the
smallest unit. But I digress!
Or maybe I don’t … I want to take you back to one of your earliest curatori-
al projects: info@blah at the Mills Gallery in Boston, MA. I remember the cen-
tral role of «net art» in the exhibition. You weren’t, at the time, talking overtly
about relationality. Instead, the buzz-word was «interactivity.» Can you speak
to the role of technology and interactivity, two central concerns for «net art,»
in your work over the years? How are these concerns related to your use of
participation and the performing relational body? In other words, can you say
more about your move from «interaction» to «relation» as different modes, or
understandings, of participation?
< kanarinka  > It’s funny because my first forays into art production were
marked by an intense desire to create «interactive» work where I imagined
an oppressed viewer being unshackled from their looking-at-art chains and
able to finally engage in a real, authentic way with an artwork. Looking back, I
cringe a little bit at these fantasies of oppression and liberation that, to some
extent, still dog digital-tech-interactive art and prevent it from (in my opinion)
being able to fully engage with subjects other than the technology itself. That
said, I think that «net art» has come a long way from the early days of trying
to position itself as some kind of anti-gallery avant-garde movement. But I am
136 137

still very skeptical and wary about liberation fantasies in relation to technolog-
ical developments. Facebook probably won’t save the world and the «Twitter
Revolution» is a clever branding scheme. We are living in the age of partici-
pation in which media companies no longer need to create content to gener-
ate revenue – no need for actors, journalists or writers – the end-users can
create the content for free, everyone is a producer, everyone is liberated, we
therefore have more democracy. Or so goes a particular narrative of participa-
tion. By that reasoning, Jersey Shore (the reality TV show) must be our most
profound democratic action to date. And though I do actually enjoy watching
Jersey Shore, I don’t see many parallels between it and democracy. Maybe
on MTV’s website where you get to vote on Snooki’s outfit? But now I’m di-
gressing. I think technological developments have played a major role in shift-
ing the way we work, play, and relate to each other in our everyday lives. In
the early days of the Internet, the body was in «meat-space.» But over the
past ten years I think we’ve come to terms with the fact that our materiality, our
bodies, are still (even more so) the central players in these networked-physi-
cal spaces that we inhabit.
kanarinka: It takes 154,000
< natalie  > Yes! This is what N. Katherine Hayles insists on in How We Be- breaths to evacuate Boston.
came Posthuman, but it, sadly, still needs to be reasserted all too often. In Running performances, website,
gallery installation, 2007 – 2008.
any case, your invocation of «meat-space/virtual-posthuman-disembodied-
Photo: David Raymond.
space» leads into some other questions I have for you: could you say a bit
about the role of «site» in your work? Do you consider your work to be site-
specific, context-specific, situation-specific or some other such designation?
And what is the role of the studio in your work – do you have a studio? Or is
the traditional studio displaced or made obsolete by the needs of your prac-
tice? I am thinking, for example, of the → Corporate Commands piece or the →
piece that you did in your back alleyway …

< kanarinka  > You ask a lot of questions! I do have a studio but it’s a small
room in our home which also serves the purpose of family office, exercise
room, and guest bedroom. So mostly I have a desk and a wall to hang things
on but I realized that I can’t hang anything too nice because my son recent-
ly colored on one of my sketches for a collaborative drawing project called
Erase the Border. Lately I’ve been considering my runs as my studio. I have
two small children and the only time I have to think expansively is when I’m
running and not in front of a computer or networked device of some sort. So
I think my studio is time-based and situation-specific. Recently when my kid
fell asleep on a plane I think I had a studio, too. I was physically immobilized
because of the giant baby in my lap but I was able to stare at the ceiling and
imagine some really interesting solutions to creative challenges I was facing
for particular projects. The Institute for Infinitely Small
It was during the alley project that you speak of, Public Alley 818, that I real- Things: Corporate Commands.
ized I could not be a traditional studio artist. I had just started an MFA program Performances in public space,
2004 – Present.
and they kept talking about being «in the studio» and I tried very hard for the
Photo: James Manning.
first couple months but ended up feeling the need to insinuate myself into a
138 139

larger context. So I put out a call on the Internet for actions I could do in Pub-
lic Alley 818 which ran right behind my apartment. People submitted instruc-
tions online and I carried them out – everything from planting flowers to read-
ing aloud to impossible Fluxus-like ideas.
In regards to the terminology, I think my projects are more context- and situa-
tion-specific than site-specific as they try to take into account not only the par-
ticular properties of a place but also the actions, relationships (emotional and
spatial), and other more performative aspects of a site.

< natalie  > OK, here is my last (multi-pronged) question! This framework, your
mode of approach, seems fundamentally feminist to me. Can you speak spe-
cifically to the role of aesthetics in your work? Are you informed by a femi-
nist conceptual aesthetic? More generally, how do you make formal/aesthetic
choices and what informs them? Do you see your work within a specific lin-
eage and thereby draw on certain aesthetic histories?

< kanarinka  > Speaking of aesthetics, my inspiration comes from things that

are, in a way, everyday and minor – in this respect I am indebted to a history
of feminist thought. And so I think the aesthetic choices often flow from those
things as well and are either designed to blend into the everyday flow of life or
to disrupt it in a calculated way. And, particularly with The Institute for Infinite-
ly Small Things, I try to treat most endeavors as a kind of collaborative exper-
iment so I try not to overly aestheticize or control them. So that is not to say
that aesthetics are not important because they are extremely important, only
that projects outside the gallery often unfold in unpredictable ways and it is
important to be open to that and not fixate on scripting some kind of perfect-
ly aestheticized social intervention whose meaning and value you have deter-
mined in advance.
And speaking of lineage – Fluxus for humor and white lab coats. Dada for ir-
reverent intervention along the outsides of things. And feminist performance
art for prioritizing the specific body in specific space (there still is not enough
bodily fluid in contemporary art). The Situationists and De Certeau for the very
powerful idea that by moving one’s everyday body in everyday space you
might change the world. A kind of poetics of revolution but micro-revolution,
resistance in the affective register. I still find solace in this idea and it’s where kanarinka: Exit Strategy. 2 :12 looping video installation at he ICA Boston, 2008.
the name The Institute for Infinitely Small Things came from. Video: Mike Hall.
140 141

in conversation: Igor Štromajer with Igor Štromajer is an intimate mobile

Norie Neumark
As a sound artist who works with voice in my own work and research, I be-
came interested in Igor Štromajer’s singing html code in his Oppera Internet-
tikka projects. I continued to follow Igor’s work and found his guerilla hactivist
media art projects, with their play on and off the Internet, ever surprising and
intriguing. Following is an edited version of our email conversation during May
2011 between Igor in Slovenia and Germany and me in Australia. To begin, I
asked Igor to describe his practice.
communicator, a multimedia artist. His projects
research intimate, low-tech, mobile, guerrilla,
emotional communication strategies and
para-artistic tactics. Since 1989, Igor has shown
his artistic work at more than a 120 exhibitions in
60 countries and received a number of international
awards. His projects form part of the permanent
collections of the prestigious art institutions, among
them the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the MNCA
Reina Sofía in Madrid; Moderna galerija in Ljubljana;
Computerfinearts in New York; Maribor Art Gallery.
Igor lectures as a guest artist at universities and
contemporary art institutes worldwide.
See: http://www.intima.org/
Norie Neumark is a sound/radio and media
artist. Norie works particularly with voice, both in
her media art work and her academic research.
In her recent co-edited volume (Norie Neumark,
Ross Gibson, and Theo Van Leeuwen) Voice: Vocal
Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (The MIT Press,
2010) she explores theoretical approaches to voice
and the performativity of voice in media art. She also
co-edited and wrote the introduction to
At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on
the Internet (The MIT Press, 2005). Norie is
Professor and Chair in Media and Director of
the Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University,
Melbourne, Australia.
See: http://www.out-of-sync.com/

< igor štromajer  > I’m a media artist, working on the Internet since 1996. I came
to the Internet from theater, but soon I discovered that theater as a medium is
not intimate, not personal and not direct enough to express my ideas. The In-
ternet – in the last decade of the previous century, was completely different, it
was the most intimate medium ever created. And its advantage was also that
originally it was not made for art. But art has this wonderful ability to test dif-
ferent media and to see if it can function inside them or not. That goes, let’s
say, also for television, radio, even fax (fax art), etc.
First, I started to do net artworks, a kind of classical net artworks, where I took
the Internet as an independent, self-dependent, self-supporting and autono-
mous medium. From 1996 to 2007 I created 34 smaller and bigger net art-
works. In parallel, around the year 2000, I started developing and researching
other fields of media art, like live Internet performance, live streaming, guer-
rilla actions, interactive installations, mobile phone and GPS (Global Position-
ing System) art, and others.
All the time I was, and I still am, fascinated with the code, with computer lan-
guage. As Alexander Galloway wrote, «code is the only language that is ex-
ecutable.» It does what it says. There are no metaphors, no second or third
levels of the language, it’s a straight, sharp and clear language. For me, the
fact that such a language exists, was fascinating, so I made many projects fo-
cusing on the beauty of that executable language. In the beginning, I was do-
ing more performative action with the code itself, like singing it (Oppera Inter-
nettikka) and dancing it (Ballettikka Internettikka). Lately I’m more interested
in empty practices, in something I call «omissive art.» Something similar al-
ready exists in criminal law: «omissive(?) act»: the perpetrator is punished for
omission if he should have prevented the occurrence of the prohibited conse-
quence, but failed to do so. So, you can be convicted by (actively) not doing
142 143
anything. In analogy, as an artist, you do something, an artwork, by not doing
it. Personally I believe that the most radical artwork an artist can do today, is
the one he does not do. NOT doing it (omitting) is in my understanding active,
a creative act. Therefore, I’m currently involved in the process of deleting my
net artworks, created in a period from 1996 to 2007, because I believe that if
one can create art, if one can write the code and program it, one can also de-
lete art, deprogram it.
< norie neumark  > There is so much to discuss here! Can we start with the
question of intimacy? I’m really interested in the idea of the Internet as an in-
timate medium. Can you say a bit more?
< igor  > In theater, «they,» people who create a performance, don’t really care
about you as an individual, about your individual desires, traumas, wishes,
etc, they just understand the audience as one unit, as one body. They per-
form the very same play, no matter if you sit in row 7, seat 14, or if I do. But
we – you and I – are different, aren’t we? They don’t care. Even at the end of
the performance they talk like: «the audience was good (or bad) today.» The
audience, as one, uniform unit.
When I discovered the Internet in 1995, it was completely different. It allowed
me to have a one-to-one communication, an intimate artistic communication. I
knew there’s a real individual on the other side. It doesn’t matter if that partic-
ular individual took another (online) identity. Even more: taking another iden-
tity enabled him/her to be more honest, more intimate, direct. Paradoxically,
hiding behind a virtual identity he/she was able to be more «himself/herself,»
to be more «real.» In fact, I didn’t understand virtual identity as something vir-
tual at all, for me this was the real identity for the duration of our communica-
tion (live online performance or classical net art project).
In my «classical» net artworks, I was interested in only one receiver/recipient
of the particular net art piece at the time. I thought, there is always an individ-
ualized recipient sitting in front of the computer, on the other side, and she/he
is committed to deal with the particular net artwork in a very intimate/person-
al way, with all her/his individual frustrations and pain that are positioning her/
him inside the displaced structure of the net art piece. And also, being in front
of the computer, one is always communicating with herself/himself, so she/he
is performing a kind of self-communication, masturbation based on the artis-
tic impulses that are coming out of the project. I called it an «intimate artistic
communication.»
The basic substance of my classical net artworks is the individuality, and the
keywords for all my activities were seclusion and ascetics. These imply inti-
macy. That’s why – back in the previous millennium – I was convinced that net
art is the most intimate art ever. And the most dangerous one.
Being faced with the computer is like going to a very deep process of the most
intensive self-communication. It is a kind of art that puts you as a user/partic-
ipant into the position of a co-creator (I mean; co-author): you have to be ac-
tive to survive in this kind of digital environment. On the other hand – being
inactive results in a very dangerous situation: you become impotent and not
able to control your co-ordinates inside the net art project. Then it becomes
dangerous.
And, emotions are not the privilege of living beings, nor of the art only. Even
businessmen, supermarkets, political propaganda, cellular phones, satellite
technology, multinational corporations, medical equipment and stock ex-
changes could be and are full of emotions. That is how I understand intimacy.
< norie  > Can we go back to when you said that you no longer see the Internet
«as an independent, self-dependent, self-supporting and autonomous medi-
um»? This sounds like you’re saying something major has changed here for
you – is that so?
< igor  > Around the year 2000, when the Internet became very popular, the me-
dium changed enormously. It started to become a very commercialized, closed
place, very fancy, MTV-like. (Flash became very popular, corporations start-
ed to have websites, etc.) That fact slowly moved me away from the Internet
as an autonomous medium. And net art in general started dying, worldwide.
Nowadays we are in a completely different situation, in something called 2.0,
whatever that means. That’s why I believe it’s time to reverse the process: de-
leting net (online) art instead of creating it.
< norie  > OK, so returning to your Expunction project … My response to this
is deeply ambivalent. In one way it’s a dizzyingly radical gesture. In another
way it is frustrating and upsetting that works I enjoy so much may disappear
from the archives – which is actually the only place I experienced them since
I missed the live performances. It certainly takes the idea of the ephermer-
ality of performance to a whole new and disturbing dimension! Is that part of
where you are coming from?
< igor > Yes, in a way. But perhaps we have to understand art as a process.
Something which goes up and down, left and right and in multiple directions.
Austrian contemporary dance/performance collective Zweite liga fur Kunst
und Kultur (Second division for Art and Culture) says in their manifesto: «wer
ein werk für fertig erklärt, ist ein faschist» (the one who declares an artwork
as finished, is a fascist). I also believe that a work of art can never be finished,
because – at the «end» – it can also be reverted (reversed?) in its process:
deleted, deprogrammed, put back to basic elements, fragments, etc. The ep-
hermerality of performance, exactly. And in some way – art has to be disturb-
ing, not only politically disturbing, but intimately as well.
Heath Bunting, a well known British net artist, says: «As technology moves
forward  … all my work is falling apart … I’d like to move forward as well […]»
And Mark Amerika asked himself in his tweet: RT @markamerika Why do
men collect art? Aesthetics, competition, risk, prestige, mate attraction, lega-
cy, immortality. It’s an entrepreneur’s wet dream.
As for Expunction, I’m currently just a manual worker, deleting, zipping, ar-
144 145

chiving, documenting each project, one by one, day by day. I hope I’ll have a
clearer picture at the end of the process. I didn’t start it as an art project, but
as a simple act of deleting works, in public (we live in 2.0 Internet …). During
the course of deleting – today, the 17th of all 34 works was deleted, that’s ex-
actly 50% – this action/act also has other dimensions. Some say it’s art, and
it also has to be deleted at the end, some say I shouldn’t keep the zipped ar-
chives at all, others say I should handle my midlife crisis differently, etc. I don’t
know where it will take me, but I hope I’ll have a clear mind at the end, to be
able to write a concept (something I should have probably done at the begin-
ning, before I started the process). We’ll see, there’s no hurry.
Most of the deleted works are also zipped in a ZIP file, available for down-
load, if someone wants to. Of course, works, available as ZIPs, may not work
100% and properly anymore. Scripts, pop-ups and other specialities may or
may not function in new browsers. Some internal and especially external links
may be broken, changed, replaced or even dead. The Internet is a live organ-
ism, it changes constantly.
So, every day I delete one work, I replace it with a ZIP file, and I make an in-
dex file (index.html) with the same address (URL) of the deleted work, so that
all the incoming links (from many places on the Internet) still have the link to
the new page, where information about the deleted project is available (not
only screenshots, but also other information: number and structure of files,
collaborators, producer, where it was first presented, etc). Then I also link the
Flickr archive, I upload screenshots on Facebook as well, and I publish the
announcement on Twitter and on Facebook.
That’s my daily routine … And there’s so much to do, honestly! It takes me one Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman:
and half hours per day (per project) to do it. And it has already taken me days Ballettikka Internettikka Intermenttikka.
to make screenshots. I’ll miss it when it’s over. Dongdaemun / Tongdaemun, Seoul, Korea; 2008.

< norie  > Can you just clarify, please … the works you are expunging are your
net artworks, what you’ve called «autonomous net art» rather than works that
crossed various sites, working on and off the Internet – works that are locat-
ed in «other fields of media art, like live Internet performance, live streaming,
guerrilla actions, interactive installations, mobile phone and GPS (Global Po-
sitioning System) art, and others.»

< igor  > Yes, the works I was expunging were my net artworks, most of them
really function only when the user is online, because they have many exter-
nal links and they don’t function offline. Several external files, scripts and oth-
er Internet protocols are included into these works (now, after so many years,
many – perhaps most of them – are also dead). That goes for some early mo-
bile phone and GPS artworks as well. → → See: wPack (2004): http://www.expunction.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/07-wpack/
And you’re right: I did not expunge my other works, like live Internet perfor- See: gsm.art (1999): http://www.expunction.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/28-gsm/
mance, live streaming, guerrilla actions, interactive installations, and others, See: wap.sonnet – microbe.4/wap.art (2000): http://www.expunction.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/37-wapsonnet/
See: unfortunately, 180.north – gps art (2000): http://www.expunction.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/26gps/
because there was no need to do that.

< norie  > In a way it seems to me that you are «détourning» those non-perfor-
146 147

mative works into performative and unsitely works (sited on and off the Inter-
net) through your durational performances, on and off the Internet. I like that!
And this is interesting for unsitely aesthetics the way this process, your daily
performances of «deleting, zipping, archiving, documenting» take place both
on the Internet (with us as we watch the deletion and disappearance) and off
(wherever you are zipping and archiving and documentting) which fits in with
one of the central ideas of this book – the idea of the Internet «not as a medi-
um but as a site» – one site of a work that has other sites as well, actual sites –
for the artist and for those engaging with their work.
Do you want to comment here?

< igor > I certainly agree with you. 37 days is actually quite a long time for a
project. Most of the time I was at home or in my studio, some days I was
traveling, and I even spent 4 days in a tent, camping with my son and other
kids and parents from his kindergarten (one photo attached, deleting a proj-
ect in the tent, early in the morning, before the kids woke up). But the expung-
ing went on, day after day, no matter where I was and what I was doing. It was
like a machine. Or perhaps: I was a machine. Not thinking much, just doing the
work and following the procedure.
I couldn’t agree more with the idea of the Internet «not as a medium but as
a site.» In general, and especially by being bombarded with old/existing and
emerging social networks, with so many people actively participating and cre-
ating content, it surely isn’t a media anymore, but it is becoming a site, a place
to live and work. Let’s say it is becoming so real, so integrated, and not any-
more virtual, «second,» or displaced.

< norie  > Can we move on to talk next about a work that you won’t be expung-
ing (phew!) Ballettikka Internettikka: VolksNetBallet, one of my favorites of your
works. You described it on Intima.org as: → → People’s Internet Ballet furtively performed at – and secretly broadcast (as six
one-minute live streaming videos) from – the Basement Toilet in Volksbühne at
For me, the small space of a toilet is not only humorously transgressive but Rosa-Luxemburg Square in Berlin, Germany
Latitude: 52.31.36.84 N, Longitude: 13.24.43.02 E, Terrain Elevation: 41 m
also enhances and plays with the intimacy and an «intimacy effect» of the per-
on Sunday, July 9, 2006 at 9 pm GMT+1 (Berlin/Paris local time)
formance. It disturbs the conventional idea of a public/private split – not just
Štromajer and Zorman manipulated a semi-automatic flying cow and eleven robots
by making a private space public but also by doing it in a way that still, if dif- dancing an Internet ballet, MC Brane conducted an MP3 orchestra!
ferently, performs it as a (different) sort of «intimate» space.
This brings us back to what you said earlier about intimacy. The way you talk-
ed about intimacy conveys to me a strong sense not just of a someone, a
particular someone «on the other side» but something about that «other side» –
as a place, like you were in, but different, another place. That is, that individual,
those individuals are all located – rather than an «audience» in some amor-
phous «cyberspace.» This makes the Internet a very complex ‹public space› –
sited across numerous specific individual locations, for those individuals
engaging with the work. Has that been your sense of it? Can you say more?

< igor  > I’ll tell you a story. We (Brane Zorman and me) started our Ballettikka
Internettikka project in 2001. First in Ljubljana, Slovenia, our hometown. Then
148 149

we flew to Moscow and broke into the Bolshoi Theater (2002). Then Bergen,
Norway and in Ljubljana, on the Ljubljana beltway – motorway ring in 2003,
we also made an illegal performance. There was a live Internet broadcast in
every action. Then La Scala in Milan, Italy, an illegal break in, 2004. And Na-
tional Theater in Belgrade, Serbia, an illegal break in again, 2005. Why am I
naming all the actions? Because we got a lot of media attention, especially in
Europe and North America. Many art magazines were reporting about our ac-
tions, but all they were writing about – was: «They did it!», «They succeed-
ed!», «They were not caught!» etc. Nothing about my dancing, my choreogra-
phy, Brane’s music, nothing about the content, the «artistic» concept, videos,
music, dancing, etc. All they were mentioning (more or less) was that we sur-
vived. Well … So we had enough of this illegality, and we wanted to shift the
Ballettikka Internettikka project away from the illegality, somehow.
In the Bolshoi we chose the basement, because that was the only place in-
side the building where we could enter without being noticed. In La Scala we
chose their kitchen, not only because they had (in 2004) a very modern kitch-
en, but mostly because we said that the kitchen is a central place of their the-
ater. This is a place where the food is produced, the food, which is then later
spent on the stage during an artistic action. In Belgrade, we chose for the of-
fice of the artistic director of the national ballet, because we said that his desk
is a central place in the theater: this is where all the major artistic decisions
are taking place. And in Berlin, → Ballettikka Internettikka: VolksNetBallet, we → See: http://www.intima.org/bi/
chose the toilet. Why?
If we wanted to get rid of the illegality which was chasing us all around, we
needed a place where anyone can go legally – and that’s a toilet. Volksbüh-
ne (Volks-bühne means «people’s stage,» «the stage of the people») is a fa-
mous theater, politically left oriented, revolutionary. They do really radical per-
formances there. It seemed like the right place for our action. Then – if you’re
in Volksbühne, people’s stage, and you do a ballet in a place where all the
people can go freely, what do you need to do the performance? You need
the people (Volk). So we took 10 little robots. If you have the people (Volk)
and you’re in Berlin, than you certainly need the Führer. So we took the big
robot. And I found that wonderful flying cow in a toyshop in London, several
months before our VolksNetBallet action. Than we thought it looks great with
that small wireless camera on her stomach, fixed to her body with black duct
tape. She looks like a suicide bomber, which was quite real at that time, those
guys were all the time on TV. And we also needed a third eye, so the cow was
very welcome. Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman:
Ballettikka Internettikka – VolksNetBallet.
< norie  > Your robots, which I always find alluring and poignant, can also be hu- Volksbühne, Berlin, Germany; 2006.
morous for me, perhaps it’s that flying cow or the absurdity of the toilet venue
for a ballet! And that brings me to the humor that is such a strong element of
your work, often in an uncanny and disturbing as well as delightful way. This
humor is another reason for me that your work exemplifies unsitely aesthetics
so powerfully. Can you say anything more about how humor works for you?
150 151

< igor  > Privately I’m a very relaxed guy, but artistically I’ve always had a prob-
lem with humor. And I still have. My personal and artistic point of view is: «Bal-
lettikka Internettikka has nothing to do with humor. It is a serious action, dan-
gerous as well, and it’s certainly not a joke!» And then, the audience at my
presentations always start to laugh. Of course, I understand.
Well, yes, I know there is a great amount of humor in it, but I constantly deny
its presence. Perhaps it is humorous just because we (Brane and I) do every-
thing so seriously. Because we don’t laugh and smile, but we perform every
Ballettikka Internettikka action as if it would be the most serious, the most dan-
gerous military or guerrilla action. Perhaps that’s the reason.
The best comedies are performed in the most serious way. I know, I studied
classical theater for four years at the Academy. Reading Molière is actually
not funny, but painful. The best humor has to be presented to the audience in
the most serious way. Being a clown is actually very sad.

< norie  > Yes, humor is a very serious business and not at all the same as be-
ing silly or funny. And of course there is the Freudian understanding of the re-
lation between humor and what is suppressed or forbidden – by society and/
or for the individual. As Maria discusses in the first part of the book, in unsitely
aesthetics humor can be a way to «get at something else.» She also alludes
to Jorg Heiser’s discussion of slapstick humor which perhaps your work res-
onates with – your Führious cow, reminds me of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick
Fürher.
I think that strange laughter for the audience – in moments that are not ‹fun-
ny› but more uncanny and disturbing, exhilaratingly beyond the edge – oper-
ates powerfully in some of your Oppera works. That is actually where I first came
to your work, which I first started thinking about in relation to voice. I was struck
and entranced with the Artaudian stuttering of voice and movement in Oppera
Teorettikka Internettikka, as the code inhabited you and you inhabited it … I find
your relation to code here and in general really fruitful as a way to approach
the Internet as a site of work – the code being another level of that site that
normally we don’t notice. What is happening for you when you perform the code?

< igor  > Code equals poetry. Poetry for machines.

But, well, you know, Norie, to be honest: I remember that when I was perform-
ing Oppera Teorettikka live, I really did start with the libretto, as it was writ- Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman: Ballettikka Internettikka – VolksNetBallet. Volksbühne, Berlin, Germany; 2006.
ten. But than, after 20 minutes or so, I forgot about it, I forgot about what was
printed on the papers, and I started to improvise – something I hate most …
But that’s how it was. I exploded, emotionally and physically, and started to
jump around, to scream (ok, still the code, more or less), everything went
completely out of control. It became irrational, insane. The audience liked it,
me too (somehow), but what started as an extremely organized performance,
became a crazy ritual, an uncontrolled eruption of my emotions on stage. The
code turned into chaos. But I survived …

< norie  > I’d like to talk next about Ballettikka Internettikk Stattikka. To me, this
152 153

work is strangely moving, strangely intimate, despite the distance between

the performance (Hong Kong) and the audiences (the live audience being
in Germany, and me an Internet audience located in Australia). One is held
close, in a moment of suspension that pulls you closer and closer to the lone-
ly Robot on a rooftop in Hong Kong. Watching the YouTube documentation,
which is where I engaged with this piece, I focused on the poised foot and
raised arms – evocative and with a quite palpable sense of precariousness.
‹Static› in this work suggests to me a visual and aural virtuality, a potential of
movement and of sound. It’s as if the robot is transfixed by the potential – as
if it’s been caught in an incredibly, painfully intimate moment, unable to move
forward, or back, its voice unable to break through the static.
Part of the impact of this precarious moment is not knowing if it’s real or not so
my own viewing response feels precarious … making me feel the precarious-
ness of being a networked audience. A sort of uncanniness comes through
the layered play between spaces – where is the home of this performance? of
this robot? – Dresden, Hong Kong, the living room where I watch it?

< igor  > Here I would like to ask you to read a part of my wife’s (Bojana Kunst) Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman:
text about Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, which answers many questions. Ballettikka Internettikka Olymppikka.
And – in this case – since it’s my wife’s text, it also reflects my opinion as Olympia, Greece and Ljubljana, Slovenia; 2008.
well  – because she is also the official theoretical adviser for the Ballettikka In-
ternettikka project from the very beginning.

→ → Bojana Kunst: How Time Can Dispossess –

< norie  > Bojana and Igor, this is a wonderful and provocative text. Unfortunat-
ley our space here is limited and we can’t reproduce it in full, but the online
website that accompanies this book will link to the full text.
< igor  > And to answer your question about where is the home of this perfor-
mance – In my opinion it’s on the top of that skyscraper in Hong Kong. Where
only Brane and I were sitting, watching the robot, which was unable to move
(but he wanted to), watching the night skyline of Hong Kong. An extremely in-
timate experience. Yes, there was the audience out there, on the Internet and
in that hall in Dresden (you can see a photo of that hall, and the way our live
video was projected with five projectors, at http://www.intima.org/bi/stattikka/),
but actually we were so far away from everything, on that terrace, and per-
haps the robot was «performing» just for the two of us.
< norie  > In this work, as in others in the Ballettikka Internettikka series, there
is a strange juxtaposition of the robots, in one sense so impersonal and stiff
and often stuttering in their movements, with the emotional and physically flu-
id evocation of «ballet.» Perhaps you can say more about why/how ballet, In-
ternet, and robots come together for you?
< igor  > Ballet – In Oppera Internettikka Teorettikka I was singing the HTML
On Duration and Movement in Contemporary
Performance (An Excerpt)
On 17 November 2007, in one of their Ballettika
Internettikka1 guerrilla actions intervening into
various spaces by means of miniature mechanical
devices and broadcasting these events online,
Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman illegally brought
a robot to the top of the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong.
On the other side of the world, at an equally eminent
avant-garde venue, the Hellerau Festival House in
Dresden (Germany), the audience was waiting for
the broadcast of this illegal guerrilla ballet action,
which was scheduled for 10 pm CET. Every minute
of the steps leading up to the action was
meticulously planned, in accordance with
the illegal nature of the event. Temporality came
second to the strategic effect of taking over the
space and synchronicity served the realization of the
planned event. First, through a series of short
electronic messages from the two authors,
the audience was notified about all the details of
the action during the ascent of the Hong Kong
skyscraper, on top of which Ballettikka Internetikka
Stattikka1: Almost Static but Still Transitive Net Ballet
was supposed to take place. At 10 pm, giant
projections began in the hall at Hellerau. On its
walls, ceiling and floor, the image of the robot
appeared. With two red lights as eyes,the robot was
situated on a concrete edge made of white ceramic
tiles, as though it were just about to take a new step.
Behind it, we could see the glittering and
rhythmically pulsating lights of the Hong Kong
metropolis, a night without proper darkness. There
was a sound as though one or several people were
continually changing the local radio stations.
The length of the transmission was determined in
advance: 35 minutes. After the first two minutes,
however, the head technician, in charge of
the transmission to the Dresden hall, Skyped
a message to the two authors atop the Hong Kong
skyscraper: «Hey, is everything ok? There’s nothing
happening here yet.»2 The authors replied that
everything was fine. After 35 minutes of
transmission, a meticulously scheduled and
synchronised descent took place, followed by
securing the equipment.
The level of risk involved in the action was assessed
as the maximum by the two authors.

154 155
code (and Java), as you can see in the libretto. Than came the idea to dance
the code as well. So we started in 2001.
Robots – I’m not a professional dancer. I’m a passionate amateur, but that’s
not enough to go on dancing for 10 years. So, after we did the second Bal-
lettikka Internettikka in the Bolshoi (2002), we decided to test the robots … in
Bergen, Norway, 2003.
If I wanted to go on «dancing,» I would have had to take some classes. To
learn. But that would be against my Ballettikka Internettikka conceptual prin-
ciples (of being a passionate amateur). When people saw the robots, instead
of me, for the first time, they said that it’s clear that me and the robots are on
the same level when it comes to dancing (none of us can really dance a bal-
let), but there is one big difference: the robots are so «cute,» people said. I’m
a big clumsy bear, but robots are cute. Who cares if they can’t dance …
So we continued with the robots. Yes, there were actions where we were also
performing (like the one in Belgrade 2005), but – in general – the robots took
it over. I’m glad they did.
«When are things going to start?» This question of
the technician was not that of a person technically
skilled but «uninformed» in the field of contemporary
art. It actually mirrored the increasingly
uncomfortable atmosphere in the hall; after a few
minutes, people began to fidget, walk around and
many actually left the hall. The artistic director of
the festival, Johannes Birringer, later described
the various reactions of the audience in his blog.
While some people were enthusiastically following
the authors’ project, others almost meditatively
yielded themselves to the transmission on
the screens, and still others felt a deep frustration,
perhaps even anger, and left the hall in protest. After
the performance, Birringer’s blog also featured
a discussion between the authors and some
members of the audience. The findings could be
summed up in two points: a) that not much
happened; and b) that, if the audience had been
more informed about the context of the performance,
they might have reacted differently to this «lack of
goings-on.» The reaction of the audience testifies to
the fact that duration can be problematic, especially
in a technological context: if duration becomes
independent, it needs a context. It needs to be filled
with something before its slowness begins to get to
us – we simply need to know why things have
stopped.
1 See: http://www.intima.org/bi/
2 See: http://www.intima.org/bi/stattikka/index.html
The whole text is available at: http://www.wp.me/
p1iVyi-1y/

< norie  > In relation to the idea of site, the locations of the various Ballettikka
Internettikka works also gives a vital shape and affect to the works – locations,
sites which always, differently frame the robots movements and vulnerabili-
ties – and which also hint at your own activities outside the frame that we see
during the streamed performances. Can you say more about all this?

< igor  > At the beginning, we went for famous theater and opera houses (The
Bolshoi in Moscow, La Scala in Milan, National Theater in Belgrade, Volks-
bühne in Berlin), but than we stepped out of that concept, and went to non-the-
atrical, non-artistic places (like construction sites, factories, nature, harbors,
etc). We had no exact plan. Locations are basically the results of invitations
(to some places we were invited by local organizers, festivals or galleries, like
Belgrade, Hong Kong, Seoul) or our decisions. Only at the very end, when we
already passed that phase of destroying the robots (2008: Olymppikka, Hy-
draullikka, Intermenttikka), and we entered the last phase: leaving, abandon-
ing and jilting them, only then we decided (in advance) for the following:
We’re gong to abandon one robot as far North as we can, the other one as far
East as we can, and the third one as far South as we can. So we did:

- Nordikka on Svalbard, because Svalbard has a northernmost commercial air-

port in the world (we had no finances to fly further north, helicopters were too
expensive, they wanted 10.000 Euro per person, and at that time we couldn’t
find 20.000 Euro …)
- Nipponnikka on Minami Torishima, because that island is the easternmost
territory of the Land of the rising Sun (we flew there as «members» of
a European research expedition, they went there to do research on waves,
tide etc.)
- and now we’re going to end the 10 -years Ballettikka Internettikka project on
the Antarctica, because that’s as far south as we can go.
156 157

And we didn’t think about the West. We said: the West does not exist. I hon-
estly don’t know what that means. Perhaps it’s only a bad joke, perhaps it has
something to do with the rotation of the Earth, or perhaps it has some refer-
ences to the fact that we grew up and were raised in Communist times, he
he he …!

< norie  > Finally, can we talk about the way your guerilla hactivist activities
have a strong DIY feeling to them – which to me is in tune with the mobility
and intimacy of your work. Is DIY (in your case, in the sense of more low-tech
approaches, strategies like live in-camera editing, for example, rather than
mega post productions) something you are particularly committed to? And
how does it fit in with your ideas about performance and the Internet, either
that you’ve already talked about or that you’d like to move on to?

< igor  > Yes, it is a kind of DIY, but not entirely. I would call it BIY (BuyIY), be-
cause the robots and other toys we’re using in Ballettikka Internettikka are all
bought in toy shops, ready made, as they are. We didn’t build our own robots,
we didn’t even modify them, the only thing we did was to attach some cam-
eras or to combine two or three toys together. But that was a conceptual de-
cision. Personally, I’m fascinated with toys, remote controlled things etc. But
using toys from toyshops is really important to me. Toys are meant for kids
to play with them. To feel safe, warm, creative, etc. They are not meant to be
used in «guerrilla» actions, or to «dance»/perform in artistic projects. More or
less. But taking the toys outside their «natural» environment, out of their «nat-
ural» contexts – that was my starting point, our concept. By doing that, we cre-
ated new relations, new contexts. We somehow perverted the situation and
the roles which the toys originally have. In a way (well, ok, nothing that I say
is 100% true).
So we just went to toyshops and bought those bigger white robots, and also
smaller ones, then some toy bugs for Insecttikka, and remote controlled sub- Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman: Ballettikka Internettikka Stattika. Dresden, Germany; 2007.
marine for SubAquattikka. And, of course, remote controlled toy cars for Autto
Mobillikka and Illegallikka Robottikka in La Scala. So, it was more go-&-buy /
BIY than DIY. → → See: http://www.intima.org/art-life/
In my opinion, art has to be «fast» today. There is no time. You have to go out
and find it. Or buy it. Because there’s such a time-pressure, all the time. So,
also lately, I don’t create art, I buy it, I find it, or I steal it. That goes for this ro-
bot as well: → → See: http://www.intima.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/omissive-art/
I even have the equation for art: a = t F²
To find the art, you multiply the time by the square of the force. More force you
have, less time you need. So, today’s artworks should be short and powerful.
158 159
in conversation: Hugh Davies with
Linda Carroli
In 2002, Hugh Davies created Analogue Art Map with Marcus Helm. Combin-
ing Psycho-geography, DIY and relational aesthetics, Analogue Art Map is an
amorphous arts media-group exploring mapping and networked space. Insti-
gating a discussion and critique of digital media, Analogue Art Map projects
typically involve creating analogue versions of digital phenomena that invite
participants and pedestrians to interact with the work. Here Linda Carroli dis-
cusses these projects and other ideas of site and place with Hugh.
Hugh Davies and Linda Carroli share an interest in exploring space, mapping,
identity and networks. In developing their conversation, they established a
closed Facebook group and conducted their conversation through texts, links
and images. In approaching the conversation in this way, they actively sought
to engage with a practice of the «unsitely» – to explore ideas of site and place
through a networked modality. To create a site for conversation from which both
participants were remotely located. Facebook groups and pages, like many
websites, give the impression of being a place through a seeming «site-spe-
cific» engagement. After some email exchanges, the discussion took place
over a few days in June. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.
< linda carroli  > Maria has asked that we focus on some aspect (or aspects)
of «unsitely aesthetics» for this conversation. Seems like you have in part
scoped this already in your earlier email to me by triangulating access, rela-
tionality and instruction (as the precursor to participation). This particularly re-
lates to the works under the Analogue Art Map banner. The artworks are quite
self-effacing and humorous, with a lower key almost DIY aesthetic. As a set of
ideas, this positions the audience as the vehicle for unfolding the work. How-
ever, you also seem to be saying that the audience still requires coaxing and
coaching – I particularly liked your use of the word «trauma» in that email.
Self-consciousness seems to shift from the artwork to the audience.
< hugh davies  > Regarding the «trauma» of interacting with the work, I saw an
interesting artist’s presentation by Lyndal Jones recently. In the context of dis-
cussing collaboration, Jones professed that she was not fond of Relational
Aesthetics’ notion of interaction and intervention in what she thought of as
existing works of art. (Contradictory I know, and perhaps I misunderstood her
here) But intervening, she explained, makes an incision, and it implies a cut-
Hugh Davies is an artist and educator based in
Melbourne, Australia. He is the founder and Artistic
Linda Carroli is a Brisbane based writer, editor
and researcher. She works with Harbinger
Director of Analogue Art Map, a project that began in Consultants using interdisciplinary approaches to
2001 with the aim of recording and generating address urban, regional and cultural development
connections between creative individuals and as well as stakeholder engagement. She has written
the spaces in which they live. Analogue Art Map non-fiction as a journalist, essayist and critical writer,
strives to use only obsolete technology in contributing to a range of publications and events
representing digital concepts, communities and internationally. As an artist, her creative practice is
realms. In addition to his arts practice, Hugh is focused on experimental text-based art and writing.
a senior lecturer in Arts and Media at Latrobe Her work has included public art, artist’s books,
University and is completing a PhD Candidate in electronic writing and other publishing experiments.
Media Philosophy at Monash University. He serves Her current and recent projects, Wording, Placing
on the board of the Freeplay Independent Gaming and Changescaping are social media based writing
Festival. and publishing projects. Her current work addresses
See: http://www.analogueartmap.blogspot.com.au/ ideas of place, writing and practice. She writes
a column for Arts Hub focused on urban innovation
and creativity and was formerly the editor of fineArt
forum, an international art, science and technology
online magazine. Linda is a recipient of a Centenary
Medal for «long and distinguished service in
the arts.»
See: http://www.flytrapper.yolasite.com/
A community is formed as soon as you
and I find some object worth talking about,
even if we are the only people who take
an interest in that artifact. When our shared
interest leads us to record our dialogue,
it is possible that soon enough readers, too,
will come to share our interest …
A community is defined, in part, by willingness
to engage in intellectual exchange.
David Carrier
160 161

ting action. While I’m not sure I share her view, I sympathise with her reserva-
tion and suspect that it’s a commonly shared feeling that creation also brings
small destruction to what already exists.
There is also the trauma of performance anxiety on behalf of the audience
members who participate. They feel concerned that their input might not be
up-to-(someone’s idea of)-scratch. And as you mention, the audience comes
to experience the self-doubt of the artist.
I certainly don’t want people to feel compelled to interact and many visitors to
Analogue Art Map projects have expressed their choice not to participate, but
simply to view, which I’m also very happy for. That said I definitely do kind of
coax people who might not consider themselves as creative to be creative, of-
ten without them realising it.
In → collecting maps, I probably take things one step further, kind of gently → Hand Drawn Brooklyn
tricking people into making works of art. I do this by going to a city I’m not fa-
miliar with and asking for directions from strangers. Then I hand them a biro Working with only a biro and a camera, and with no
and a piece of scrap paper asking for a map in favour of verbal instructions knowledge of the area, Hugh Davies representing
Analogue Art Map spent the 2006 Conflux Festival
which I will, in genuine honesty, simply forget. And then they set about draw-
seeking hand-drawn maps from locals in the Brooklyn NY
ing. It’s fascinating to watch people hand-draw maps. They begin as extreme- area. These maps gave directions to sources of food,
ly practical diagrams but quickly the maker becomes conscious of their own water and rest as well as to possible points of interest.
mark and begins to correct and flourish. Maps, I argue, are one of the best ex- See: http://www.handdrawnbrooklyn.blogspot.com/ and
amples of art that are no longer commonly thought of as art. Therefore getting http://www.pro-tribute.blogspot.com/
someone to create a map is a very easy way to coax them into being creative
without realising it. I tell people that they have helped me, and have created
a work of art for me. I also tell them about Analogue Art Map and give them a
card with the address so they can see their work online. I’ve offered to give
back maps to some people, as they have begun to realise its artistic value,
but so far no one has accepted. But a common question is whether I will sell
the map. I haven’t and don’t.
In these mapping works we perhaps skim closer to the ideas of unsitely. I have
included some links here but this discussion makes me realise that I have a
great deal to update and put online. Of course, I have no time to do this but it re-
minds me none the less.

< linda  > A few things in there. First, I am quite interested in these ideas of in-
tervening and intervention, from your citation of Lyndal Jones. I have found
myself questioning this idea of intervention too. This week my order of Every-
day Urbanism arrived in the mail, so I am yet to delve into that. → However, → At the Right to the City Symposium, held at
your mapping projects seem to have that everyday resonance in the sense that Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney in April 2011,
maps are very familiar and we use them and draw them in lots of interesting keynote speaker, Professor Margaret Crawford,
ways. The premise of the work I am doing in → Placing and Change-scaping is noted that many small scale DIY improvisations
→ See: http://www.placing.wordpress.com/
in communities, such as garage sales, were
partially about thinking beyond intervention, particularly in relation to site, rep-
sometimes regarded as a kind of «blight»
resentation and the negotiation/navigation of meaning. I think this has some- because of their untidiness or randomness.
thing to contribute to the ideas of «unsiteliness» and «uncertainty.» It’s per- Municipal regulations encouraged a «move on»
haps not the most important aspect of your work – which is more focused on or «close down» response from authorities.
people, connection and process – but seems to somehow sit across your own
treatment of the gallery space. I’ve never actually seen your work in situ so I
162 163

can’t be sure how it «plays» out but there seems to be quite a warm tactile
and textile quality to it – quite gently unfolding across gaming, crafting, knit-
ting/weaving and social networking – and that’s not interventionist at all. Do
you want to talk more about that to unpack it a bit?

< hugh  > While the professed purpose of → Analogue Art Map from the outset →
was to explore digital technology and space through non-digital means, it also
had a strong focus on activating creativity in «non artists» and psycho-geog-
raphy, specifically exploring creative and subjective notions of space. The ma-
terials are my choice and I guess are informed by my sculptural sensibilities.
The wool used is certainly suggestive of the way people and places are knit-
ted together, and the stationary kind of hints at the utilitarian and everyday.
But concerns such as affordability, availability and transportability also play an
important part in the choice of material. These projects have been presented
abroad many times but like much creative work, the whole AAM project has
occurred without any funds, nor sales.
Obviously the tactile nature of the materials makes them inviting to interact
with, but it’s also important that the materials be a bit open source – people
can bring their own objects: photos, drawings, business cards, etc and it adds
to rather than upsets the aesthetic. I guess I want the audience to intervene Hugh Davies: Analogue Art Map. World Map, 2005. Hugh Davies: Analogue Art Map. Protribute, 2009.
in that way. Photo: Marcus Helm. Photo: Hugh Davies.
There was discussion several years ago about the anti-aesthetic and ugly ap-
pearance of collaborative works, which I also overheard more recently from a
local curator. Although this is perhaps an understandable curatorial concern, it
seems to miss the point of many collaborative works and kind of pisses me off.
I know that Olafur Eliasson’s Lego project, The cubic structural evolution proj-
ect (2004) was universally embraced in white box galleries for its collabora-
tive interaction but intrinsic uniformity of aesthetic. But I thought this left it very
closed and modernist in appearance. There was a concerning uniformity to
it that was almost nationalist. When the work travelled to Melbourne, several
visitors to the exhibition, myself among them, snuck in coloured Lego pieces
and incorporated them into the white blocks. These were obviously very visi-
ble and were quickly spotted and weeded out.

< linda  > So this folds into that relationship between coaxing and coaching that
we emailed about. I like wordplay and the power of words used in multiple, re-
petitive registers – drawing comes to the fore now. Drawing out the audience
(coaxing and coaching). Drawing the work (if such an assemblage or collage
might be a drawing – string drawings). Drawing as a representation of some-
thing – a map, a set of relationships. Paul Carter’s Dark Writing addresses
these questions of drawing in very interesting and complex ways – as a ten-
sion between word/writing and image/drawing – and kind of alludes to ideas
of linearity and contours. Carter says, «a richer drawing practice is needed.
But so is a richer, poetic way of drawing ideas together.» I tend to think of rich-
er and poetic as meaning «kinder» or «more giving.» [That’s intended a little
as a rebuke to the curators who think DIY/collaborative works are «ugly.» Lots
164 165

of things in the world are complex and messy – that doesn’t make them unwar-
ranted or ugly.]

< hugh  > I agree. The messiness and ambiguity are crucial. But so is drawing.
The situationist derived ideas of walking as a gesture, drawn in space, was a
big influence on me in initiating Analogue Art Map. In the mapping works I col-
lected drawn maps as gestures to retrace. And in the social mapping stuff I was
interested in the ways relationships rely on gestures that can be represented.
For example, by drawing wool between two people. And the mixing of physical
and digital gestures, people often Facebook poke each other at Map Me exhibi-
tions. Or at least they used to (Facebook pokes are apparently so passé now).
My favorite part of the Map Me exhibitions is the extent that they evolve social-
ly. I often ask strangers to talk through the work to me and their explanations
are fascinating. More than once I have been told how the different coloured
wool represents the nature of the relationship to the person you are linked to:
blue for business, red for romantic, green for friendship. This development is
impossible without the openness and messiness.

< linda  > Maps always codify space. So there’s an idea of coding (i.e. the co-
lour coded wool) where it seems that people are really aware that they are
participating in a mapping endeavour and setting up systems for conveying
information about real / lived social spaces. A problem of representation might
be embedded in that – the map can’t tell or replace the whole story, which frag-
ments into multiple stories i.e. the story of the mapmaking, the story of the re-
lationship, etc.
The idea of drawing wool between people reminds me of those tin can tele-
phones we might have made as children (which I believe used string rather than
wool). There was always something liberating about being able to manipulate
space as a child, often using optical or communications devices. Can you ex-
plain a bit more about how the work plays across physical and virtual spaces –
I don’t quite have the sense of this yet. How does Facebook, for example, be-
come part of the exhibition?

< hugh  > Apart from the blogs, which present images and explanations of pre-
vious actions, there is no online component to Analogue Art Map.
In practice, it’s entirely non-digital, thus all the tactile materials. However, that Hugh Davies: Analogue Art Map. Stranger of the Month, 2009.
practice is directly informed by the digital and online world. Analogue Art Map Photo: Hugh Davies.
relocates social networking locations and digital applications into physical
space. Therefore Facebook, and that ilk of applications, are really only a point
of online reference for visitors. Its intended visitors incorporate both online
and offline interactions into the work.
The actual role of Facebook in the work is an important question and one that
often gets overlooked. When I first presented Map Me in about 2005, Face-
book barely existed. It was all about Myspace and Friendster back then and
this is what the work was originally based on. But as Facebook grew in popu-
larity, it became the language to explain the project Map Me and, in turn, be-
166 167

came a short hand for the whole of Analogue Art Map.

I suspect things have drifted a bit since its conception a decade ago, but this
idea of presenting digital concepts, locations and social connections through
paper, cardboard, wool etc was chief among the original intentions of → Ana- → You can also find examples of Analogue Augmented Reality and
logue Art Map. non digital 3D animation here:
Likewise: http://analogueresearch.blogspot.com/
Pro-tribute was a physicalisation of geo-tagging.
Hand-drawn Brooklyn was peer recommendations of physical space.
Hand-drawn planet is the gradual map compiling towards an eventual hand-
drawn Google map of the world.
I’ve been thinking about initiating a hand-drawn street view but I suspect I’ve
already bitten off more than chewable.

< linda  > So in the gallery, it was people poking each other – with their actual
fingers rather than their keyboards? (The old fashioned way.)

< hugh  > Exactly. In the Facebook era of Map Me, poking was reclaimed as a
direct physical interaction. A very annoying one too. Some wag actually print-
ed out a FB poke button and stuck it to his finger to remediate the poke.

Hugh Davies added photos to → Analogue Mobile Phones. →

< linda  > These are lovely photos that truly capture the joy of making your own
phone/technology. What is going on here?

< hugh  > There were four of us and the woollen phone lines connected in a
cross. It was a party line. Obviously all of the Analogue Art Map works hinge
on play and experimentation. Hugh Davies: Cup and String Phones, 2009.
Photos: A. Smith & N. Ryberg Johansen.
< linda  > The play and humour is coming out very strongly in these works – you
are having way too much fun. We’ve reached this strange condition where we
have to set aside special places – usually playgrounds for children – where play
is sanctioned and in so doing that makes play alien and formal (as in sporting
fields or parks). Play, like walking, becomes a gesture for charting space. The
other side of that is a sense of parody – particularly in relation to the inflection of
digital spaces and platforms in other spatial realms and vice versa i.e. «present-
ing digital concepts, locations and social connections through paper, cardboard,
wool, etc» It’s not as if you are caught up in the treachery of images/represen-
tation (i.e. this is not a pipe) because you are not claiming that the offline expe-
rience is anything but an analogue one. In your conversations, do people talk
about their comparative online/offline or analogue/digital experiences?

< hugh  > Map Me in particular really invites people to compare, contrast and
hybrid together social situations from both on and off-line with some very in-
teresting results. And the work inevitably sparks discussions about online and
offline relationships and interactions. Many of the stories end up being about
168 169

break-ups and long distance relationships facilitated through technology as

compared to similar experiences in close physical proximity. Two artists who I
have met working in similar areas, that is, creating analogs of digital technol-
ogies, also deal heavily with place, space and distance and the effect on rela-
tionships. These artists are → Aram Bartholl and → Tomoko Hayashi. → See: http://www.datenform.de/ → See: http://www.tomokohayashi.com/
Again, they too often end up with playful results. I think there’s a couple of rea-
sons for this.
Firstly this is a recognition in the value of play. One of the few things I agree
with the → Gamification crowd about is that play is often just learning without → Gamification is the application of game mechanics to real world problems
the realisation that you are becoming smarter. in order to encourage participation and engagement. As a concept, it has
Secondly there is a recognition in the existing presence of play. While Face- a very long history for example, think of Tom Sawyer reframing the painting
book and Linkedin are labelled as social networking, Googlemaps as naviga- of fences as a fun activity to engage his friends in the task, or even of the role
of games in developing strategies and tactics of war going back to ancient
tion, Analogue Art Map versions of these are perceived as just silly fun. Doesn’t
times. I see gamification as something of a problematic field. This is
this imply that the digital originals might just be silly fun too? complicated by gamification becoming the latest buzzword in the corporate
In Adelaide I taught a digital media class in which I got students to set up an- consultancy world.
alogue versions of digital things. One of my favourites was a chat room that
involved students on each side of a door, passing notes to each other. It was
great. They made small stacks of smiley face stickers and other «emoticons»
that could be sent. And a key-hole that could be activated as a USB Camera.
It was funny because the students came away thinking that it was pretty ju-
venile, but were still desperate to chat to each other online in class. While G-
Chat is a legitimate form of communication between people working in close
proximity in offices, it’s often just digital note passing, as is the whole of text
messaging.
In which form does the network data world manifest itself in our everyday life?
What comes back from cyberspace into physical space? How do digital inno-
vations influence our everyday actions?

< linda > Returning after a short break … We’ve covered a bit of ground so far
and I thought it could be useful to interrogate how those concepts Maria is
working with relate to your work. It’s often a strange kind of displacement when
we theorise and write about art. Let’s return to and explore a bit more this
idea of the unsitely. I like this because of the potential for wordplay – unsite-
ly as in unsited or not fixed in place, as well as unsightly as in ugly. And you’ve
made some comments about perceptions of ugliness in relation to collabora-
tive work. So in relation to unsiteliness, I am thinking about how networks both
fix and unfix us in space. I am thinking about so much of our mobile communi-
cations and technologies really being about narrating where we are and who
we’re with. In a way it seems that the collaborative works do that – toy with the
idea of networks to reveal a kind of lie. That we are always somewhere and/
or connected to some place for all kinds of reasons.

< hugh  > Unsited is a great name rich with possibilities, which I’ve been busy
unravelling a bit. Unsited suggests without location but Unsighted also sug-
gests something unseen, not yet seen or not seen before, perhaps something
new or perhaps something that is even missed. The term site is a location of
170 171

activity – usually construction. So if sitely refers to a construction site, unsitely

might refer to a demolition, unconstruction or deconstruction site. Phonetical-
ly, unsightly refers to some thing that is not able to be seen or not to be looked
at due to its ugliness.
→ Map Me involves the construction of a map of existing relationships as well →
as the deconstruction of on and offline interactions. But most importantly, it
brings about the construction of new relationships. The advantage of Map Me
over Facebook is that there is actually an opportunity to meet people that you
have never met before without any connotation of untowardness that the same
interaction would bring about if it occurred online. In the digital world, there can
be something unseemly and unsitely about this. This meeting someone online
that you have not met before in the physical world. They could be anyone, any-
where. They are unsited and unsighted.
Because of this suspicion of people met online, Facebook does not create net-
works but re-enforces old ones. Map Me uses traditional physical space but
has more possibilities for interaction and network building. This is the unfortu-
nate nature of much technology. It’s much more conceptually traditional in the
way it facilitates space and networks than most people realise. Consider lo-
cation-based information that is available on mobile phones. Despite its tech-
nological newness, it’s really just a re-mediation of old information. What was
once on a sign or plaque is now available on a mobile phone. But you have
to be in the location where the plaque was to receive the information – or for
it to make sense. This is one of the ideas that I attempted to explore with the
mobile phone works. By interacting on a mobile phone in a public space, you
are really tying yourself to a relationship that already exists. You are not meet-
ing new people, but other people can become entangled in your conversation.

Hugh Davies added photos to Map Me. → →

< linda  > The word play does roll around doesn’t it? I like how you’ve brought
demolition and deconstruction into the conversation. These kinds of words al-
ways, almost, evoke a sense of history, i.e. there was something there before.

< hugh  > I also think place is an important aspect of this discussion as it relates
to unsitely. Analogue Art Map works haven’t been so much about place mak-
ing as recognising existing social places and our feeling around those plac-
es. To me the notion of place is invisible – unsighted – yet crucial. In collect-
ing maps I’ve tried to «see» place.

< linda  > I do enjoy this notion of collecting maps – do you mean the hand drawn
ones or are you talking about the installation based work? I wasn’t aware that
you could collect the string maps. How do the maps help you «see» place, ul-
timately an aspect of sensing place?

< hugh  > You can’t collect the Map Me installation works: the social maps, you
can only document them. In fact I make a point of telling people that the infor-
172 173

mation they leave will not be collected or wind up in any database or be sold
for advertising purposes. It’s a bit of a point of difference with online social net-
working tools. I do collect the hand drawn maps of places however. These are
usually anonymous but are very personal and poetic depictions of the spac-
es, places and indeed times in which people live. Specifically, I remember be-
ing given a map in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2006 of a «nice place to sit.» It
was a little disused lot along the river overlooking Manhattan. I went there and
checked it out. Despite being pretty post-industrial ugly vacant block, it was a
popular spot with a great view and indeed a nice place to sit. Apparently, it’s
all condos now.

< linda  > That makes me wonder about their ephemerality and contingency – a
bit like the idea of place itself, which can be so provisional at times. In an era
when the urban professions are fixated on «place,» we’ve seen some of the
most disturbing «unsettlement» (natural disaster, economic crisis, industrial
reshaping) which is akin to uncertainty. Decline is synonymous with «ruin» –
and that’s another way into thinking about the unsitely.

Hugh Davies: Analogue Art Map. Broklyn Mud Map.

Photo: Hugh Davies.
174 175
in conversation: John Craig Freeman,
Scott Kildall & Victoria Scott and
Michael Takeo Magruder with
Jo - Anne Green and Helen Thorington
(Turbulence.org)
In a 2006 proposal to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New
Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) co-directors – Jo-Anne Green and
Helen Thorington – requested support for Mixed Realities an international
competition, exhibition, and symposium. For the first time, practitioners were
invited to engage a simultaneous tripling of space in which two sites – a real
world gallery (Huret & Spector Gallery, Boston) and a virtual world gallery (Ars
Virtua, Second Life) – were networked via a third site, the Internet gallery Tur-
bulence.org. Thus, Mixed Realities explored the convergence – through cy-
berspace – of real and synthetic places made possible by computers and
networks. It enabled people distributed across multiple physical and virtual
spaces to communicate with one another and share experiences in real-time.
NRPA issued an international call for proposals in early 2007. Out of one hun-
dred and forty proposals, five were commissioned: Imaging Beijing by John
Craig Freeman;
 Remote by Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa, and
Georg Tremmel; No Matter by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott; The Vitruvian
World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele; and Cater-
waul by Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and
Brigit Lichtenegger. Curated by Jo-Anne Green, the exhibition opened in Feb-
ruary 2008.
< turbulence.org  > Briefly describe your work.
< john craig freeman  > Imaging Beijing was part of the larger project, Imaging
Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combined panoramic photog-
raphy, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations
where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local
communities. When a denizen of Second Life first arrived at Imaging Beijing,
she walked over a satellite image of central Beijing that was populated by a
network of nodes – constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoram-
ic photographs texture mapped to the interior. The avatar could step into the
center of each node, giving her the sensation of being immersed in the loca-
tion. In the physical gallery, a web-cam captured live video of the user’s head
that was then transposed onto the head of the exhibition avatar in real-time.
That is, the real-life user assumed the identity of the Second Life avatar as she
navigated the installation. Time-stamped links in the virtual space launched
John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using
emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of
globalization are impacting local communities. His work seeks to expand the notion of
public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place.
He has produced work and exhibited around the world including in Venice, Xi’an, Belfast,
Los Angeles, Beijing, Zurich, New York City, Taipei, São Paulo, Warsaw, Kaliningrad,
Miami, Bilbao, Havana, Atlanta, Calgary, Buffalo, Boston, Mexico City, London and
San Francisco. He has been commissioned by both Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org.
His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, El Pais, Liberation, Wired News,
Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper’s
and Der Spiegel. He is currently an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College
in Boston.
Scott Kildall is a cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints,
sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm to perform
interventions into various concepts of space. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Political
Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited his
work internationally in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin,
London and Hong Kong. Kildall has received fellowships, awards and residencies from
organizations including the Kala Art Institute, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Recology
San Francisco, Turbulence.org and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center. He is a founding
member of Second Front – the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently
resides in San Francisco.
Victoria Scott works between the mediums of 3D electronic media and 2D physical
materials to create site-specific installations, sculptures and multiples. She has exhibited at
galleries and museums throughout North America and Europe, including the Centro
Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), San Jose Museum of Art (California), the University of
Toronto Art Centre (Canada), Kasia Kay Art Projects (Chicago), Galleri Enkehuset
(Stockholm), and the 2010 01SJ Biennial (San Jose). Scott has been commissioned by
San Jose Museum of Art (2010), Zer01 Art and Technology Network (2010) and
Turbulence.org (2007). She is the recipient of several grants from both the Canadian
and Ontario Arts Councils. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago within
the Art and Technology Department and completed her MFA in 2005. Scott lives and works
in San Francisco.  
Michael Takeo Magruder is an artist and researcher based in King’s Visualisation
Lab, located in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. His practice
explores concepts ranging from media criticism and aesthetic journalism to digital
formalism and computational aesthetics, deploying Information Age technologies and
systems to examine our networked, media-rich world. Michael’s projects have been
showcased in over 200 exhibitions in 30 countries, and his work has been funded by
the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Arts
Council England and The National Endowment for the Arts, USA. He has been
commissioned by numerous public galleries in the UK and abroad and by the leading
Internet Art portal Turbulence.org. Several of his most well-known artworks have been
included in Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, USA.
Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., producer and
presenter of Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review,
Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art), and New American Radio. She
founded Upgrade! Boston, a new media speaker series and one of thirty cities active in

176 177
a browser, which opened a web journal of the Imaging Beijing field research.
< scott kildall & victoria scott  > No Matter
was an installation of «imaginary
objects» – things that appear in myth, literature, and thought experiments,
such as the Holy Grail, the Trojan Horse, the Time Machine and the Yellow
Submarine – but had never been physically built. We commissioned builders
in Second Life, a space of pure imagination, to create 40 imaginary objects.
We then extracted the 3D data through a digital backdoor and reconstruct-
ed it as paper sculptures on archival paper to resemble the crude 3D graph-
ics of Second Life. On the website, we tracked how much each builder was
paid (based on an hourly wage) to reflect the labor value behind each cultur-
al treasure.
the Upgrade! International network. Green has exhibited her paintings, prints, one-of-a-
kind artist’s books, and installations in Johannesburg, Massachusetts and New York. She
has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Emerson College, Boston;
and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is also a curator, writer and designer.
Green has a MFA in Visual Art and a MS in Arts Administration. She lives in Boston.
Helen Thorington is a writer and composer whose radio and sound compositions
have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty-five years. She has
created compositions for film and installation that have premiered at the Berlin Film
Festival and the Whitney Biennial. Thorington has produced three narrative works for
the web and she played a principal artistic role in the cutting-edge multi-location
performance work, Adrift. She has also composed for the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane
Dance Company. Thorington is the founder and co-director of New Radio and Performing
Arts, Inc.: New American Radio, Turbulence.org, Somewhere.org, Networked_Performance,
Networked_Music_Review and Networked a [networked book] about [networked art].
See: http://www.turbulence.org/
See: http://www.somewhere.org/

< michael takeo magruder  > In the 1st century BC, Roman writer, architect
and engineer Vitruvius codified specific building formulae based on the guid-
ing principles of strength, utility and beauty. He believed that architecture was
intrinsically linked to nature and was a human imitation of cosmic order. The
most well known interpretation of this postulate is the Vitruvian Man by Leon-
ardo da Vinci in which the male form is depicted in unity with the square and
circle – representing material and spiritual existence respectively. This tripar-
tite union of human body, material form and spiritual essence maintains rele-
vance within the current climate of distributed presences, mixed realities and
Internet cultures, and the proliferation of synthetic worlds and virtual constructs
engendered by our ubiquitous technology provides new realms for both actu-
al existence and creative exploration. → The Vitruvian World was a multi-nod- → See: http://www.turbulence.org/works/vitruvianworld/
al and recursive artwork that embodied the principles of Vitruvius within this
context. Existing in three distinct yet interconnected spaces, the work simulta-
neously embraced the virtual, the physical, and the network connecting them.

< turbulence.org  > In laying the groundwork for her book, Maria Miranda re-
fers to the Internet as both a public and «unsitely» space. Unsitely artworks
are simultaneously on- and off-line or, as David Crawford wrote, they are both
non-located in the «space of flows» (Castells) and located in the space of
places (museums or galleries). → Mixed Realities asked that the work be po- → See: http://www.turbulence.org/works/mixedrealities/
sitioned in both and, additionally, required one component of the work to be
located in → Second Life. How did you approach the challenge of network- → Second Life is a shared, synthetic, 3D environment
ing three distinct «sites» for your piece? in which people can interact in real-time by means
of a virtual self or avatar. In 2006, Second Life, was
< john > The physical component of → Imaging Beijing consisted of an immer- attracting millions of new online users who were
→ See: http://www.turbulence.org/works/ImagingBeijing/
buying and selling land, spending real world money,
sive, interactive installation in a darkened alcove of the Huret & Spector Gal-
hanging out with their friends, visiting galleries and
lery. A nine by twelve foot projection and a simple controller knob allowed attending classes, conferences and concerts.
visitors to the physical gallery to control a dedicated avatar, navigate the Im-
aging Beijing virtual installation in Second Life, and interact with other people
through their avatars. Blog entries were accessible via the World Wide Web
and through place markers in the virtual installation. All three parts were de-
signed to be interdependent.
178 179

The virtual component consisted of a large platform floating high above the
virtual exhibition space, Ars Virtua, in Second Life. A satellite image of the city
of Beijing created a map for the avatar to walk across while navigating a net- John Craig Freeman: Imaging Beijing.
work of spherical nodes with panoramic imagery texture mapped to the interi- Installation at the Huret & Spector Gallery, Boston, 2008.
ors. The avatar could walk to the center of each of these nodes and view the Photo: Ryan Scianio.
image in any direction, giving her the sensation of being immersed in the ac-
tual location. At each node an audio clip would play, providing narrative con-
tent for the scene.
Although the work addressed the social, historical and political situation un-
folding at the site, the narrative content largely consisted of the recollection of
formative memory by the residents of Beijing. The result was a kind of multi-
dimensional, inhabitable memory map.
The content of the project was created on location in Beijing during the sum-
mer of 2007, when the city was preparing to host the 2008 Olympics. Large
swaths of the city’s traditional → hutong neighborhoods were being demol- →
ished at the time to make room for Olympic building and to craft an image of
the «new» China. These neighborhoods had rich histories, some as old as
five hundred years. The word hutong is derived from the Mongolian word hot-
tog, which means water well, since these neighborhoods grew up around the
local common well. The word has come to simply refer to a complex of distinc-
tive enclosed courtyard style dwellings accessible only by labyrinths of nar-
row, walled alleyways, some just wide enough for pedestrians and rickshaws.
In → Imaging Beijing, the story unfolds spatially rather than linearly as the av-
atar explores the space, moving from a vibrant living hutong, through the de-
molition zone, to a construction site and out into the bustling, skyscraper lined
streets of twenty-first century Beijing.
A web-cam captured live video of the gallery visitor’s face in real time and trans-
mitted it to a mask-like screen worn on the head of an avatar in-world. If other
avatars were present, they could talk in real-time using voice chat. John Craig Freeman: Xizhimen Station Hutong, 2008.
The installation was designed to destabilize audiences’ sense of location and Photo: John Craig Freeman.
place.

< scott &  victoria  > We thought of Second Life as a medium through which imag-
inary objects could pass into physical existence. Second Life served as a pro-
duction environment – where we commissioned builders to make the 40 ob-
jects as 3D models that reflected the imaginary nature of the space. Realizing
that the average gallery viewer would have little knowledge of Second Life,
we sought to suggest an alternate reality (rather than a literal depiction of it)
by creating real life physical sculptures. We thus favored physical art objects
that embodied qualities of Second Life.
The website had a different function altogether: it was a reference for those
who could not be there to see the work in person, and it showed the produc-
tion process through text and graphics. It told the back-story of No Matter, how
we first hired builders to create the imaginary objects, then tracked their labor-
time and finally constructed the objects in physical space.
180 181

< michael  > Our creative team consisted of myself (a contemporary visual art-
ist working extensively within physical gallery contexts), Drew Baker (a senior
academic research fellow renowned for his construction of online virtual en-
vironments) and David Steele (a leading information architect specialized in
the development and programming of networked systems). As each person
in the collective was naturally aligned to a particular «site» – and given the
group’s previous history of interdisciplinary collaborations and the extensive
pool of expertise and resources upon which we could draw – it was a logical
and quite natural process of conceptualizing, developing and realizing an in-
stallation across the three proposed spaces (i.e. realities).

< turbulence.org  > As Miwon Kwon wrote in her book One Place After Another,
site-specific art was initially inseparable from its environmental context (Land
Art). «Site» later evolved to include the mind (Conceptual Art) and the body
(Performance Art). Thus, in certain instances, the site of the work shifted from
a specific geographic location to the location of the body in space; and in oth-
ers, the site found its «‹locational› anchor in the discursive realm.» How do
these shifting definitions of site play out in your work?

< john  > → Imaging Beijing is part of a much larger art project and research in- →
vestigation titled Imaging Place. The goal is to invent a new sustainable, mod-
ular art practice, which can expand over time; adapt as technologies evolve;
and migrate when they become obsolete.
This work has been ongoing since 1997 and includes hundreds of individual
locations and hours of content from Beijing, New York, Taipei, São Paulo, Brit-
ish Columbia, New England, Warsaw, the U.S. / Mexico Border, the Miami Riv-
er, Kaliningrad, Niagara, Appalachia and more.
Rather than the synthetic, imaginary experience of what we have come to re-
gard as virtual reality, Imaging Place is based in real places around the world.
I travel to locations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of
individuals in local communities and document the place, its people and my
experience using panoramic photography and video, 3D gaming and interac-
tive technologies.
Much of this work focuses on borders, ports and other conflict zones, places John Craig Freeman: Imaging Beijing. John Craig Freeman: Imaging Beijing.
where culture and nation states collide, places that are undergoing profound The artist as avatar, 2008. During the opening reception, 2008.
transformation and differences are brought into full relief. It has always been Photo: John Craig Freeman. Photo: John Craig Freeman.
my intention to locate the edges and call into question the meaning of bound-
aries, walls, fences – both physical and virtual, literal and figurative. In other
words, it is the exploration of the borders between mind, body and space that
motivate me as an artist. Imaging Beijing was an exploration of the boundar-
ies between the virtual world, the gallery, the city of Beijing, the self, the avatar,
subject, object, etc. It tried to locate where one becomes the other and brings
the shift that Kwon writes about into the awareness of the audience.

< scott &  victoria  > These initial contexts of site-specificity rely on movements

away from the physical museum in the late 1960s / early 1970s, while the con-
182 183

temporary context is somewhat different. Like the site-specific artwork of that

era, No Matter reflected its own time: the widespread shift to digital production,
the potential for endless reproduction, and an engagement with various sim-
ulated worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. In these online en-
vironments, locality is unique – it is a realm of space separate from our own
material reality. We cannot touch it, but it is «there.»

< michael  > The context (i.e. «anchor») for The Vitruvian World is the techno-so-
cial conditions of the time in which it was created. To situate the work requires
one to understand the history of the development and use of online, virtual world
technologies in this particular period: the post Web 2.0 socially-connected
landscape that witnessed the rise of shared virtual environments like Second
Life for the first time, the onset of physical gaming, affordability of high-defini-
tion (HD) audiovisual immersion in the home environment, etc.
→ The Vitruvian World consisted of three sites: the «realm of the Avatar» (vir- → The notion that The Vitruvian World was itself a site that embodied
tual), the «realm of the Puppet» (physical), and the «realm of the Doll» (net- the principles of Vitruvius can be argued since the artwork was
work). An → Avatar (by the Western definition) is a graphical representation → conceptually and formalistically structured upon Vitruvius’ writings
and formulae.
of a user within a virtual space. With regards to Second Life’s avatar «res-
idents,» the virtual body is a completely personalized and embodied form
through which a person interfaces and expresses her will (i.e. agency) within
the metaverse, and is constructed by an individual for their own use. → The →
Puppet is a hybrid body created by one entity (in this case the artistic team),
which is then used by others (in this case the visitors to the physical gallery),
and represents a shared state of agency and partial embodiment. The third
form, → the Doll, is a virtual body devoid of any human embodiment and agen- →
cy – it is a «lifeless» shell that merely functions as a component of the virtual Michael Takeo Magruder:
realm (in this case as a data conduit). The Vitruvian World. Portrait of
The Second Life portion of the artwork was a full sim created both for ava- the Puppet.
tars to visit and as a residence for the Puppet. It was constructed to sense the
presence of these types of virtual bodies and programmatically transform itself Michael Takeo Magruder:
according to their locations. The Doll – as a shell without an embodied pres- The Vitruvian World. An Avatar
ence – did not relate to and affect the virtual world in this manner. explores the virtual environment.
Avatars interfaced with the virtual component of the installation via their own
computer systems running the Second Life client. The Puppet was only acces- Michael Takeo Magruder:
sible in the physical gallery space, where a visitor (through the use of a hacked The Vitruvian World. Portrait of
Wii-mote) could assume control of the body and view portions of the virtual the Doll.
space through an immersive audiovisual projection system created with a cor-
ner dual HD projector setup and 5.1 speaker set. Visitors to Turbulence.org (i.e.
the network) were able to watch a real-time data-painting created from live ani-
mated image streams captured from the Doll’s viewpoint.

< turbulence.org  > If the public sphere is a «discursive site» – a site for public
dialogue/debate – and not a physical place (Jürgen Habermas), is the Internet
part of the public sphere? Is Second Life part of the public sphere?

< john  > For the past eight years, I have worked on the corner of Tremont and
184 185

Boylston Streets overlooking the historic Boston Common, the first public park
in the United States. I walk across the park every morning. As I do, I often
contemplate the role that the town square plays in the shaping of political dis-
course and national identity formation. As the location of the public sphere,
the town square is where we air grievances, display solidarity, express our dif-
ferences, celebrate our similarities, remember and mourn. This is why monu-
ments and memorials are located in town squares.
In the early 1990s we witnessed the migration of the public sphere from the
physical realm to the virtual realm, the Internet. In effect, the location of pub-
lic discourse and the site of national identity formation were extended into the
virtual world. When thinking about this, it is important to keep in mind that the
practices of the virtual public sphere have to be invented, just as the equip-
ment is invented.

< scott &  victoria  > Most spaces in Second Life are like public parks: you can
enter and exit freely, socialize and meet strangers. There are exceptions –
such as fenced off areas and regions, which are only open to certain subcul-
tures – but there are fewer restrictions in Second Life than in real life.
However, the contradiction is that a corporation, Linden Lab, owns this en-
vironment and as such, it exists only on their servers. Linden Lab can boot
out users that don’t conform to its standards of conduct, allot resources as it
chooses, and even shut down Second Life. If Linden Lab goes bankrupt, all of
the virtual user-created spaces would instantaneously disappear.

< michael  > Yes, certainly both the Internet and Second Life are part of the
public sphere (domain). Having said that, both are manipulated to varying de-
grees by governmental and commercial powers through various «protocols»
( → Galloway) and systems of control, and I feel it is useful to think about the
notion of what is deemed «public» within this context.
Michael Takeo Magruder: The Vitruvian World. An aerial overview of the ever-changing virtual environment.
→ Alexander R. Galloway: Protocol: How control exists after decentralization.
Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2004.

< turbulence.org  > Is the Second Life component of your piece more akin to
the site-specificity of Land Art or unsiteliness of the Internet? How important
is the aesthetic of the Second Life environment? Did you embrace the con-
straints of the aesthetic? Is the Second Life aesthetic «unsightly?»

< john  > Imaging Beijing was designed to be simultaneously site-specific and

unsitely.

< scott &  victoria  > The sculptures were transmuted from the space of imag-
ination, Second Life, into physical space. Although the works themselves
were presented as conventional art objects, displayed on shelves or plinths in
the physical gallery, their origin was clearly digital. The sculptures embraced
the crude 3D-look of Second Life with its faceted edges and oddly mapped
graphics. The Second Life installation showed all of the 3D models in a vir-
tual gallery, along with programmed scripts that provided humor and took ad-
vantage of the Second Life environment. For example, avatars could ride the
186 187

Yellow Submarine as it descended below the floorboards of the gallery and

as they approached Kryptonite, they got weak and fell to the ground. In this
way, →  No Matter tapped into the site-specificity of the environment, much like →
many Land Art works.

< michael  > The inherent nature of Second Life as an ever-shifting metaverse

where virtual simulators (sims) appear and disappear on a regular and incon-
sistent basis, intrinsically links all Second Life creations (and components) to
a state of unsiteliness. Of course, real-world land experiences both natural
and man-influenced changes; however such transitions usually occur gradu-
ally over a period of time, unlike the often instantaneous shifts seen within In-
ternet-space.
Aesthetically, The Vitruvian World was informed by the inherent audiovisu-
al qualities of the platform itself – I believe in trying to employ the «natural»
beauty of any media-based system.
For me, technical constraints can often be employed as creative «obstructions»
( → von Trier) within the artistic process. My use of Second Life as a platform for Scott Kildall & Victoria Scott: No Matter. → Lars von Trier & Jørgen Leth: De Fem Benspænd /
creative practice has certainly been informed by this view – i.e. the limitations Paper Tiger, 2008. The Five Obstructions [film].
are often challenging, but the process of finding solutions makes one careful- Hvidovre: Zentropa, 2003.
ly consider artistic intentions and strategies.
The Second Life aesthetic is certainly «unsitely» as it is directly informed by
the constant changes in the platform’s technical infrastructure, which alters as-
pects of the manifested virtual environment (e.g. graphical capabilities are ex-
panded and/or altered, authoring facilities are sometimes deprecated or re-
moved, etc.).

< turbulence.org  > In creating your piece for Mixed Realities how much con-
sideration was given to Second Life as a site of social interaction?

< john craig  > In earlier iterations of the → Imaging Place project (1997 – 2006), →
I amassed a large archive of work, with hours of narrative content from hun-
dreds of locations around the world. Although the work was authored in the
language of the Internet, it was always too bandwidth intensive to deliver on
the web. For most of this time the work was shown primarily in the form of in-
teractive exhibitions in galleries and museums. As a result the work never de-
veloped the social and participatory possibilities that were emerging online at
the time. The widespread adoption of virtual world technology changed that.
In Second Life, I was able to engage a robust and committed worldwide audi-
ence. During the Mixed Realities exhibition, whenever possible, I would log in
to the virtual installation from my studio. I would meet up with the exhibition
avatar, give tours of the space, and facilitate interactions between gallery vis-
itors and their online counterparts. This one-on-one interaction brought a kind
of ritual storytelling aspect to the work. In addition to each node containing its
own narrative content, it would act as a memory trigger of sorts, reminding me John Craig Freeman: Xizhimen Station, 2008.
to talk about particular related ideas or theory, or to supplement the story with Photo: John Craig Freeman.
additional narrative based on my experience on location in Beijing.
188 189

< scott &  victoria  > The first stage of production for → No Matter was to hire
Second Life builders to create the imaginary objects in the Second Life environ-
ment. During this time, we spent many hours each day working with builders
in the «showroom» – a museum-like house containing the imaginary objects
where we conducted business. We forged our own social rules of salesman-
ship that were specific to Second Life. We were heavily involved in this space
as a system of exchange, negotiating specific flat fees for each object with
hourly pay rates well under those in real life.

< michael  > Since 2007, I have thought of Second Life as a «living space for our
living beings» (Appia in → Magruder) and, as such, social interactions (and re-
lated elements) are certainly considered during the creation process.
< turbulence.org  > Is there an inherent tension/conflict between the unsiteli-
ness of the Internet and the specific location (web address) of a website?
→ Michael Takeo Magruder: «(Re)Configurations of
Space and Movement. Performative Extensions of
Appia in Second Life», in Gabriele Brandstetter and
Birgit Wiens (eds.), Theater ohne Fluchtpunkt /
Theatre without Vanishing Points. Berlin: Alexander
Verlag, 2010, pp. 60 – 75.

< john  > There is. Particularly when web locations or virtual worlds are regard-
ed with the same definitional criteria for location as physical reality. It is, of
course, not the same. Virtual location is representational, an image more akin
semiotically to a photograph, but one that you can enter, explore, have social
interactions and adventure in. But it is still an image, a signifier not the signi-
fied. I chose to use this inherent tension / conflict to disrupt the audience’s ex-
perience and draw attention to the construction of meaning.
All storytelling requires the suspension of the audience’s disbelief. With any
film, novel, or narrative performance, the viewer has to ignore the fact that the
experience is constructed and temporarily accept it as reality, allowing her to
enjoy the fiction as if she were observing real events. Games and virtual worlds
are no different. People expect to turn themselves over to a fantasy when they
don an avataric identity and enter a virtual environment. When they encoun-
ter real people, real places, and real political situations, it can be an extreme-
ly jarring experience, even if it is only a representation. I see it as being a bit
like the breaking of the fourth wall in Brechtian theatre.

< scott &  victoria  > Absolutely. The Internet is entirely illusory. The reality of
the web is managed through IP addresses and physical servers, evidenced
by censorship in China or the shutting down of the Internet in Egypt in Febru-
ary of 2011. Most people forget this until sites get hacked, governments cen-
sor them or corporations exercise undue control over the infrastructure of the
Internet.

< michael > Web addresses – in terms of both their IP address and domain

names – can change in erratic ways, and if one considers this point, then per-
haps there is not so much tension between these two factors.

< turbulence.org  > Mixed Realities sought to combine elements of a physical

environment with those of a virtual world. How would you conceptualize physi-
190 191

cal/virtual; as the antithesis of one another or as part of a continuum?

< john  > I consider the virtual to be a prosthetic extension of the physical, al-
lowing meaning of place to radiate out worldwide from a specific physical lo-
cation and back again.

< scott &  victoria  > This is a difficult question to answer due to its general na-
ture. In → No Matter, we gave physical form to that which was formerly vir-
tual. Imaginary objects existed before simulated worlds; Second Life oper-
ates much like the imaginary worlds created by stories, film and other fictional
spaces. Thus, the idea of virtuality is an old one but computing technology
now allows for millions of people to log in to the same service and feel a sense
of shared space.
< michael  > Certainly as part of one continuum: although they are different
kinds of spaces when we connect to and inhabit them, our consciousness (i.e.
our overarching reality) remains constant.
→ No Matter Workshop at Emerson College, Boston,
MA; February 11, 2008. Artists Scott Kildall and
Victoria Scott assisted participants in building
miniature paper models of famous imaginary and
fictional objects, such as Kryptonite, the Flying
Carpet and The Widget. They discussed how they
commissioned Second Life builders to make 40 of
these imaginary objects and demonstrated how
they extracted and transformed these 3D models
from Second Life into real 3D paper sculptures.

< turbulence.org  > Site-specific works of the 1960s and 70s (Land Art) de-
manded the physical presence of the viewer for the work’s completion (Kwon).
Similarly, Mixed Realities called for works that were either interactive or partic-
ipatory, requiring the «audience» to activate or «complete» them. Remote, for
instance, sensed the presence of «bodies» in both the physical and virtual
spaces, alerting each to the co-presence of the other. How much audience in- No Matter has exhibited at the Huret & Spector
volvement did you require/desire? Was the experience of your piece enhanced Gallery, Emerson College, Boston, MA. It was
a part of the group exhibition Mixed Realities from
by multiple co-present bodies?
February 7 to April 15, 2008.

< john  > It was extremely important. I have years of experience creating physical
offline interactive installations in galleries and museums. I have been making
Internet art since 1990 and I have created dozens of online virtual installations
in virtual world environments. Imaging Beijing at the Mixed Realities exhibition
was the first time I brought all three of the practices together in one project.

< scott &  victoria  > For No Matter, the audience that completed the work was
the builders in the Second Life community. They operated like independent
contractors and though we featured them on the website, their identities were
largely anonymous and for the most part, they had little interest in the final
real-life exhibition.

< michael  > As the artwork was conceived to exist across multiple time zones
and «sites,» it was clear from the onset that it would not be visited or experi-
enced on a predictable or regular basis. Therefore, we sought to create com-
ponents and situations that had underlying autonomous (algorithmic) struc-
tures that would gain (i.e. increase their complexity) from human interaction.
In short, the spectator/user experience would always maintain a (hopefully)
interesting baseline, but would become more dynamic and intriguing as the
192 193

spaces were inhabited (often by multiple individuals). The artwork was defi-
nitely enhanced as the virtual and physical «sites» were populated, explored
and «used» by visitors.

< turbulence.org  > Given the specific brief of the Mixed Realities exhibition,
could your piece be exhibited again? Most importantly, would you migrate the
Second Life component into a different virtual world? (Note, this is not a ques-
tion about technical feasibility, but rather the site-specificity of Second Life.)

< john  > What made the Mixed Realities exhibition so significant was not only
its underlying concept, but its timing. It occurred during the peak of Second
Life’s assent; the virtual world community was exploding. There was a wild-
west feel to the place, where anything could happen and everything needed
to be invented.
Much of the general population had still not heard of virtual world technology,
so many visitors to the physical gallery had never experienced Second Life.
They simply stepped through the door of an art gallery into a mixed reality ex-
perience. This initial encounter was much different than having a friend dem-
onstrate it or reading about it online and preparing one’s computer and going
through Orientation Island.
The virtual world community has largely moved on, and so have I. Most of
what is left in Second Life is limited to shopping malls and pornography. Oth-
er virtual worlds are missing the quirky, playful experimentation that defined
Second Life at the time and made it an interesting place to invent avant-garde
art practices.

< scott &  victoria  > We have exhibited No Matter in multiple venues since the
Mixed Realities exhibition. However, for the Second Life component, we have
opted to do video fly-through of each sculpture. This has been a practical con-
sideration. Most people don’t know Second Life; using the controls is tricky
and they understandably get confused.
Because the objects embody the qualities (aesthetic) of Second Life, migrat-
ing them to another environment would mean re-staging the project from
scratch in another simulated world using its virtual economy.

< michael > The Vitruvian World could certainly be re-exhibited at present as Scott Kildall & Victoria Scott: No Matter. Trojan Horse, 2008.
Second Life still exists and has not radically changed since 2007 when the
artwork was conceived and created. For the future, we have discussed mi-
grating the work’s Second Life component to a different virtual world platform
(like OpenSimulator) but this would be undertaken only for the purpose of
preservation.
194 195
in conversation: Brooke Singer with
Renate Ferro
In the following email conversation with Brooke Singer, we focus on collabo-
ration as an important element in both our practices as artists and educators –
as well as its relevance for unsitely aesthetics.
Brooke Singer describes her practice as working across media and disci-
plines, where she creates platforms for local knowledge to connect, inform
and conflict with official data descriptions. She engages technoscience as an
artist, educator, non-specialist and collaborator. Her work lives «on» and «off»
line in the form of websites, workshops, photographs, maps, installations and
performances that involves public participation in pursuit of social change.
In my own artistic practice, that of a conceptual artist who toggles between
the creative skins of old and new technologies, the conceptual nature of the
work and the processes that are indicated drive what kinds of collaborative
networks I employ. The expanse and methods of collaboration depends on
the task at hand and the evolving journey towards the project’s completion. I
engage in artistic writing, performance, cross-disciplinary media art projects,
artist’s books and drawing both in my studio and my lab, The Tinker Factory.
< renate ferro  > From my observation there are divergent models of collabo-
ration that many digital/new media artists incorporate into their practice. For
some, the process of collaboration has been described as similar to a science
lab or a film studio. In the production process the artist acts as the chief orga-
nizing officer and conducting those working with him or her to complete the
essential tasks that need to be finished in order for the final objective (usu-
ally a specific project finished) to be accomplished implying a hierarchy of
production (Stelarc, Australia). In an artist’s talk at Cornell University in mid-
May 2011, → Rafael Lozano-Hemmer described his own production of the
last twenty-years, equating his role as an inter-disciplinary digital media artist
to that of a dance choreographer. He equated his role to that of a conceptu-
al conductor who orchestrated the movements of each participant in tandem
with the overall mission of the production. In other instances, media artists
(Out-of Sync, Australia) describe the process by which they work as «sympa-
thetic» equal partners. Through collaborative trust, the creative process takes
part in formulating the outcome. Discussion and creative banter create a net-
work of threads, some of which stop dead and others that lead to a synchro-
nous outcome.
Working across media and disciplines,
Brooke Singer creates platforms for local
knowledge to connect, inform and conflict with
official data descriptions. She engages
technoscience as an artist, educator, non-specialist
and collaborator. Her work lives «on» and «off» line
in the form of websites, workshops, photographs,
maps, installations and performances that involves
public participation in pursuit of social change.
She has exhibited at the Warhol Museum of Art,
The Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum of Art, MoMA /  configurations include drawing, artist’s books,
PS1, Diverseworks, Exit Art, The Whitney Artport,
among others. Recent awards and commissions
include an El Ranchito / Matadero commission in
Madrid, Turbulence.org net art commission, New
York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual
Artist award, a Headlands Center for Arts residency
and an Eyebeam and Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council (LMCC) Social Sculpture commission.
She is Associate Professor of New Media at
Purchase College, State University of New York,
a fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center and
co-founder of the art, technology and activist group
Preemptive Media.
See: http://www.bsing.net/
See: http://www.purchase.edu/departments/
academicprograms/faculty/brookesinger/
brookesinger.aspx
See: http://www.preemptivemedia.net/
→ Lozano-Hemmer was the keynote speaker at the Cornell University’s The Institute for Comparative Modernities
Conference, Sighting Technology in Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, May 13 –14, 2011.
Organized by Maria Fernandez.
Renate Ferro is a conceptual media artist who
toggles between the creative skins of old and new
technologies. Her artistic practice enfolds critical
interactivity, particularly social and theoretical
paradigms of the psychological and sociological
condition. At the heart of her most recent research
interests, Ferro critically engages the corporal
body’s symbiotic relationship with technology. By
aligning artistic, creative practice with critical
approaches to cyber configurations, the resulting
performance, installation, and interactive, net-based
projects. Most recently her work has been featured
at London, New York, Mexico, Hungary, Germany,
and The United Arab Emirates. She is a Visiting
Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at
Cornell University where she teaches digital media
and theory. She also directs The Tinker Factory,
a creative research lab for Research Design,
Creativity, and Interdisciplinary Technology. She is
a co-moderator for the online new media list serve
-empyre- soft-skinned space.
See: http://www.renateferro.net
See: http://:www.tinkerfactory.net/
See: http://www.empyre.library.cornell.edu/
196 197

In my own recent work, collaboration has been central in a variety of ways.

In the collaborative performance → Private Secrets / Public Lies participants → Private Secrets / Public Lies was installed at Cornell University, Dartmouth, and in Chiapas, Mexico,
pondered a personal secret, writing it down then carefully clipping each word at a women’s theater collective called FOMMA. See: http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/fomma/
apart deconstructing the meaning of their entry. Their cooperative behavior in- The work can be viewed online at http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/
spired me to develop code for an online game, → The Secret’s Game where → See: http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/applet/secrets.html
visitors could virtually submit data in the form of a secret. In turn the site’s pro-
gram deconstructs the content by filtering the inputted words. Users are then
asked to rearrange the archived data from former users in the form of word
clouds. The newly assimilated word clouds are thrust back out into the world
wide web. This recycling process is recorded and archived on the Home Page
for the others to see. While my performance collaborators inspired me while
conceiving the online version, over the course of two years I worked with
three programmers all of whom had varying interests and expertise to assist
me in developing the code. In working in tandem with those programmers
the project coiled in and out of the range of my own interests. Like a fish on a
line the project reeled in and out of the conceptual parameters that I had en-
visioned originally, but in that process each version was saved and archived.
With the freedom to work associatively, there were times when I had to sus-
pend my own interests because of programming limitations or sometimes the
technological gaps we encountered. These errors or gaps allowed me the cre-
ative space to think through other possibilities and then when appropriate fi- Renate Ferro: The Secret’s Game.
nalized it for closure. All of the variations both successful and unsuccessful Installation, FOMMA, Chiapas, Mexico.
have been charted in my project archive.
The use of the archive has been an important construction that I have drawn
upon in my collaborations in research, curating, and creativity. With Tim Murray,
a curator of new media and a critical theorist, I collaborate on joint conceptual
projects that often are framed by concepts of memory’s erasure. In our curato-
rial collaborations in orchestrating the discussion topics of → -empyre- soft- → See: http://www.empyre.library.cornell.edu/
skinned space, a new-media list-serve, we have long been influenced by broad
reflections on matters of technology, culture and art especially as they relate to
psychoanalysis, memory and fantasy. Pivotal in this work has been our em-
brace of «erasure» as the fundamental ground of memory within the digital plat-
form. Like the errors or gaps that allowed creative spaces in Private Secrets /
Public Lies, the list-serve format allows for programmatic gaps because of
spammed mail and suspicious headers or the times when invited guests fail to
contribute to the discussion. Likewise conceptual gaps occur when subscrib-
er’s threads fall silent because other subscribers do not respond, or intent and
content is misunderstood, or perhaps even when there is a language barrier Renate Ferro: Laura Mandell playing The Secret’s Game.
between subscribers writing in differing languages. Installation, Dartmouth University.
Collaborations that occur between the junctures of my artistic practice and
teaching occur in my lab, The Tinker Factory. Within the real space of the
open lab, we generate ideas through practice and tinkering in a workshop at-
mosphere that often creates the impetus for both short-term and long-term
projects. Some of those projects in turn network with other artists, writers, and
programmers to take the form of artistic writing, performances, or projects that
occasionally are followed through to fruition.
198 199

< brooke singer  > I have maintained a collaborative arts practice for ten years
now. I have been part of a long-term collaboration (Preemptive Media) that fol-
lowed an art collective model, meaning we were three individuals that came
together under one name to create works of art with a fairly distinct purpose
(to critique and intervene in the high-tech world of R & D labs) and coher-
ent aesthetic. I have made works under my name that were beyond my abil-
ities, compelling me to hire assistants (an approach more in line with Rafa-
el Lozano-Hemmer’s concept of collaboration as a conductor/choreographer,
perhaps). While these works are attributed to me, I always speak of them as
collaborations and give credit to the people who have helped to make them
happen. And now, in my collaboration with Stefani Bardin on The Counter Renate Ferro: The Tinker Factory.
Kitchen, I am part of a collaboration that is perhaps a bit of a combination of
these two models.
I also speak of my work as collaboration because often I am building plat-
forms for participation or frameworks for others to add content and co-develop
content. I hardly ever make finished work. The only exception are the photo-
graphs I am currently making that document Superfund sites, or toxic contam-
ination sites across the US in a series titled → Sites Unseen. But these imag- → The EPA states that: «The Superfund is
es come out of an archive of data and user contributed texts and photographs the federal program that investigates
that shaped my understanding of the Superfund process and has lead me to and cleans up the most complex
uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous
my locations.
waste sites in the country.»
My collaboration with Stefani Bardin began at Eyebeam Art + Technology Cen-
ter last Fall. I am a fellow and Stefani a resident artist. We knew each other
prior to starting at Eyebeam and a friendship is always an excellent starting
place for collaboration. I had created a project called «Demolition Drugstore»
a few years back, which was essentially a workshop to deconstruct and re-
make personal care products in the context of understanding the history of the
chemical industry and the toxic contamination that we are exposed to and pro-
ducing through consumption of household goods. I had wanted to revisit the
work and grow it. I also was looking for a collaborator since I believe collabo-
ration benefits social practice, becomes a microcosm of the social context for
the work, that is not possible when one works solo. Brooke Singer: Sites Unseen.
Stefani’s research into food policy and technologies was intriguing to me and Hudson River PCBs, NY, 2010.
we immediately saw overlap in our thinking. There were literal overlaps too;
the chemical industry supports the production of both food and cosmetics al-
though people tend to think of the things we put in our bodies as distinct from
those products we put on our bodies or around our homes. This separation
is false and we believe one of the main strengths of our research is tying dif-
ferent bodies of knowledge together into a connected network of operators.
We have invited many people to work with us in the kitchen from disciplin-
ary diverse areas who bring specialized points of view and who work from in-
sulated occupational areas: industrial chemists, high school art and science
teachers, a chocolatier, a fragrance maker, a historian of American nutrition,
among others.
There are many «buzz words» that persist in new media arts practice and arts
practice in general including collaboration, participation, interactive. These
200 201

words lack meaning since they are so broadly defined and so frequently used.
Or, perhaps a more generous perspective, these words provide us with the op-
portunity to dialogue and constantly redefine their meaning through practice.
The utterance of the word «art» itself produces the same tension.

< renate  > Yes I agree, the words collaboration, participation, and interactive,
are concepts that are thrown around by curators and theorists these days and
your suggestion that these words may be grounds for construction sites for
artists in that they «provide us with the opportunity to dialogue and constant-
ly redefine their meaning through practice» resonates with my own creative
thinking and practice.
In 2003 Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle wrote in Surface Tension: Problemat-
ics of Site specifically about the relationship between practice and the «site»
of its reception. → → «And how does artistic practice position itself in relation to notions of public space and the complexity of
In my own work, Private Secrets / Public Lies perhaps best exemplifies the gen- audience? In this sense, «site» might function as an operative term through which to gauge practice – it is
erative nature of the inter-relationship between the development of conceptu- both the physical location of presentation and the intrinsic negotiations such presentation entails.» (p. 10)
al framework, practice, and «site» of reception and how the flux of those three
factors helps to determine the flow of the project. As an installation «site» in
2003, within Cornell University’s Tjaden Gallery, I installed a «collaborative,
participatory installation» where two zones of action were positioned each
side of a moveable wall. The project at that time I called Secrets and Tales.
Moving through the first zone, visitors were asked to contribute information
by writing a personal secret. Through observation and discussion with those
who agreed to participate, I noted that some pondered judiciously over what
to write while others invented small anecdotes that were only shadows of the
truth. Once the personal secret was written each contributor was asked to cut
apart the words or phrases of their secret with a pair of scissors and then de-
posit the deconstructed remnants into → The Secret’s Box, an open wooden →
box (with a plexi-glass cover with a slit opening that was only large enough
for a piece of paper to slide through). As the scrambled words were deposited
into the box, layers of content were created. As new secrets were added they
obstructed content that had been added before, like the layers of a geograph-
ic site. By peering into The Secret’s Box random phrases and words were ap-
parent, while others were impossible to decipher. On the opposite side of the
gallery space hidden by the wall were three audio altars upon which tape re-
corders were placed. Visitors to the installation were invited to leave a «sto-
ry» or «tale» that had passed down through their family through time. The re-
cordings were globally diverse, documenting tales from Nigeria, the South of
France, and Japan. In discussions that occurred during the event I was in-
spired by the fact that tensions between present and past memory collided.
While this portion of the project provided impetus for the next stage, I did not
incorporate it into subsequent versions of the project.
Secrets and Tales provided the opportunity to ask questions about the relation- Renate Ferro: The Secret’s Box.
ship between personal intent and public reception. In the process of revision FOMMA, Chiapas, Mexico.
I began to consider how the status of personal information shifted as the ges-
tural performance of writing, filtering, and sorting took place. The Cornell iter-
202 203

ation provided the impetus for conceiving the Internet site, where global con-
stituents with access, could conceivably visit a virtual installation space set up
similarly to the gallery version. Thus the new project, Private Secrets / Public
Lies website was conceived, a conceptual space within which my own writing
about the project could reside with archived descriptions of the project, instal-
lation photographs, and video of subsequent installations that occurred with-
in real space. Additionally, a link to The Secret’s Game allowed online partici-
pants to digitally participate.
It was at this juncture that I was given the opportunity to install Private Secrets /
Public Lies at a digital humanities conference. Unlike the art venue, those in at-
tendance were not primed to participate or «play» a game that would ask them
for information, instead they were expecting to receive information not give it
away. Within a room of digital humanities projects the secret’s box was posi-
tioned adjacent to a computer linked to The Secret’s Game. While willing vis-
itors could write, cut apart, and deposit secretive information into the box in
the real space, they could also virtually play the game that would simultane-
ously be the means to a similar end. The close proximity between the perfor-
mative gestures of the secret’s box and the virtual online game created inter-
esting tensions that prompted me to reconsider proximity.
For the third iteration of Private Secrets / Public Lies in Chiapas, Mexico at the
women’s performance collective FOMMA, → the two zones presented larg- → As an invited performance artist at
er conceptual possibilities for experimentation. The project was installed in a the women’s theater and
three-story multi-purpose space that is both a proscenium stage with bleach- performance collective, FOMMA,
I was asked to create an installation
ers or a conference room where the bleachers acted as steps to the upper lev-
within the public space of their
el of the building. On this upper tier, the women of FOMMA make and serve
performance center during
regional meals for guests to their center and locals surf the net in a small com- a conference where attendees
puter lab. The Secret’s Box was installed on the first floor of FOMMA. The rich included FOMMA members, digital
colors and warm light of the building provided an amazing environment for humanities specialists from
this portion of the project. Three computers each set to the online version of The Consortium of Humanities
the secrets game were available for users to play. The indigenous cultures of Centers and Institutes as well as
Chiapas and the charged technological gaps realized both by the poor Inter- performance scholars from
the Hemispheric Institute for
net reception and the language barriers between the attendees created ten-
Performance and Politics.
sions with unrealized solutions in the online version of this project. However,
the performative gestures of conceiving, writing, cutting apart, filtering, and
archiving secrets in the real space was realized quite successfully.
Conceptually, the project was to highlight comparative differences between
how personal information is handled in real space as opposed to virtual space.
Within the gestural performative space of the personal secret or the public
spheres of digital technology is it possible to tell the whole story or what some
may believe to be the verifiable truth? How do layers of hidden and or re-
vealed content in both the site-specific and remote parts of Private Secrets /
Public Lies represent the dispersion, illusion, and the innuendo that may be
potentially misunderstood or misinterpreted in personal information. More im-
portantly at this juncture was the obvious digital divide that the culturally rich
but incredibly economically impoverished region of Chiapas presented.
The on-going construction over time of the real performance «site,» the virtu- Renate Ferro: The Secret’s Box. Installation, FOMMA, Chiapas, Mexico.
204 205

ally accessible online game, and the archive of materials associated with the
entire project provided an expanded site that went beyond any imaginings
that I could have had for Private Secrets / Public Lies. Maria Miranda calls the
formulation of this expanded site «unsitely» where production and reception
go beyond the limits of traditional approaches to public art. Miranda also iden-
tifies «uncertain practices» of media art «that position themselves in relation
to the mediated spaces they work with and within.»
Brooke, your work within the collective Preemptive Media situates itself be-
tween the real sites of public urban space, the workshop, an online website
and in the case of The Counter Kitchen the spaces of YouTube. I am curious
if you think as I do that the tensions between situating artistic projects within
spaces that may or may not be designated as specifically art venues influenc-
es and changes not only the reception of the piece but how the work changes
over time from one iteration to another. Like you I also never «finish» projects
but some certainly fade and others take on new life.

< brooke  > To address your questions I will return to Stefani and my project,
→ The Counter Kitchen. You can see that through the demonstrations we are → See: http://www.thecounterkitchen.org/main/s
identifying popular food and personal products (ice cream, fragrance, choc-
olate, baby lotion, Gatorade, Pop Tarts) that in turn we are reverse engineer-
ing in public and theatrical settings. The approach is a mash-up of a cooking
show and a DIY instructable (sic). We design the events for a live audience
(typically small, less than 20) and document all aspects for a much larger (in
numbers and duration) online audience as you do in Private Secrets / Public
Lies. Like my previous work, this project is a platform (or foundation, starting
point) from which an audience can easily involve themselves and help to gen-
erate or develop content.
The first part of the demo is information heavy and focused on deconstruc-
tion: what are the ingredients in the target product, where do they come from,
how are they made, what is their function and environmental or health im-
pacts? From there we turn to the hands-on segment in which we (often joined
by an invited guest expert) remake the chosen item with common, easy to pro-
nounce and procure ingredients. Every participant gets a sample to take home
and a recipe. We hope these recipes provide a starting point for other exper- Brooke Singer: The Counter Kitchen. Brooke Singer: The Counter Kitchen.
imentation. At the very least, when someone shops for this item, s/he will be Devotion to Lotion workshop with Rachel Winard. Possibilities & Cacao workshop with Daniel Sklaar
more closely reading the label. Through the process we introduce topics like from Fine & Raw Chocolate.
Confidential Business Information (or trade secrets), the ever-present soy in-
gredients in most commercially produced foods and the status of regulation
and testing in US chemical and food markets.
In describing these several projects – that are fairly inextricable from each
other – I have emphasized format. On the one hand I have the static art ob-
ject (the photographs) that utilize beauty as a mechanism to lure and produce
a slight shock (this location cannot possibly be toxic?). And on the other ex-
treme, I am cooking in the kitchen in front of a live audience with chocolatiers
and perfumers.
From my perspective the methods of inquiry satisfy different personal needs
206 207

for my continued learning and knowing. The motivation, however, is about en-
gaging new audiences and finding ways to break down distances (between
my audience and me, between forms of knowledge and publics, between
agents of change and the disempowered). And, as with most social practice,
I desire (whether made obvious or not) change. The multiple approaches are
in some ways like casting many nets and hoping that just one might catch the
big one.

< renate  > In your use of the performance space of the workshop and the me-
diated space of YouTube, information and discussion is nurtured and encour-
aged to flourish for both you and your audience. You want to incite change,
while also allowing the documentation of what has transpired to live on to ac-
tivate and engage viewers and potential participants. Private Secrets / Pub-
lic Lies is an example of a digital media / new media project that has contin-
ued to live on through its web-based presence. Situating this project in both
a real space and the space of the Internet distinguishes it from projects that
exist solely in real three-dimensional space especially if that space has been
zoned as an art «institution.»
In Chiapas, Mexico the two zones of the project were installed amidst a po-
litical and cultural environment where nutrition and living conditions created
tensions where unrealized solutions pushed the conceptual edges of the proj-
ect. While the website documents and archives the installation, The Secret’s
Game allows remote users to continue to add to the project.
Over the past ten years, my work in digital and new media art has helped me
expand and embrace a broader perspective in envisioning the potential for
the reception of this kind of work in places that the public would ordinarily not
expect «art.» In Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New In-
stitution, Ned Rossiter discusses the complications of the word «institution»
and its double-sided problems. On the one hand the art «institution» is an of-
ficial delivery transport of trends, taste, and exchange for the global art econ-
omy where directors, curators, and boards determine the seasons’ genius. In
the case of alternative artist spaces, these «institutions» act as optional sys-
tems that undermine the officially controlled regulations of bigger brother. → → Ned Rossiter: Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions.
However, what happens when the «art» project is delivered outside the realms The Institute of Network Cultures. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006.
of the «art institution.» During the Chiapas, Mexico, I was hosted by FOMMA
(translated as Strength of Maya Woman). The women of FOMMA support a
theater troop of Mayan women, while managing a community center. FOMMA
provides a refuge within a region where malnutrition and poor living standards
are the norm. The performance troop focuses on education and communi-
ty building. As actors and playwrights they educate their constituents on the
rights of indigenous women, literacy, ecology, cultural survival, health and ed-
ucational issues among many others.
Originally an experiment questioning the relationship between personal intent
and public reception, my project was thrust into uncertain conceptual territo-
ry within the walls of FOMMA, a politically activated space. While I installed
the performative The Secret’s Box on the ground floor logically where perfor-
208 209

mances were staged, I situated the three computers accessing the Internet
site on the top floor adjacent to a computer lab of refurbished computers
where local children were able to access the Internet. Despite the incompati-
bility of the Internet connection and the gaps in language accessibility, Private
Secrets / Public Lies was thrust from a social experiment questioning the rela-
tionship between personal intent and public reception to a broader platform.
Within the context of a culturally and politically charged environment the ten-
sions between the real and the virtual pushed the conceptual premise of the
project further.
Brooke, your work in inviting specialists to collaborate with → The Counter →
Kitchen, in a workshop setting at Eyebeam, engages special experts to share
knowledge within the context of an art and technology research setting. Con-
sequently, by uploading the demonstration/workshops you are expanding the
workshop to reach the general public and politically engage and educate will-
ing YouTube participants. Are there other recent projects that you are doing
that use both the «sites» of real space and virtual online venues? Also, I was
curious if new tactical responses came from the simultaneous «sites» and if
that in turn affected other ongoing work?

< brooke  > The tension you speak of between your content and the reception
of your participants at FOMMA remind me of my earlier experiences with The
Counter Kitchen. The Counter Kitchen grew out of my research and work on the
issue of Superfund. I realized that often people would glaze over when I started
talking about toxic contamination sites and the seemingly obscure and foreign- Brooke Singer: The Counter Kitchen.
sounding chemicals. People felt removed, even though one in four Americans A participant at Holiday Mixer, Eyebeam
live within four miles of a Superfund site in the US. In parallel with document- Art + Technology Center.
ing Superfund landscapes, I felt compelled to initiate a project that more direct-
ly implicated people and gave a hands-on entry to the complex and far-reach-
ing issues.
→ The Superfund online archive and the photographic series consider our re- → See: http://www.bsing.net/sites_unseen.html
lationships to our environment and the ways in which land use decisions are
made. Because the framework I have chosen is Superfund, this work is ul-
timately about public policy and the ways in which government (hopefully in
concert with local communities) works to identify, cleanup and redevelop sites
that are rendered hazardous through industrial, military and (less frequently)
individual activities. From the Superfund365.org archive, I have culled exem-
plary sites to photograph that underscore a pattern of (mis)use to show that cir-
cumstances that at first appear extreme or odd are, in fact, part of a larger pat-
tern or status quo. In total, I see this work as an alternative history to the United
States as it traces the development and confluence of industries, economies,
ecologies, land use and environmental health over time. It is a form of archae-
ology or learning from the past to reconsider the present in order to shape the fu-
ture. It is a thinking project or a learning project, and less of a doing project.
To engage a larger audience (and address the problem of detachment I was
seeing), I turned to the medicine cabinet as my next site. Could I link the toxic
waste sites directly to the home? Could I link signature Superfund chemicals
210 211

to the personal space of the home or even body? Ultimately, this was not very
hard to do. Some examples: One of Colgate Total Toothpaste’s active ingre-
dients is triclosan, a classified pesticide. Any product that is blue (mouthwash,
toothpastes, aftershaves etc) is more likely than not using Blue 1, a derivative
of coal tar or a ubiquitous Superfund contaminate. By highlighting the ingredi-
ents of personal care products (and eventually including food items with The
Counter Kitchen), I could literally connect every household and ultimately ev-
ery body to toxic waste sites that exist «outside of us.»
This short project treatise outlines the historical background and political im-
petus for this work. It is a summary of my research from which all actions Brooke Singer: Sites Unseen.
(workshops, installations, dialogue) and media content (website, videos, data US Radium Corporation. Orange, NJ, 2010.
visualizations) emerge.
Industrial chemistry is a 20th century phenomenon. During World War I, mili-
tary demand for war gas was a great boon for the burgeoning industry. But, in
1925, with the signing of the Geneva Protocol that banned chemical warfare,
the chemical industry had to look for other markets. The production of nerve gas
(a phosphorous-containing chemical) gave way to a new line of insecticides
and the chlorine used in weapons such as phosgene and mustard gas became
feedstock for newly designed solvents, PCBs and, eventually, plastics.
The chemical industry really took off after World War II. In the United States,
synthetic organic chemical production has grown more than thirty-fold since
1940. Today industry produces billions of tons of chemicals per year of approx-
imately 90,000 substances. These man-made chemicals are the foundation of
our built environment. They form our plastics, cosmetics, household cleaners,
pharmaceuticals, resins, pesticides, food packaging, paper, clothing, flame-
retardants, electronics, solvents, paint, automobile parts, mattresses, lumber, Brooke Singer: Sites Unseen.
pigments, refrigeration, detergents, PVC, silicone, dry cleaning, disinfectants, Tower Chemical. Clermont, FL, 2010.
lubricants – the list is truly endless.
Many of these chemicals and the byproducts produced during their life cycle
are stable and persist in the environment. These types of chemicals are said
to bio-accumulate (or build-up in bodies over time) and bio-magnify (increase
in concentration as they move up the food chain). Chemicals can travel great
distances on currents of wind and water, making remote regions like the Arc-
tic just as susceptible to contamination.
New research demonstrates that some of these pollutants, even at very low
doses, can cause serious health problems. Previously it was thought that de-
creasing the concentration of a substance would mitigate its impact. Dilution is
no longer seen as the pollution solution. Timing of exposure is crucial and sen-
sitivity is particularly high when exposure occurs in utero or early development.
For many years, cancer was the primary health concern. Today, laboratory
studies and wildlife observations demonstrate that chemical dangers are ex-
tensive. Chemical exposures disrupt endocrine, reproductive, immune and Brooke Singer: Sites Unseen.
nervous systems as well as contribute to cancer and other diseases. Quanta Resources. Pittston, PA, 2009.
In its first scientific statement published in 2009, The Endrocrine Society – an
international body with 14,000 members founded in 1916 – stated: «Results
from animal models, human clinical observations, and epidemiological stud-
212 213

ies converge to implicate EDCs [endocrine-disrupting chemicals] as a signifi- diverse audiences. Many thanks for sharing your work with me. It has been
cant concern to public health.» an insightful journey into your creative practice.
The United States government does not require manufacturers to prove a
chemical is safe before use. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) < brooke  > I think we have really come to a point in which the real and the vir-
can only enforce testing if there is substantial evidence that a chemical is dan- tual are so embroiled that it is very difficult to differentiate them. It’s perhaps
gerous. Therefore, only some 200 of the 90,000 chemicals already in circula- a constant reverberation in which one realm is dominant but both are always
tion have been tested for health impacts. In response, many groups and con- present. I think both of our work speaks to this. And we are finding new modes
cerned citizens are promoting the precautionary principle, which states that of working and new audiences due to this reality. Thank you for inviting me
the manufacture of certain products should cease even when there are only into this dialogue and it has been a great pleasure to find our common ground
hypothetical or untested risks. This places the burden of proof on the industry, as artists together.
not citizens, to show that a substance is 100% safe before use. Testing chem-
icals for safety can take years, even decades, significantly slowing down the
passage from lab to commerce and reducing company profits and competi-
tiveness. Industry believes overhauling the regulatory system portends their
death and the chemical lobby has fought tirelessly to preserve the out-dated
and lenient Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.
Some scientists are creating new frameworks, citing the failure of the scientific
method alone to sufficiently protect human health and ecological effects. Fun-
towicz and Ravetz, for example, have introduced postnormal science, which
is useful when facts are uncertain, the stakes are high and decisions are ur-
gent. These scientists encourage dialogue and participation with a full range
of stakeholders since scientific objectivity cannot provide all that is needed for
decision-making on high-risk issues. I create projects like The Counter Kitch-
en to provide platforms for instigating, supporting and promoting this type of
dialogue and participation. I’m hoping this background research gives you
more insight into the impetus of my tactical creative projects.

< renate  > Thanks so much for talking about the background research that has
prompted your collaboration in The Counter Kitchen and your Superfund pho-
tographs. Private Secrets / Public Lies was also grounded in research-based
work. The influence of digital culture, most specifically viral technology, has
enabled the intrigue of private secrets and lies to legitimately become the en-
abler of fast-paced information to network out and rampantly spiral out of con-
trol. This project was inspired by international news reports whose origins were
in the realm of personal relationships: Catholic priest’s sexual abuse scandal,
chemicals of mass destruction controversy (Valerie Plane), Bush illegal wire-
taps, and the private lives of heads of state (Bill Clinton) and royalty (Princess
Diana).
What I did in designing Private Secrets / Public Lies and what you have done
similarly in The Counter Kitchen is to situate charged information within an
accessible and playful context. Within the theatrical settings of your work-
shops and my collaborative installations, consciousness-raising can take
place. Whether about the rampant flow of personal information and privacy
into the public realm as in the case of Private Secrets / Public Lies, or informa-
tion about toxicity within the personal and public spaces of our health and en-
vironment, as artists we are able to contextualize serious contemplations for
214 215

in conversation: Deborah Kelly with Deborah Kelly is a Sydney-based artist whose

works have been seen around Australia, in
Bec Dean is the Co-Director of Performance
Space. She is a curator and writer who trained as
Bec Dean the Singapore and Venice Biennales, and elsewhere. a visual artist. Prior to joining Performance Space as
Her collaborative artwork with Tina Fiveash, Hey, Associate Director, Bec was curator at the Australian
hetero! has been shown in public sites from Sydney Centre for Photography (2005 – 2007), exhibition
to Glasgow. She is a founding member of the art manager at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art
gang boat-people.org, which has been making (2002 – 2005) and held various positions at John
public work around race, nation, borders and history Curtin Gallery (1997 – 2001).
since 2001. Her cross-media work considering the Bec was Chair of both the Artrage Festival in Perth
rise of religiosity in the public sphere, commissioned (2003 – 2005), and the Young People and the Arts
by the Museum of Contemporary Art, included public Panel of ArtsWA (2001 – 2002). She has also served
service announcement videos in train stations and on the selection panel for the Bundanon Trust
projections onto clouds over Sydney Harbour. Residency Program (2007 – 2010). She has been
Deborah Kelly and I are framing this conversation within a series of emails.
The participatory memorial she devised for the 20th a freelance writer on contemporary art and
It has been decidedly impossible for both of us to physically meet about this anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, interdisciplinary performance practices since 1999.
«unsitely» proposition from Maria Miranda. It’s fitting, I guess that we conduct Tank Man Tango, was performed in 20 cities on Her curatorial interests span site -specific installation,
this dialogue remotely and electronically. This is the way that we met. 4 June 2009. Her work won the 2012 Albury Art new media, photomedia, sound and socially and
About ten years ago, I emailed Deborah Kelly about a group that she was in- Prize, the 2009 Fisher’s Ghost Award, the 2009 politically engaged practice.
volved with: boat-people.org. I was working as an exhibition manager and a Screengrab International New Media Art Award and
the 2001 Sydney Mardi Gras Art Prize. Artspace
freelance writer in Perth, Western Australia when I started receiving artwork
will publish a monograph about her work at the end
from a Sydney-based collective, in the form of very smartly designed down-
of 2012. Deborah Kelly is represented by Gallery
loadable PDF posters. Their most well-known image was of a tall-masted ship Barry Keldoulis.
against blue skies and blue seas, with boat-people.org emblazoned below. I
later learned that this poster was the art work of Kelly, who started her career
as a political cartoonist and newspaper designer. At the time, I was interested
in how artists and activists were responding to the (ongoing, in hindsight) cur-
rent of anti-immigration sentiment and new policies related to «mandatory de-
tention» for refugees, «offshore processing» and «border protection» in Aus-
tralia. boat-people.org created a very clear image with this work, of a country
primarily comprised of immigrants and their ancestors. The message was a
party-politically unaligned statement, and was downloaded and held aloft by
members of the public in protests around the country.
In the interceding years, Deborah Kelly has continued working with boat-peo-
ple.org, and on her solo practice which has been installed in major and minor
institutions and commercial galleries, projected inside railway stations, pro-
jected onto clouds in Sydney and in Singapore, attached to household gates
and performed on the steps of the Opera House. Kelly’s use of the internet
has remained constant, but it is sometimes the site of information or instruc-
tion, sometimes a gallery and sometimes the locale for an aggregate of re-
mote actions to be framed together.

< bec dean  > Deborah, I was hoping that we could talk about a collaborative
work that you made in 2009, to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square massacre, Tank Man Tango. This was a complex work in
terms of the collaborators involved and the destinations and sites for the work.
Could you talk through the process of making Tank Man Tango to illuminate
our readers?
216 217

< deborah kelly  > Isn’t it funny how much context supplies in terms of the res-
onance of a work, and then how laborious it is to spell it all out? Goodness.
You mean from the very beginning? Have you got all day?

< bec  > Not really, but I think it’s important to note that the call for participants
in this performance project was first issued as an instructional video work
performed by Teik-Kim Pok online, → before it was ever performed in public →
space. The dance was choreographed by Jane McKernan and filmed by Su-
mugan Sivanesan. You also worked with translators to make the work avail-
able to speakers of English as well as Mandarin, Cantonese and German. I
think this was crucial to the rapid dissemination of the work and its intention
as a shared memorial on 4 June. Do you see the role of online media as piv-
otal with Tank Man Tango?

< deborah  > Yes, of course. YouTube was the primary destination for the video
instructions, but it’s not like it really «went viral,» as ad people love to say and
think, as if the Internet can stand in for human connection. It was absolutely
critical to have the light, cheap resource of the instructions and explanation
online, but at least half the work was building people-to-people networks for
its dissemination. It asked a lot of people: time, concentration, organisation.
Practice, quietness, a collective act with strangers! So they had to feel like it
was correct and appropriate: a vigil, an artwork, a peoples’ memorial. A mon-
ument made of people dancing. And it seemed to me that it was important it
be surrounded by as much silence as possible, that it maintain a certain open-
endedness, which is kind of counter to the Internet’s default RGB flash chatter.

< bec  > That’s very true of the work, and I hadn’t thought about it before now,
but you really did cut the potential for that «chatter» on the website for →  Tank →
Man Tango. It’s not interactive. There’s no buttons to «like» it. There’s no twit-
ter feed. It shares the kind of silence of older work, like boat-people.org’s Boat
People image the video is clear and instructive. It gives the user the tools to
participate, or not. Teik-Kim Pok learning the steps of
Tank Man Tango, 2009.
< deborah  > I have to interject! It only now occurs to me how CONTROLLING Photo: Deborah Kelly.
that seems. It’s true that the invitation is to do this actual, already-conceived
action, and doesn’t offer people the opportunity to change it, so the capacity
for interaction is limited in that way. Although in the end, people really DID do
their own versions, some very surprising.
Tank Man Tango. Invitation, 2009.
< bec > Then when people did participate, you were able to create a space Photo: Deborah Kelly.
there for the actions to be collated. Can you talk about where and by whom
→  Tank Man Tango was performed, and what became of the documents of →
these actions?

< deborah  > I was in contact to varying degrees with people who were organ-
ising their own versions of the monument in Sydney, Melbourne, Daylesford,
218 219

Perth, Brisbane, Singapore, Weimar, Leipzig, Bristol, St Catharines, Warrnam-

bool, Mexico City, Erfurt, Brussels, Athens, and Tucson, and with people who
TRIED to organise it in Taichung in Taiwan, Seoul and Barcelona (those peo-
ple ended up doing small, private, undocumented events).
There were some offshoots that I didn’t know about until after: artists in Biele-
feld, schoolchildren in central NSW, the Leah Stein Dance Company performed
it in Philadelphia, the Fleshy Thud company performed it in Peterborough, Can-
ada, and some very unusual Christians organised it somewhere in the middle
of the US, with the subtitle «Dancing on the grave of Maoist atheism.»
The Brisbane-based dance artist Suzon Fuks organised for it to genuinely
happen online, and linked up groups to make the memorial actually together
through streaming across continents and time-zones in Richmond, Belgrade,
Auckland, Hobart, Dunquerque, Singapore and Brussels.
People documented themselves and sent me photos, or just put themselves
up on YouTube in a kind of feedback loop, which I loved. I spent DAYS goo-
gling it, and that’s how I found out about the events I wasn’t directly involved
in. I did plan to make a book, but instead I made a little documentary, with Su-
mugan Sivanesan, connecting most of the groups and trying to tell the story of
why and how and who. It has been shown at festivals in Brussels, Budapest,
Paris, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Marseilles, around Australia and Brazil. → → See: http://www.vimeo.com/24423785 and http://www.reeldance.org.au/moving-image-collection/mic?sobi2
I have to admit that I have allowed the website of the project to lapse. I was Task=sobi2Details&sobi2Id=1350576
anxious that it might become a kind of monument to a monument, and I don’t
know how to think about that. I’m still figuring out what process to apply to it to
make it live, useful, and properly about itself. I hope to learn a way to archive
the memorial correctly. I mean, so it stays available and usable, (and alive!)
as long as it remains relevant.

< bec  > Yes, we do tend to take cyberspace for granted as a space in which in-
formation that will continue to remain alive, but that’s just not the case. You
do have to tend to it.

< deborah  > I heard Melbourne artist Tom Nicholson articulate the issue with
memorials very succinctly, though I wish I could remember his exact words.
He spoke about how so much effort goes into building a memorial, all the nec-
essary civic body agreements, the political prioritisation, and public commis-
sioning discussions, but that once a memorial is made, it stops memory, even
while purporting to honour it.
Some young artists in Zagreb are working on translating the Tiananmen me- Tank Man Tango; Leipzig, Singapore and Sydney.
morial into Croatian as I write, (April 2012) and plan on teaching the steps in
dance classes later in the year, in a way to keep this memorial going, but also
as a catalyst for thinking about the dire political situation there, I imagine. So
that’s one of the challenges, I think: making an archive that doesn’t mummify
what is being preserved, but keeping it so it can stay open.
My wish is that this work be truly monumental and commemorative as well as
agile, in flux, and teeming.
220 221

< bec > I participated in the Tiananmen memorial that was performed for 90 min-
utes on the plaza of the Opera House in Sydney, the experience of which was
almost trance-like for me by the end, as I was determined not to take a break.
Staging memorials and quiet acts of protest in Sydney’s tourist hotspots has
been really important for you over the years. I can think of at least five proj-
ects off the top of my head where you have actively sought to give these con-
texts to your work and the work of → boat-people.org. The recent boat-peo- → Boat-people.org is Zehra Ahmed, Safdar Ahmed,
ple.org project, a kind of rally with peoples’ heads wrapped in the flag (2010) Stephanie Carrick, Dave Gravina, Katie Hepworth,
was staged on the steps of the Opera House → in Federation Square in Mel- Jiann Hughes, Deborah Kelly, Enda Murray, →
Pip Shea, Sumugan Sivanesan and (sometimes)
bourne, outside the GPO in Perth, on the (in)famous walk bridge in Brisbane,
Jamil Yamani.
in Kakadu, and in peoples’ gardens and kitchens in various parts of the coun- See: http://www.boat-people.org/
try. Can you talk about the strategies you employed for this work regarding its
online presence?

< deborah  > Well, a lot of the people I work with in the boat-people.org group
helped very significantly with the Tiananmen memorial, and participated in it.
So the simple strategy of putting instructions online and then asking people to
use them, to go somewhere iconic of the place they’re in, and document them-
selves performing that action seemed very familiar to us all. (And of course,
it’s not as if that kind of distributed work ethos began with the Tiananmen
work, either). And as with the Tiananmen Memorial, some of the distribution of
that call to participate went through really lo-res social media; Facebook, text
messages, emails to our haphazard «list.»
When I was trying to find funding to make the Tiananmen work, I foolishly ap-
plied to the Australia Council for the Arts, and thankfully I was unsuccessful.
Thankfully, I say now, (though it was very hard financing it myself) because I
later realised how critical to the work’s sincerity or truthfulness it is that it be
a gift, from people to people. Without any state involvement or obligation. But
that’s not the point of bringing this up: when I approached them, the represen-
tative of the funding body suggested they would only be interested if the work
was predicated on locative media or mediated through some further techno-
logical apparatus. That struck me as absurdly technofetishistic; something I
find murderously dull. Muffled Protest. Opera House, Sydney, 2010.
The fact of the means of transmission is almost immaterial, to me, possibly Photo: boat-people.org
partly as a reaction to said fetishism. But I know I’m also wrong: I’m not that
interested in the means, in the technology itself, but I also have to acknowl-
edge that these works are entirely children of the Internet. But it’s just the air
we breathe, you know? We’re not looking at the air, we’re just… breathing.
I need to acknowledge that the works made this way aren’t simply passing
through, being transmitted. The means of distribution are also a destination,
in an important sense, a steadfast witness to this dispersed intimacy, this em-
bodied history, this collectivity. As durational works, their space-in-time is infi-
nitely expanded, as is the public sphere they partake in, at least theoretically.
But the seemingly inherent characteristics of online-ness itself, ubiquity and
eternity, are just effects of a possibly momentary political expediency. As
seems apparent from Google’s compromise with the Chinese state, (and pret-
222 223

ty well every state’s attacks on Wikileaks), information’s desire for freedom

was merely a marketing slogan. I mean to say, the idea of work online being
simultaneously everywhere, and forever, seems increasingly precarious.

< bec  > Do you think the → Muffled Protest or Tiananmen Memorial actions → See: http://www.vimeo.com/15246828
could have happened without these particular modes of distribution?

< deborah  > We wouldn’t have thought of these works, singly or together, if we

had to just ring everyone up and ask them to do this act at this time in this
place. (though I know that magnificent international actions and artworks and
indeed movements were actually organised before the web shrank the world
so radically. Think of ACT UP! the 888 campaign! the civil rights movements,
Stonewall, FEMINISM.)
I guess what I’m trying to get to is that it’s only because an idea has traction,
has meaning and resonance, that disseminating it makes something happen
in the analogue world and the other realms of being. At the same time, it is
necessary and satisfying to know the work slips between and across the vir-
tual and analogue worlds, inhabiting them nimbly, contingently, leaving trac-
es of pixel dust.
Boaties were so speechless with dismay about the bilateral xenophobia of the
2010 election campaign that none of our ideas could address it directly. So
the Muffled Protest (the work’s formal name) is what we came up with instead.
It’s a work I keep thinking about. I still wish more people could see it, because
I am curiously attached to it. I can’t put it away, fold it into memory, yet, per-
haps because understanding it, categorising it, continues to elude me. I know
it «looks like art» more than any of boat-people.org’s other actions or works
or events or whatever it is we call what we do. But does that mean it’s in bad
faith, as an act in the world? I know that’s not a question particularly related
to the media focus of this exchange, but it is a far more pressing one for me
than any other considerations.
Muffled Protest.
Photo: Tanja Milbourne.
224 225

in conversation: Barbara Campbell Barbara Campbell has performed in Australia,

with Norie Neumark
In May 2011, Norie Neumark had a conversation with Barbara Campbell about
her work 1001 nights cast. Norie is a sound artist who is particularly interest-
ed in voice, both in her media artwork and in her research writing. Barbara is
a visual artist who works primarily in performance. Their conversation contin-
ued over several weeks, alternating between email and Skype.
Before presenting an edited transcript, Norie briefly introduces Barbara’s ex-
traordinary project that began on 21 June 2005 and continued until 17 March
2008.
Europe and the USA, in museums, galleries, public
buildings, photographs, on film, video, radio, and
the Internet, in silence and with words, still and
moving, since 1982. The Department of
Performance Studies at Sydney University produced
a survey exhibition of her 1997 – 2001 performances
with an accompanying catalogue, Flesh Winnow
(Power Publications, 2002) and she is now an
Associate Artist with the Department. In 1994 she
was awarded the NSW Women and Arts Fellowship
and in 2004 she received an Australia Council
Fellowship to develop and produce her online
durational performance work, 1001 nights cast.
See: http://www.1001.net.au/
Norie Neumark is a sound / radio and media artist.
For over 25 years, she has been making
radiophonic works that have been commissioned
and broadcast in Australia and internationally.
She collaborates with media artist Maria Miranda as
Out-of-Sync. Their media art works have been
exhibited in Australia and internationally. Norie
works particularly with voice, both in her media art
work and her academic research. In her recent
co-edited volume (Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson,
and Theo Van Leeuwen) Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in
Digital Arts and Media (MIT Press, 2010) she
explores theoretical approaches to voice and
the performativity of voice in media art. She also
co-edited and wrote the introduction to At a Distance:
Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet
(MIT Press, 2005). Norie is Professor and Chair in
Media and Director of the Centre for Creative Arts at
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
See: http://www.out-of-sync.com/

→ → Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast. Frame story.

So opened Barbara Campbell’s 1001 nights cast networked performance

project. The title played with the Tales from 1001 Nights (The Arabian Nights) In a faraway land a gentle man dies.
and with the fact that the net cast of this performance involved a webcast
His bride is bereft. She travels across continents
and a cast of (by the end) 243 writers, who submitted their stories online for
Barbara to perform each night. looking for a reason to keep living.
Each morning Barbara would read newspaper reports of events in the Mid-
dle East to find a brief text, which she painted and put online as a prompt for
people to write their own story (no longer than 1001 words). They had all day Every night at sunset she is greeted by
to write and then post their response-story on the site before sunset at local a stranger who gives her a story
time, wherever she was located. She then told the story live for the webcam.
Her «audience» saw only her mouth, giving prominence to the voicing, which
to heal her heart and continue with her journey.
story-telling involves. The webcast opened with a view of Barbara’s tongue,
pierced and wounded – like the bride’s heart – with a numbered tongue stud
She does so for 1001 nights.
that signalled the number of the day/performance.
With the death of a loved one as its point of departure, there was a deliber-
ate play with ephemerality in the project. The performances could be viewed
live only once, as they were happening. Barbara travelled the globe so that
this live sunset storytelling could involve writers (and viewers) in different time-
zones and locations. While the performances were ephemeral, the written sto-
ries remained, archived on the site.

The conversation begins on email …

226 227

< norie neumark  › Barbara, it seems particularly appropriate for us to have this

conversation over the Internet, starting now via email, given that’s the way you
received the stories, which you performed for → 1001 nights cast. Can you be- →
gin by talking about the experience for you of performing the stories over the
Internet?

< barbara campbell  > Stories, conversations and performances «over the In-
ternet» take many forms. The Internet is creating diverse performance prac-
tices. We know this even if we don’t consciously acknowledge ourselves as
performers. We email, we download, we upload, we game alone and with oth-
ers, we stream, we podcast. In 2005 when I started streaming 1001 nights
cast, we were less familiar with some of these modalities than we are now but
nonetheless, even back then, I was intensely aware of the difference between
telling a story in real time to an unseen audience who nonetheless shared the
space of my webcast time, and having that story published online in the site
archive immediately after its telling … In the design of the project I insisted Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast.
that the telling was a once off: the telling, or I should say MY telling, was done The challenge of healing.
once in real time. If you weren’t there to hear it, then that’s just the way it is, Writing prompt for performance #1; watercolour;
June 21, 2005.
you could read it and do your own telling if you so chose. And that’s because
Photo: Barbara Campbell.
my telling was about something else beyond the story, it was about proof of
life. Your witnessing, through the act of listening, was proof of my existence.
Here I’m conflating the «my» of me the performer/artist and me the character
of the bereft bride whose frame story is written/animated in the Intro to the site.

< norie  > Can you say a bit more about «proof of life» and its role in the work?

< barbara  > It relates to a tenuous connection between performer and audi-

ence – how that was expressed through time and space. One of the charac-
teristics about the webstreaming was that while the audience and I do share a
time, we don’t share a space. It seemed very important to me to maintain this
tension. It harks back to one of the primary inspirations for the work for me,
and that is the terrorists’ technique of hostage-taking. Within the hostage-tak-
ing economy, the hostage as primary bargaining chip, while remaining undis-
coverable (removed in space), must be understood to be alive (co-extensive in Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast.
time). This necessity leads to an embedded «proof of life» message within de- Between now and then.
mand communiqués coming from the hostage-takers. Most often, the «proof Writing prompt for performance #733; watercolour;
June 24, 2007.
of life» takes the form of a video in which the hostage is seen to be reading or
Photo: Barbara Campbell.
showing a headline from a daily newspaper; the logic being that the publica-
tion of the news of the world is beyond the reach of any tampering. So for me,
in dealing with the subject of daily survival, «proof of life» became an impor-
tant design element within the work. This was expressed in a number of ways,
most obviously through the understanding I had with the writers – that I would
supply a writing prompt that had come from that day’s newspaper story and
that they would have to embed it in the story they wrote and that I would read
a few hours later. But it also extended to the relationship between me and the
audience. I wanted the audience to understand the role they played in keep-
228 229
ing me alive through the act of witnessing the telling of the story in real time.
Each night was a declaration for me: I am alive now. But more than that  – that
if you are there to witness that declaration then you are also alive. We are
alive together. We keep each other alive. Ironically, while it was the Internet
that made this kind of temporal sharing possible, it was another characteris-
tic of the Internet that threatened to undermine the simplicity of my intentions,
and that is the sense that everything is «always available at any time» that
we’ve come to expect from this digital life. Many many times during the proj-
ect and since, I’ve been questioned as to why the performances of the stories
are not available online. It seems there’s no such thing now as not being able
to see something. No matter how many times I tried to explain the conceptu-
al importance of real time witnessing, I was always made to feel selfish for not
making the performances downloadable as podcasts. Needless-to-say, I’m
holding my ground on that one. In any case, the stories are still available to
be read on the site. In fact as soon as I performed them, they were archived
as written texts for anyone to read.
< norie  > I completely agree that that mode was crucial to the concept and
ephemerality of the work – far from a «selfish» gesture – I found it very pow-
erful and compelling at the time. Returning to your daily reading of newspa-
pers – in which you read stories about the Middle East – can you say more
about how the Middle East figured in the work? In the context of this book, it
seems to me that it is one of the several sites of the work, along with the site
of your performance and the site of the audience?
< barbara  > Well of course the Middle East is both the literary and geograph-
ic site of the work. The 1001 nights within the title is a clear reference to THE
1001 nights (aka the Arabian Nights) we know from literature. I had long been
thinking about doing a work based on the durational framework of 1001 nights.
I often work with what I call «found durations» (that is, durations that come
with their own logic) … [But] it wasn’t until the invasion of Iraq by the so-called
«coalition of the willing» in 2004 that my earlier reading and thinking around
Scheherazade began to stir. But historically, it went deeper than that. All those
place-names began to appear on our television sets and in our newspapers –
Baghdad, Basra, Babylon – places from what I’d been taught was the Cradle
of Civilization. It seemed to be a stark case of self-destruction, that we were
destroying our own culture. Many of us who were deeply outraged by that war
and the way that it was promulgated «in our name» struggled to find ways
we could respond, especially as all the usual methods had come to nothing.
It was then that Scheherazade woke up. And within that thought, the commit-
ment to performing for 1001 nights was no longer daunting but entirely nec-
essary.
And continues on Skype …
< norie  > To me, your gestures of reading newspapers and the way you paint-
ed prompts from the articles seem to be suggestive of the mediated character
of the Middle East – through media today, through history etc.
< barbara  > Yes, the sort of Middle East that exists in the project is always a
heavily mediated one. I was never in the Middle East when I was performing,
although I had a few writers in Israel and one from Lebanon. Very few writers
were actually located in the Middle East, and I never had any stories come to
me in Arabic or any other Middle Eastern language. That was part of the rea-
son for doing the project – that our perception of the Middle East, for those of
us who live in the West, is very mediated. As you say I was moving around but
only between English speaking countries. I started the project in Paris and I
was looking mostly at the International Herald Tribune, which was taking sto-
ries from the New York Times. So I was getting a particular kind of coverage
about the Middle East. It was only when I went back to Australia and I realised
how much the stories from the Middle East were being shunted to the middle
of the newspaper rather than the front, I realised that even in this kind of glo-
balised media world that geography still holds – if you are closer to the Mid-
dle East geographically, you are going to be more interested in it. It did be-
come important for me to keep going back to the northern hemisphere and
another time zone that is only one hour away from the Middle East rather
than 14 hours, which is what we are [here on the east coast of Australia]. The
coverage was different and the writers were different because I was in their
time zone.
< norie  > Were there other reasons, too, for moving around?
< barbara  > There were other reasons but not as important … I needed to keep
the number of writing hours in any day as long as I could for the benefit of the
writers. So when the days got contracted here I would move to the Northern
Hemisphere where they were longer again. Also I wasn’t just swapping North
South, I was moving further East.
< norie  > When you say geography matters, I’m interested in how that relates
to work that is both on and off the Internet, because I think it really says some-
thing about the Internet that is quite significant and that the idea of the global
can miss. That is something that Maria has been writing about in the first part
of this book – the sense that the physical site of the work, on and off the Inter-
net, actually makes a difference to the work as a whole, including to the audi-
ence. Her ideas seem to fit in with what you say about why you just didn’t want
to podcast things – in your performative work the Internet is not about distribu-
tion it’s about something else?
< barbara  > Well that is particularly true for this project … I don’t know, though,
if we are reinforcing a dichotomy by talking about it like this – like the mind-body
split issue? The space of the Internet is physical as me touching this screen
and being annoyed about how much backlighting I’m getting from the window
230 231

behind the screen, or I continually wipe dust off my keyboard. It is as real as

everything else is real.

< norie  > Yes, I think we actually agree here … when you say that you are in
a physical location – those things are signs of you being in a physical loca-
tion – a «site» …

< barbara  > Yeah. We are never completely on the Internet or in the Internet …
It still occupies the space, the location of physical sited-ness in the world, in
the way that the mind is a part of the body.

< norie  > What about your relationship with your audience during the perfor-
mance?

< barbara  > I think there were a couple of performances in the way that there
were a few audiences as well … The one most easily understood as a per-
formance, that has all the conventions of a performance around it, is the web
stream – the moment when I open the web channel and tell the story live to
an unseen audience. Because there is me as the performer there is a shared
time with an audience and there is what could be called the performance are-
na which is that window that just showed my mouth. But the larger perfor-
mance was the one of the project I «inhabited» so in a way I never felt that I
left that particular performance.

< norie  > Could you say more about what you mean by the project you inhab-
ited or how you inhabited the project?

< barbara  > Well having set up the frame, having determined a certain struc-
ture to the day it was hard to imagine myself outside of that structure. Even
the dream state, the sleep state, was tagged structurally. So when I finished
the performance and the little place holder came up that said → «she sleeps →
now» that was indicating that that was the next stage in the performance that
one couldn’t see, but I was in that stage. The state of sleep was accounted
for in the structure of the work so there was that. There was the reading of the
newspapers. There was the making of the prompt – that was another moment
when I felt … not sure I could call it a performance but it was certainly a mo-
ment of creating a work where I didn’t know how that particular watercolour
would go that day. And then there was the technical performance – getting the
prompt up onto the web and then communicating with an author, writer and
starting their process off. And then there was a lull, but there was always a
part of me thinking and wondering how that writing was going.

< norie  > So, when you talk about the inhabiting of the project that isn’t really
conceptual how you describe it? It’s more … Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast.
Placeholder after each night’s story,
< barbara  > … emotional isn’t it … watercolour on paper, 2005.
Photo: Barbara Campbell.
232 233
< norie  > … or performative. Your whole actual day was organised, brought
into existence around it – where you were going to be at sunset whatever. It
was conceptual but it was more than conceptual. Would you agree?
< barbara  › Yes that’s absolutely true.
< norie  > And I find it just so interesting that idea that you use of inhabiting the
project. You say you are not sure if you can call it a performance but maybe
what you were doing was expanding the idea of performance and recognis-
ing that you were always in it. That is really interesting and it also inflects the
idea of duration as well, don’t you think? Do you see it as a durational work?
< barbara  > At the time, I questioned myself as to whether I could call it a dura-
tional performance. In the sense that the duration was marked by intervals but
I guess in what we are saying or talking about this morning there is that sense
that it was ongoing even at times when I wasn’t conscious of it.
Later …
< barbara  > I was just thinking about the question of duration and performance
and the extent of duration and therefore the extent of the staging of perfor-
mance and remembering back to when I first thought towards this project
thinking about 1001 nights. I don’t think I have ever talked about this but back
in the very early days of putting in the first [funding] application I was actually
thinking about pairing Scheherazade’s art with Anne Boleyn. Because Anne
Boleyn had this durational frame to her life – 1000 days so I was struck by the
1000 days and the 1001 nights. The Anne Boleyn thing fell by the wayside but
I do remember thinking that in both cases there was a sense that the duration
that has been attached to both of those characters is the stage of their lives –
the performance stage of their lives so it is the duration that frames them rath-
er than a physical space and in a sense that is what I am getting at in terms
of never being outside the performance.
< norie  > Yeah, I think that is really important to be able to bring in this ques-
tion of everyday life, or your life as part of a performance, which in this case
it was. To me it fits in perfectly with the idea of unsitely because you are real-
ly seeing the sites of the performance as multiple – the site of your everyday
life where you are inhabiting the project, and then the site of the webcast per-
formance of the story. In a way it is not just about performance of a story, it’s
a bigger performance – Is this what you are saying?
< barbara  > Yes.
< norie  > So the performance of the story and the signalling that you are there
doing other work of performance which includes sleeping is sort of happening
through the Internet. So there is an interplay between those different sites?
< barbara  > Yes, you know I went out of my way to disrupt the expectations
of what a net performance would look like. I didn’t want it to be a kind of just
something that happened on the net or that relied only on the capabilities of
the net to make it function as a performance or function as a project. For in-
stance I didn’t want the website to ignore the more, what would you call it, an-
alogue is not the right word, but the more tactile activities if you like that were
going to be part of the work outside the frame, outside of the screen rela-
tionship. I could have just typed for instance – I could have just typed those
prompts and had them appear inside a window the way everything else does
but I needed to have a kind of activity which was about translation and chance
and you know, a real relationship with a page and so to actually paint those
prompts and then have them digitised for the net seemed important, it certain-
ly gave the site a different look – it signalled something else.
< norie  > Do you want to say any more about why it seemed important?
< barbara  > First of all it was important to me to engage with a daily practice
that was about hand-eye coordination. Watercolour to me also signifies some-
thing about chance – there is something unpredictable about the way water-
colour will go – that unpredictability needed to be part of the project. It was im-
portant that I didn’t have control over everything. That I was willing to adapt
to whatever the chance elements were. The newspapers – I didn’t know what
was going to appear in the newspapers; I didn’t know what sort of story was
going to come out of the prompt. Even though I had set up the meta-structure
of the work, it was important to keep a certain number of elements unpredict-
able. The work needed to reflect something about nature and that tension of
things coming into our lives from outside that aren’t predicable, and we then
take them and try to control them.
Later …
< norie  > Can we return to the locatedness of the audience and the sort of
space they were in or the site that they occupied in relation to you in relation to
the performance and how that really influenced or shaped, or played into your
performance?
< barbara  > I guess the audience for me had to be imagined as I couldn’t see
them. I had to sense them … I had to project an image of an audience into my
own mind – I had to trust that I was telling this story to someone. When I was
in Europe, for instance, I was conscious that I was not telling that story to an
Australian audience, who I had come to rely upon when I was in Australia – I
imagined the Australian audience were tucked up in their winter beds and not
listening … but I still imagined them … in that way.
< norie  > There’s something important in this about the different spaces and
sites of the work … you talk about imagining people in private spaces – a sort
234 235
of one to one experience …
< barbara  > Yes. I was always aware of my own environment – the comput-
er where I was, I similarly imagined people at the other end in their own pri-
vate spaces … very much like the familiar experience of radio … I’ve always
liked that very direct communication between one private space and another.
… I came to rely on the presence of my friend Narelle … nearly always listen-
ing to me … She started to become the Dunyazade character [in the original
1001 nights story], a character that didn’t make much sense to me when I first
read that story … Narelle/Dunyazade became the important ally that I [too]
needed in the chamber who did indeed keep me going. I did need to feel a
sense that there was always an interested listener. And you know, some peo-
ple said they never heard any of the stories and they would say it didn’t mat-
ter because it was all conceptual … But for me [even though] the concept was
still strong, I did need people listening.
Later, back on email …
< norie  > Can we turn next to an «uncertainty» of your practice in general and
in this work? You once described yourself as a «visual artist working primari-
ly in performance.» Can you say a bit more about that – did this work, with its
use of the Internet, change or develop that in any particular way?
< barbara > That description «visual artist working primarily in performance»
does reveal a certain anxiety if not uncertainty: a need to qualify my performance
practice within the traditions/conversations/histories etc. of the visual arts rath-
er than say, theatre arts. Partly this is to do with my «training» through art
schools (initially majoring in printmaking at the undergraduate level, but then
through an academic art history degree and then back at art school within an
equally hybridized studio called Sculpture, Performance, Installation (the «ev-
erything else» studio). At such moments, nomenclature becomes hopelessly
self-parodic. But anyway, more importantly I tend to stress the visual arts link
because I like to prepare audiences for a certain kind of experience that’s not
bound to entertainment (while acknowledging, of course, how many perform-
ers and performance companies are challenging such assumptions from with-
in). The flip side of such uncertainty or anxiety is freedom – a freedom to in-
vent your own conventions …To illustrate – I want to make a piece about the
1001 nights. Well, that work comes with its own self-described duration – 1001
nights. Let’s really test what that means. Let’s treat the fiction as reality. Sure,
Scheherazade is a literary construct, but what if we start from the premise that
she wasn’t. Let’s just see what 1001 nights is as an object of durational intent.
So, back to your question, did 1001 nights cast change my practice as a «vi-
sual artist working primarily in performance»? Well yes, and no. Yes, in that
up to that point I’d not made a performance that could only be accessed on-
line and it certainly revealed to me some previously untapped qualities of what
Internet presence can be. Here I’m thinking of uncertainty in the sense of a
fragility, a tenuousness. The thematic tenuousness of life was for me always
shadowed by the tenuous quality of my digital connections. Also, not knowing/
seeing who your audience is at those performance moments, indeed wheth-
er the webcast would go out at all, were both factors of the online technology
that affected my onscreen and offscreen performance/behaviour … One way
in which I dealt with the tenuousness of the connection, was to project the au-
dience in my mind conceptually: I couldn’t see them so I had to sense them.
I just had to believe they existed in order for me to keep webcasting night af-
ter night. And remember, I was always performing at sunset so there was that
added sense of the world (the day) coming to an end. But you know, some of
what I’ve just been talking about is not unique to the Internet. A lot of this is
also true of radio  – the real time connect / real space disconnect between per-
former and audience. And radio is a medium I’ve worked with in the past so it
influenced my approach to the webcasts. But there wasn’t that sense of ten-
uousness in radio that I felt with the webcasts. I was operating with very, very
limited resources, not a lot of technical knowledge, no team immediately on
hand pulling the leavers and pushing the buttons, and often in a foreign coun-
try. I’ve no doubt all this uncertainty at the practical level inflected the perfor-
mances qualitatively.
So, that was the «yes» part of the answer. The «no» is – no, not in the sense
that using the Internet in that work has affected my performance direction for
good or that I’m now ONLY going to make work on and for the Internet. Sub-
sequent work has taken many forms, some using the resources and reach of
the Internet, some very much grounded in a real time and real space sharing
of performance-making with not a computer screen in coo-ee. A lot of my re-
cent works have used some pretty antiquated techniques and technologies –
frottage, weaving, Dymo labels, for example! But then «new technology» in
that breathless, evangelical use of the term has never been what my per-
formances are about.
Continuing the conversation on Skype …
< norie  > Thinking a bit more about sunset, which you just mentioned again …
Sunset is a marker and signal of physical time and it had a big part in your
performance in both the wider sense of the time and space you were inhabit-
ing and in the narrower sense of when you did the short webcast performance.
Can you say a bit more about it?
< barbara  > Well, sunset is a word that is very definite, but actually it’s a very
kind of amorphous time as well, it is very perceptual. Even though I needed
to program the website to stream at a particular time using a web site called
«timeanddate.com,» in actuality our sense of sunset is very perceptual and
that has always interested me … Though the sun might set over a particular
horizon line, the light continues until we perceive that there is no more light, or
no more sunlight. It is an endlessly fascinating concept … And there certainly
is an irony about my performing at sunset which is that at the same time that
236 237

I was consciously aware of every sunset, I missed every sunset! I had to turn
my back on it because I was staring at a screen.

< norie  > Can we return to an earlier point and talk more, too, about your story
telling in the physical sense and how you framed this? Having your mouth fill
the frame was very intense and intimate and palpable. Was it like that for you,
because it was for me as the audience?

< barbara  > That’s good, I’m glad because I was always concerned that it
wasn’t palpable enough because often it would break up, digitally disintegrate
or freeze and on one hand that would disturb me because it would remind me
of how fragile that connection was – the Internet. On the other hand it would
interest me for the very fact that it did signal how tenuous it was – kind of con-
tradictory. But I’m glad there was a sense of that, the palpability of the mouth,
for you at least.

Later … Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast. Part of the picture.

Writing prompt for performance #89; watercolour;
< barbara  > In relation to the limited view of my mouth: I didn’t want people to September 18, 2005.
Photo: Barbara Campbell.
really come to know me, as in, «oh there’s Barbara Campbell and everything
that she brings with her.» It was more «a» mouth. So that I was very much a
medium in the sense of channelling – where the story is channelled through
me. I used to think of that as kind of pure – that the channel was untainted,
like a clean drain, but of course I’ve come to realise that no, it is a drain where
residue lays down and in the channelling of any story the story can’t help but
pick up some of that residue as it moves along. So the residue is some aspect
of me whether it is just my particular vocal quality or the look of my teeth – that
sort of thing – visceral stuff, or that it is some kind of accumulation of knowl-
edge of me that the audience comes to know over time.

< norie  > Which in a way makes it more interesting because otherwise you
might as well just post up the stories. What it suggests to me is an interesting
sort of tension … the impossibility of being a medium … which raises questions
about the ambiguous space of whose story is it and what it means to be the
performer. And having just the mouth in a sense heightens all that tension or
ambiguity which I thought was very interesting.
Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast. At the end of the day.
< barbara  > Yeah, that’s good. I hope so! Writing prompt for performance #1001; watercolour;
March 17, 2008.
Photo: Barbara Campbell.
< norie  > Because you know even in a Chinese medicine way, like your tongue
says something about you, I don’t know if you have ever done acupuncture
but they always want to see your tongue – so «it» speaks – beside speaking
it «speaks.»

< barbara  > Of course the other thing about my tongue was that it had the
tongue stud in it which had the number of that night and that – I had that
238 239

→  tongue stud done for the project – I previously didn’t have any kind of pierc- →
ing and as soon as the project was finished I took the stud out and the hole
closed over but that was another kind of reminder to me that I was carrying
the project around or that it was inhabiting me or I was inhabiting it because
to have a piercing in your tongue is very much like carrying an open wound
because the tongue with all those enzymes from the saliva is always trying to
heal itself – it is very good at healing itself but to keep a hole open through an
artificial stud – something foreign in the mouth like that means that it can’t do
the healing that it wants to do.
Barbara Campbell: 1001 nights cast.
< norie  > Did you wear it even when you weren’t performing? Webcast detail, 2005 – 2008.
Photo: Russell Emerson.
< barbara  > Well you have to because of that very fact that if you take the stud
out within hours the hole starts to close up.

< norie  > Oh.

< barbara  › I only learnt that after I went through the procedure! But yes I had
to have something in there.

Later …

< norie  > Can we return to a couple of earlier discussion points and flesh them
out a bit further? Your mobility with the work – did it change as you became
more mobile, nomadic and occupying different locations, media, groups of
writers?

< barbara > Yes, for the first year of the project, so while I was in Paris, and then
for the next six months when I took it back to Australia, that first year I was ex-
tremely nomadic, without a stable home and what did happen was that the site
itself became my home so (I’d forgotten that) I inhabited the project not just in
the conceptual sense that we discussed last time but it did become a space
like my home – it is what grounded me. Attending to the Website as though
it were a domestic space that I could move through – certain pages became
like rooms in a house. Which is kind of interesting because of that thing about
websites how there is often a home page, what we call a home page – the lan-
guage did carry over in a domestic way for me.

< norie  > Now what you are saying is interesting because you had in a way two Barbara Campbell (left) in Sydney skypes with
locations, one of which was home which you took with you and the other was Norie Neumark (right) in Melbourne.
your temporary nomadic location. Each was photographed by the other.

< barbara  > Yeah, it was very grounding to have the site as the point of familiar-
ity for me – the way coming home every day has that sense – coming through
a front door and so on.
240 241

< norie  > Following on from the palpable, which you were talking about before
… things that keep recurring, for me in the experience of the work and in this
discussion, are «tactile,» «fragile,» and «tenuous» – that was true with the
water colour and now you are saying it was true with the performative mouth. I
suppose I am trying to tease that out a bit, how? … Is there maybe something
paradoxical, certainly complex, in that you want it to be ephemeral but not to
disappear, you want it to be tenuous but you don’t want to lose it?
lation from speech to print is reflected at the end of the original The Arabian
Nights too. The King, having reprieved Scheherazade after 1001 nights, or-
dered all the scribes of Islam to notate and distribute her stories. So you know
I’m able to kind of relinquish my sense of physical closeness to the stories.
Time has given me that licence. There’s a sense of freedom in that.

< barbara  > Yes I can see the paradoxical nature of it. Does this bespeak anx-
iety – of wanting it both ways at all times? Perhaps paradox is simply nec-
essary.

< norie  > We’re coming to the end of our time … I’m interested in whether you
would say this project reshaped your practice in any way?

< barbara  > Yes, it did, it gave me a whole different idea about perfection. The
unattainability of perfection. Up to this project I had worked in a fairly tradi-
tional way where I could shape the entire mise-en-scène according to my own
desires and that it was all aiming for one controllable moment before an audi-
ence. But with this, going on for so long, and with such a high degree of col-
laboration – everyday a new kind of collaboration was built – that first of all I
had to give over a lot of the project to other people and secondly that there
was always something going wrong. Either the prompt wasn’t exactly how I
would like it or I didn’t paint it beautifully, or the colours didn’t quite work, my
telling of the story wasn’t exactly how I wanted it – you know something – it
didn’t ever just come together perfectly for me. But because it was an ongo-
ing project I always had that chance of perfection the next day and that’s what
kept me going and little imperfections – the accretion of imperfections actual-
ly made it better. Looking at it as a total entity, all those imperfections kind of
made quite a beautiful thing in the end. So now quite a lot of the projects I’ve
done since 1001 nights cast have tended to allow for completion by other peo-
ple, mostly audiences. So it is not just about me controlling the final shape of
the work, there has tended to be a more participatory aspect to recent works.

< norie  > And finally, where to next for this project?

< barbara  > I talked to various people about various publishing options but
1001 pages is a very big book (in the conventional sense) and anthologies
of «the best of» or «my favourites» really went against the grain of the whole
project. In the last year or so, a couple of technical issues to do with the HTML
code and the database arose that helped me decide what to do next. I’m re-
designing the site so that it looks more like a collection of stories rather than
a record of a performance project. The stories will stay online a while longer.
And it will also be easier to print them all out as paper archive sets.
Interestingly, with the passage of time, the stories have drifted closer to the
written word and further from the spoken word. And I also recall that this trans-
242 243
in conversation: Yao Jui - Chung with
Timothy Murray
It might seem paradoxical to engage in a conversation about networked cul-
ture and unsitely aesthetics with an artist whose practice remains deeply am-
bivalent about the culture of the internet itself. But in speaking with Maria Mi-
randa about the scope of this collection on uncertain practices and unsitely
aesthetics, I couldn’t think of an artist whose practice embodies her overall
aesthetic concept better than does that of the Taiwanese artist, Yao Jui-Chung.
While standing forth as a strong proponent of the development of new me-
dia art in Taiwan, his work places more emphasis on the gritty politics of his-
torical networks than on any utopian promise of the internet itself. As will be-
come apparent in our discussion, the power of knowledge takes precedence
for Yao over the play of the internet. Yet, his practice as a conceptual photog-
rapher and political installation artist capitalizes and reflects on the mobile, no-
madic, and performative nature of an artistic engagement that has left the safe
confines of the studio for the communal spaces of an ontology of cultural re-
sistance. Taiwan’s enthusiastic embrace of new media and networked identi-
ties is grounded in and conflated with the complex histories of its colonialized
past and the fraught tensions of its Asian presence. For a Taiwanese artist,
then, unsiteliness is less a condition of virtual orientation than a reality of geo-
political bifurcation, being of and out of China, while bearing the socioeconom-
ic traces of its colonial lords, whether under the yoke of pre-technological Ja-
pan or snared in the web of the less than subtle economic colonizer, the USA.
To a certain degree, Yao’s artistic practice, which we will discuss below, exem-
plifies the paradoxical place of the internet within Asian circles of new media
art. The internet as a novel medium of artistic practice has had much less of
a stronghold across Asia than it has tended to have in the West. I found when
curating internet art in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, that the
exciting genre of net.art had a vastly smaller footprint throughout Asia than
across Australia, Europe, and North America. Is it a coincidence that Shu
Lea Cheang of Taiwanese heritage and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
of Korea were the only artists who submitted net.art for the many issues of
Ctheory Multimedia that I curated with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker? →
Similarly in 2000, I curated a net.art exhibition in Slovenia with Teo Spiller for
which we managed to exhibit only one Asian artist, Thuan Duc Tran of Viet-
nam, out of some thirty-five international artists. → That these were two of the
earlier international platforms curated primarily via emergent listservs such as
Yao Jui-Chung was born in 1969 in Taipei. He
graduated from The National Institute of The Arts
(Taipei National University of the Arts) with a degree
in Art Theory. In 1997, he represented Taiwan in
Facing Faces – Taiwan at the Venice Biennale and
took part in the International Triennale of
Contemporary Art Yokohama in 2005, APT6 (2009)
and Taipei biennial (2010). Apart from working in
the fields of theatre and film, he has taught art
history, written art criticisms and curated exhibitions.
The themes of his works are varied, but most
importantly they examine the absurdity of the human
condition. Apart from creating art, his essays have
been published in many art journals. He has also
published several books, including Installation Art in
Taiwan since 1991 – 2001 (2002), The New Wave of
Contemporary Taiwan Photography Since 1999
(2003), Roam The Ruins of Taiwan (2004),
Performance Art in Taiwan 1978 – 2004 (2005),
A Walk in the Contemporary Art: Roaming the
Rebellious Streets (2005), Ruined Islands (2007),
Yao Jui-Chung (2008), Beyond Humanity (2008),
Nebulous Light (2009), and Biennial-Hop (2010).
His works have been collected by museums and
many private collectors. He teaches at the Taipei
National University of the Arts and the National
Taiwan Normal University Department of Fine Arts.
See: http://www.yaojuichung.com/
→ CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA
See: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/
→ Timothy Murray and Teo Spiller, curators, Off-line Net Art, INFOS 2000;
Ljubljana, Slovenia.
See: http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/internet/infos.php
Timothy Murray Director of the Society for the
Humanities, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of
New Media Art, and Professor of Comparative
Literature and English at Cornell University. He is
Co-Moderator of -empyre- soft-skinned space, the
new media listserv and the author of Digital Baroque:
New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota
2008); Zonas de Contacto: El Arte en CD-ROM
(Centro de la imagen, 1999); Drama Trauma:
Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance,
Video, Art (Routledge, 1997); Like a Film: Ideological
Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge,
1993); Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in
XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987).
He is editor of Mimesis, Masochism & Mime:
The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French
Thought (Michigan, 1997) and, with Alan Smith,
Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms
of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1997). His
curatorial projects include Ctheory Multimedia and
Contact Zones: The Art of the CD-Rom.
See: http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/
See: http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
See: https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/
244 245

Rhizome could well suggest the ongoing balkanization of Asian artists and cu-
rators from Western discussions on the web. This could be attributed not only
to fundamental cultural differences but also, if not primarily, to coding differ-
ences that isolated Asian languages from the English dominated web.
Yet, my discussion with Yao will point to something of an even broader cultur-
al indifference to networked art. This first became apparent to me in the late
1990s when I curated the exhibition, → Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom → Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom.
to foreground portable interactive art made on the eve of internet art. Of the See: http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/
eighty CD-Roms from seventeen countries, I could manage to exhibit only
three works from Asia by the Japanese artists Masaki Fujihata, Takahiko Iimu-
ra, and the trio of Koonosake Mihara, Tatsuo Tajimi, and Testuzo Hirai. When
I began working in China in 2000, the curator Shin-Yi Yang then introduced
me to Feng Mengbo and Qui Zhijie both of whom produced portable interac-
tive works. Feng animated picture books and songs from the Cultural Revolu-
tion for his net.art piece, Phantom Tales, which was commissioned by the Dia
Center for the Arts, → while Qui developed a power-point style CD-Rom proj- → Feng Mengbo: Phantom Tales,
ect, The West, in response to the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese Em- Dia Center for the Arts.
bassy in Yugoslavia. → Ironically the very motivation for The West exempli- See: http://diacenter.org/mengbo/ → Qui Zhijie: The West. CD-Rom, 1999.
fies how the development of Asian new media has remained anchored in the See: http://www.artlinkart.com/en/artist/wrk_
contrasting physicality of unsitely performance. → This is a point made poi- → I provide more detailed readings of sr/3a3avz/89ehuB
gnantly by Thomas J. Berghuis when he reflects on the ambivalence of Qui’s The West and Phantom Tales in
embrace of new media in «Transcending Media» and the Role of Contempo- The Paradox of Chinese Art in
rary Art Practices in China. In speaking of Qui’s preference for media events the Age of Technology. Neural.it
(English edition), 29 (2008), 38 – 39.
organized around the coming together in a common physical space of the me-
dia and the participants, Berghuis concludes that «artists in China tend to ap-
proach new media art (xin meiti) in ways that allow them to create direct in-
teractions with the public, often through live art, rather than being primarily
technology-focused.» → It well could be that the importance of public interac- → Thomas R. Berghuis: «Transcending Media» and the Role of Contemporary Art
tions with new media art, particularly as predominantly mediated through vid- Practices in China, Experimenta: Mesh 17 (New Media Art in Australia and Asia)
eo and installation in mainland China, can be attributed as much to the com- See: http://www.experimenta.org/mesh/mesh17/berghuis.htm
plexities of the government’s extensive operation of internet censorship as to
anything else. But the cases of Taiwan, Japan, and Korea reveal a far more
complex utilization of the internet as something more of a background inter-
face that enhances physical installations than as the material substrata of ar-
tistic practice and experience itself.
It was in this context of thinking the unsitely, as a resistant slippage from in-
ternet culture to performance venue and public response, that Yao Jui-Chung
came to mind as the penultimate example of the paradox of developments
across Asian new media art and culture. As our conversation progressed in
spurts over the internet, it became all the clearer to me that Yao’s work is moti-
vated by a conceptual framework that has striking commonalities with my own
curatorial and theoretical commitment to networked art and culture. What re-
mains particularly striking is Yao’s resistance to this culture at the same time
that its conceptual framework and media context remain paramount to the po-
litical imperative of his artistic practice for which site and unsiteliness conjoin.
Indeed, it was on this very topic of siteliness that we began our discussion.
246 247
< timothy murray  > Your conceptually laden performance and installation work
has always played rather irreverently with the tension between deeply over-de-
termined national sites, whether in Taiwan or China, and the distributed prac-
tices of an artist who reflects on the slippage of any investment in notions of
«pure site» or «pure beauty.» Perhaps something similar could be said about
the politics, both identity and nation, of your projects that overflow with the
passion of investment while divesting themselves of any simplistic assump-
tions about the promise of the internet or idealistic national solutions, partic-
ularly when it comes to addressing the complex history of Taiwan’s colonial
legacy, from Japan to China. At the same time, your work consistently solicits
and seduces the spectators with seductive displays of gilded toilets, spectac-
ularly bluish environments, stunningly ordered arrangements of serial photo-
graphs and surreal paintings only then to confront them with the realistic over-
lays of shit, piss, ruin, and excess that constitute the realistic core and fabric
of everyday life.
Before we get into a discussion of any specific projects, perhaps we might re-
flect on the importance of «unsiteliness» as a concept that may be pertinent to
the history of your interventions as they depart from the specific national and
political site of Taiwan. One starting point would be the mere fact that many
of your projects stage unsiteliness by exhibiting the deterritorialization of site.
This happens both through content, such as your emphasis on environmental
and geopolitical issues, and through form, such as your indirect decontextual-
ization of specific sites when their photographs and video sequences are ex-
hibited in juxtaposition with others in a way that foregrounds seriality as much
as locality, a point to which I hope we might return later. But even more telling
is when you shoot yourself, throughout your extensive History Maneuver se-
ries either pissing on, surrendering to, or mocking the monuments of Taiwan-
ese and Chinese history. And, later, in the later 1990s and 2000s, when your
mocking presence is no longer the center of your photographs and paintings,
the spectator is confronted and haunted by scores of photographs of sacred
and secular ruins, often inhabited by specters of petrified dinosaurs and ob-
solete gods. This then gets transformed into epic paintings that depict, among
other things, the Cynic Republic. Key then, it seems to me, is your aesthetic
fascination, maybe obsession, with the contamination of site itself as a venue
of spiritual and nationalistic reverence.
< yao jui-chung  > In relation to this juxtaposition of aesthetics and ruins, I am
interested in the power operations behind ruins. It could also be said that I
depend on artistic practice to look at what the ruins have generated and con-
struct my idea of political geography. For example, the great amount of mili-
tary architecture that was constructed during the Cold War due to the cross-
strait situation, and then the subsequent cutbacks in the military, resulted in
many abandoned structures. The many jails for political prisoners that were
constructed during this period, for example, serve as testimonials to the ab-
surdity and severity of the Cold War period. The many abandoned factories I
have documented also suggest the movement of industry to China in search
of greater profits under the conditions of globalization, and because of the
unique political relationship between Taiwan and China, Taiwan is being evis-
cerated in the process. Recently, I organized a project requiring students to
photograph abandoned public spaces throughout Taiwan, highlighting the
shadow of political struggle cast over the spaces resulting from failed govern-
ment policies. This project was intended to put pressure on the government
and bring about changes in official policies, thus serving as a successful case
of art intervening on society.
< timothy  > It may appear from your early emphasis on Taiwan and its tumul-
tuous return in your recent series that highlights expensive public architec-
ture projects that lie abandoned in ruins that your work might nevertheless run
counter to the very notion of unsiteliness with which we began and that Maria
Miranda has articulated so forcefully in the introduction to this volume. But
what I’ve gleaned from our conversations over the past decade is that «site»
and «siteliness» are very loaded terms in your repertoire. What might make
them «unsitely» is not so much the virtuality of artistic expression on the in-
ternet, although the network remains crucial for the dissemination of your proj-
ects and politics internationally, but more the very forcefulness, power, and af-
fect that effective socio-political work enacts, perhaps in a way that destabilizes
both the artistic object and the geopolitical source of its inspiration.
< yao  > Whether or not art should reflect local historical or political conditions
is really not my chief concern. Every place has its own specific context, and
I am only using my art to make some tragic and self-deprecating jokes about
my own value within this context while addressing the inexplicable black hole
that is history. There always has been a lot of social unrest in Taiwan, and the
atmosphere has been such that magnificence could potentially arise out of ru-
ins. Nativism became a means of resisting both authority and traditional Chi-
nese orthodoxy. Even though the art world was insufficiently supported in Tai-
wan at the time, artists still had tenacity, unlimited passion, conviction, and of
course indispensable insight and critical spirits. I just recently realized how
much I have been influenced by my upbringing at a time of political transition
in Taiwan, as it still influences the way I address challenges and difficulties in
contemporary society with my art.
< timothy  > As you might remember, when we first met a decade ago in Taipei,
you and the video artist, Tsui Kuang-Yu, took me to the offices of the Taiwan-
ese new media collective, Et@t, where you introduced me to the young gen-
eration of new media artists working in Taiwan. Among other things, this col-
lective curated a biannual exhibition of international sound art whose primary
material consisted of the «immateriality» of digital detritus. Although primari-
ly identified as a photographer and installation artist, you have been tremen-
dously important to me as a champion and spokesperson for new media art in
Taiwan or, at the very least, for the advantages of relying on digital platforms,
whether photographic or networked, for stretching the boundaries of media
248 249
or for extending the reach of local Taiwanese art across the globe. This was
most evident when I was last in Taipei a year and half ago and we cruised
the scene on gallery night. There we encountered artists and curators from
across Asia who happened to be in Taipei to celebrate the opening of the bi-
annual exhibition of new media art at the Taiwan Museum of Contemporary
Art. This show featured exceptionally innovative installations and animations
by young Taiwanese artists as well as established Asian practitioners the likes
of Norimichi Hirakawa from Japan whose installations have screened visual-
izations of the flow of the internet as a component of his complicated interac-
tive interfaces. The ongoing excitement over internet culture and new media
art in Taiwan, first catalyzed by the interventions of Et@t in the late nineties,
became further evident to me when you took me out to the 2009 Asian Art Bi-
ennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung. This massive
exhibition on Viewpoints and Viewing Points, curated by Chao-Yi Tsai, attest-
ed to the proliferation of stunning animations from across greater Asia (with
even more in an adjacent exhibition celebrating contemporary Korean art)
and also featured some complex and fascinating interactive new media inter-
ventions by international artists of renown, such as Xu Bing whose simple use
of the internet performs the visual and significational ambiguities of communi-
cation. These were not only the kinds of installations that some art historians
might deny as «art» but also indicators of an international energy or force in
art practice that derives its edge from the internet and global exchange.
< yao  > As for Taiwanese contemporary art under the sway of the internet and
globalization, I would agree that the young generation is indeed sparing no
effort to expand our knowledge of aesthetic and perceptual experience, and
in doing so, is casting off the «exalted» constructions of the previous gener-
ation. In the wake of more recent trends in globalization and digital technolo-
gies, these topics have receded, and inevitably, Taiwanese contemporary art
has been impacted by consumer culture with international styles replacing lo-
cal aesthetics. Most younger artists are no longer interested in grand narra-
tives, nor do they directly challenge traditional or exalted values, but rather
use gentler, more personal strategies, avoid problems (both intentionally and
unintentionally), and escape into their own communities. So it could be a mis-
take merely to celebrate the «site» of the internet and the purity of new media.
While most of this work is clever, ethereal and speaks of personal experience,
this is not enough. If they cannot construct their pastiche of fragments on a
fully elaborated genealogy of knowledge, then the superficiality of their proj-
ect is likely to cause it to collapse. It is knowledge that expands the horizons
of the local, while lending depth to the seduction of digital globality.
< timothy  > Might it be true that the genealogy of knowledge, as you put it, is
directly related to the specifics of locale and the cultural context of one’s de-
velopment as an artist? I’ve been struck by how many Taiwanese artists are
somewhat loyal or at least deeply embedded in a local history that their own
work seems so ready to challenge. Perhaps the loyalty is more important to
such a genealogy than to either networked expansion or «site-specifics» itself.
Your remarks remind me of Michel Foucault’s tremendously insightful book,
The Archeology of Knowledge, written at the outset the development of open
source code, in which he situates knowledge in relation to the expansiveness
and unsettledness of archives and other closed formations of identity. Per-
haps the genealogy of knowledge is more consequential than geography it-
self? Or perhaps, in your case, geography, the specificity of Taiwan, is what
has given rise to the very expansion of knowledge that then challenges any
notion of border retreat.
< yao  > I received the national education that was compulsory in Taiwan at the
time. One day I realized our familiar history textbook was filled with lies and
tended to avoid difficult issues while emphasizing trivial ones. This realization,
in addition to my father’s death (he was a KMT official who fled to Taiwan af-
ter the Civil War), made me both suspicious and curious about my own origins,
of which I was completely ignorant. For these reasons, I attempt to peel back
the layers of this onion-like conundrum which is me, my past, the memories of
all Taiwanese people and even a period of world history that cannot be erased.
A marked characteristic of the period around the end of martial law, for ex-
ample, was the use of art to alleviate depression and resentment caused by
long-term oppression. Critiques of society, political issues, awakening of na-
tive consciousness, folk culture, and challenges to traditional aesthetics and
values were all important topics in 1990s. Since the Taiwanese art market has
yet to become over-hyped like China’s, most artists are still working diligent-
ly at their art and not being influenced by the market. While the scale of the
market in Taiwan is small, its orientation is more extensive and many artists
maintain a high degree of experimentalism and independence, creating work
with high degrees of accomplishment and rigor. As a country that is continu-
ally suppressed by China and marginalized by the rest of the world, Taiwan is
one place in the world that prizes creative freedom, and this is the main rea-
son why I make art in Taiwan. It is in relation to this combination that we might
think about the power of increased knowledge to expand concepts of the local.
< timothy  > Still, there’s something of a paradox that drives your own relation
to knowledge, isn’t there? I’m thinking not only of the label you gave to your-
self and your peers in the early 1990s as very young artists working at the end
of martial law, «New Fishy Generation» (with a combined emphasis on smelly
and suspicious) but also of the series that first put your own smelly body on
the map, so to speak, Territory Take Over. For this installation, shown in 1997
at the Venice Biennale, you aesthetically documented a prior performance in-
stallation at IT Park in Taiwan (1994) for which your own pissing on the ex-
hibition site was replicated by photographs of you pissing on six monuments
marking specific colonial incursions against Taiwan by the Spanish, Dutch,
Japanese, and Chinese. Of course this is one of the installations where you
mix the ruins of colonialism, the aggression of the artist literally pissing on his-
tory, and the aesthetic attraction of golden toilets hanging at the bottom of the
250 251

photographic frames, as if inviting the spectators themselves to piss on the pu-

rity of aesthetics and the imaginary of an uncolonized Taiwan. It’s curious how
your combination of historical research that gave rise to your selection of colo-
nial monuments and the performative play of your personal intervention seems
to solicit notions of both knowledge and performance that might run counter to
conventional understandings of art and its reception. Something smells fishy
here, no?

< yao  > Most Taiwanese artists active before my generation maintained a neg-
ative and powerless attitude toward history. I think this was more of a political
stance, rather than an aesthetic one. Colonialism was undoubtedly a night-
mare for the third world, but excessive indulgence in playing the victim doesn’t
help anyone address the future. At the time, Taiwan was engaged in a debate
over nativism, which prompted me to wonder, why nativism? What is subjectiv-
ity? With my artwork, I didn’t expect to stage an emotional rehashing of pain-
ful histories, but rather chose satire and humor, photographing myself urinat-
ing outdoors, to compare unlawful colonization to a feral dog marking territory.
In Taiwan, urinating on the ground outdoors is illegal, yet urinating into your
own portable toilet outdoors is fine. With the small golden toilets placed in
front of my photographs and wordplay (as shit and history happen to be ho-
mophonous in the Mandarin language), I meant to suggest the self legitima-
tizing strategies often used by colonizers to gild their decidedly less than ster-
ling (shitty, actually) histories. My 1994 work → Territory Take Over was related →
to my enthusiasm for climbing mountains in Taiwan that are over three thou-
sand meters high. Once while climbing Jade Mountain (the tallest peak in Tai-
wan at 3,954 meters) I felt very confused by the imposing bronze statue of Yu
Youren erected at the summit, and urinated beside it as I really needed to go
to the bathroom. This gave me the idea of creating an artwork by urinating in
various places around Taiwan. Later, after reading up on four hundred years
of Taiwanese history (during the martial law period we weren’t taught Taiwan-
ese history and most people of my generation studied KMT history in school),
I decided to stage this artwork in places where various colonizers first entered
Taiwan. I chose to pose for the photographs completely naked to raise the
verisimilitude of the results, as dogs don’t wear clothing. Being an introvert
by nature, however, I struggled for several months before steeling my savage
animal nature and marking territory the only way a dog can: naked and with
urine. Ultimately, these smelly photographs infused my later work with its in- Yao Jui -Chung: Territory Takeover. Yao Jui -Chung: Territory Takeover.
tense geopolitical flavor. Installation, Venice Bienale, 1997. Photography and mixed media, 1994.

< timothy  > Another fascinating aspect of your work, Yao, is its inscription in
action, first exemplified by the Action Series. In Recovering Mainland China
(1997) you photograph your rigid body in the act of jumping in front of rec-
ognizable Chinese monuments – a commentary on the KMT’s unachievable
ambition to recover the mainland, you both jump into something «new» only
to land back in exactly the same position as before. In The World is for All
(1997 – 2000) you reflect on post-colonialism by standing with your hands up
252 253

in the air in front of the architectural gates designating Chinatowns through-

out the world: Brisbane, Paris, Toronto, London, New York, Victoria, Vancou-
ver, Yokohama, San Francisco. And in your very ambitious series, Long March
(2002 – 2004), you retrace the route of the Long March and shoot yourself
standing upside down in front of sites of importance of the Revolution. This top-
sy-turvy intervention then becomes embodied in your brief 2005 video piece,
China Town Dizzy, in which the gate of Yokohama, the site of the world’s largest
Chinatown, rotates in 260 degree motion as if miming the still shot at its cen-
ter of your standing upside down. Here the literal commercial and cultural net-
work of international Chinatown gets reversed on its axis in rotating perspec- Recover Mainland China – Action
tival vortex. Action for you, thinking back to something Maria Miranda said to
me about unsitely and uncertain aesthetics, seems to enact the event of transit I started serving in the air force in 1994. Since then
I have collected all sort of official documents, in
and transition, through which art itself comes to stand unsteadily «in transit.»
order to reveal the procedures of thought-control by
Even with your series title, Action Series, you seem to unsettle the prominence the governmental machine. After my discharge
of «action» in contemporary art history by displacing the «action» of painting, I immediately travelled to the Mainland to
as the artistic form and individual prowess of abstract expressionism, with the photograph Recover Mainland China – Action.
combined actions of historical research, photographic series, and your own ir- Against the backgrounds of famous historical
reverent insertion of your subjectivity into the field of the photograph. Rather attractions, I hopped in the upright posture to create
than reenacting action as something akin, say, to the signature of the genius the illusion of levitating. This «superficial» visit to
the Mainland comments on the absurdity of history
of abstraction, à la Jackson Pollock, you seem to reinvent it for art as the per-
and a sense of disconnection, and also deconstructs
version of photographic realism and as the cynicism of your critical commen-
the torment suffered in the previous era. Even if
tary on social history. the younger generation had no choice other than
having been born into the mystifying course of
< yao  > Basically my cynicism and irreverence in this work is a critical reaction history, something has to be said with regards to
to the view of so-called Chinese orthodoxy in Taiwan. It seems history is al- how we arrived in these circumstances! In my own
ways written by the victors, but the historical view held by the vanquished or words from before, «Human history is hopelessly
absurd in its destiny!» It has been, is, and will
marginalized is often more credible, or at least has reference value. The mod-
always be a condition we cannot escape.
ern history of Asia, or that of China, is a history of struggle against western
colonization, and is related to complex issues of the colonizing force of mo-
dernity and wholesale modernization. I didn’t intend to discuss these issues in
the works you mentioned (I dealt with this in the later series Roaming around
the Ruins), but rather the work had a direct connection to my search for iden-
tity. My father was a KMT party member who retreated to Taiwan in 1949, and
the sole spiritual sustenance for people of his generation lay in their plan to
retake the Mainland. However, the KMT’s inability to rout the communists dur-
ing earlier stages of the Civil War and Mao Zedong’s ascent during the Long
March, foretold both the necessity of resisting the Mainland communists and
the ultimate failure of the KMT plan. Second generation forty-niners like my-
self were haunted by a floating feeling caused by our long-term geographical
displacement (for example, we were limited in our knowledge of Taiwanese
history, and the Mainland place names we memorized in school were frozen
in 1949 and thus seriously out of step with reality), and no amount of political
coercion could erase our inevitable destiny or the fact that our history was not
tied to the earth and defied gravity – on the contrary – it made the situation
all the more absurd. In my Recovering Mainland China photographs, I am like
a wandering ghost or perhaps a retired soldier on tour. Either way, the figure
254 255

in each photograph is not me, but rather is meant to represent a generation

which could not escape its historical destiny. Political situations suggested by
the backgrounds in the photographs were carefully selected, as were the cos-
tumes, and even the distressed effect of these black and white photographs
was meticulously added. In October 1996, when I photographed myself jump-
ing at various historical sites in Beijing, I never imagined that by jumping into
the past, I would in effect be rewriting its future. While I had hoped to prevent
images previously frozen by one historical reality from reconsolidating, I nev-
er imagined that preconceived notions of these historical images would be
erased by the audience’s bemusement, or that my humor would result in the
continual reinterpretation of these historical sites.

< timothy  > I remain fascinated by your early insistence on both performance

and installation as fundamental aspects of action. Many Chinese artists have
made important commentaries either through the means of documentary pho-
tography or disorienting performance. Documentary photography has been
especially important in both Taiwan and the mainland, not only in relation to
your most recent reclamation projects but also on the mainland as a testimo-
ny of difficult working conditions, housing situations, and even the plight of the Yao Jui -Chung: Recover Mainland China – Action.
migrant as made so evident in Yang Shin-Yi’s 2004 Beijing exhibition, Artists
with Migrants, which he curated for the UNESCO Together With Migrants Ini-
tiative under the Project for Poverty Reduction. → As for the corollary interest → UNESCO: Together with migrants. Beijing, 2004.
in disorienting performance, we only need call to mind Tsui Kuang-Yu’s vid-
eo series of himself vomiting in different locations or another disorienting se-
ries that documents various objects coming as if from nowhere to hit him on
the head. But few artists have so insistently embraced performance only to
freeze it, as you have done. I have been meaning to ask you for a long time
about your commitment to «freezing» performative action within the frame of
the photograph, in a way that seems to disorient photography while disem-
bodying performance.

< yao  > This is a very interesting question. The archive I created about contem-
porary Taiwanese art and my photography are both extensions of my interest
in historical documentation. From a certain perspective photographs are like
postage stamps. By taking pictures we can make postage stamps about our
personal experiences and then enjoy sharing them with friends. As a shy per-
son, I’m uncomfortable making my art in front of large crowds, preferring rath-
er to meet my audience through some kind of medium. Just as you observed,
I freeze decisive moments in my performative photographs, and I imbue my
work with amateurish theatricality. A big part of the work is kuso, which I de-
ploy by freezing action in my photographs. In other words, the work is a kind
of anti-performance created with simple poses and actions, rather than stunts
that anyone could perform. I urinate, jump while posing at attention, do hand-
stands, put my hands up in surrender, goosestep, salute or wave. All of these
postures tend to be political in nature as they mimic those used by politicians
when dealing with the media. I don’t intend to emphasize my bodily presence
256 257

at a site, but rather the absurdity of a body restricted by politics. I hope that by
freezing these moments in time I can liberate those who have been frozen by
history or ideology. While I’ve also made performance videos, such as Phan-
tom of History, March Past and Mt Jade Floating, they aren’t performances re-
corded at a specific site, but rather attempts at mimicking political mecha-
nisms used in the past to brainwash the masses, and thus have a pronounced
geopolitical flavor.

< timothy > Still even when you freeze your performative events, your attentive-
ness to the action of installation frequently seems to re-enliven or unfreeze
your stilled performances as they are reenacted in the context of serialized in-
stallation. Part of the conceit of your photographic work is its insistence on seri-
ality, which relates the site-specificity of individual photographs into the stream
of juxtapostion, comparison, and narrative. Might we also think about serialism
itself, as it functions in your work, as constituting another paradox of the un-
sitely? And in some cases, the very architectonics of your installations seem
to re-enliven it further with the cinematic effect of exhibited serialism. I’m think-
ing of how you installed → The World is for All on raised architectural frames in → The World is for All – China Beyond China
the round so that the spectatorial vision moves from within the circular vision of
the series. This not only calls to mind the staged seriality of nineteenth-century Chinatown often becomes, to the natives, a hot spot
for trafficking and drug dealing, a destination for
panorama devices but more recent 360 degree new media installations, such
cheap goods and labour, or even one of
as the colossal 360 cinematic panorama by Tim Gruchy, Clesthyra’s Undoing,
the stereotypes in Hollywood movies, a haven for all
which we enjoyed at the Asia Art Biennale. There’s something in your installa- outlaws. I therefore adapted the movie scenes of
tions that call to mind this kind of decentralization of point of view and panoram- police arrests into a circular shooting range, with ten
ic vision in a way that foregrounds the floating edge, the constant adjustment images, an air gun in the middle and the warning
of motion, and the vocabularies of fading and mixing. mounted on a pedestal: «You have the right to
remain silent; everything you say can and will be
held against you in a court of law.» Aiming at
< yao  > In my 360-degree panoramic photo installation The World is for All
the unidentified figures in black with both arms held
(1997 – 2000), I used carved, gold painted frames and black and white photog-
high in surrender, the audience play the policing role
raphy to heighten the contrast with the work’s Chinatown imagery. My primary in the standard procedure of apprehension.
emphasis, however, was not on visual impact, but rather on an allusion to po- The shooting game is critical of colonial mentality
litical metaphor which is basically composed of three layers. First, by creating and reflects on stigmatised stereotypes of
a large circle in the venue with ten door-shaped frames, I suggest the global immigrants.
reach of Chinese culture. Displayed within the frames are archways that seem
to be in China, but in fact were photographed in various Chinatowns around
the world. These areas seem like small city-states, or perhaps satellite states,
but the center around which they orbit is not China, but rather Confucianism,
which forms the foundation of Chinese culture. While the declaration of terri-
tory made by the archways in the photos is quite strong, the abstract govern-
ing relationship suggested by the work doesn’t involve political entities. The
second layer of the metaphor involves the kinship system in Chinese society,
which is organized based on interdependent power relationships. The circular
arrangement of the installation suggests the values, class awareness and life-
style that form the closed circle of a kinship system. In Chinese society, this
system operates much like a country and is on par with local governments, but
exerts even more influence. The final layer of the political metaphor reflects a
258 259

reality of physical space. It was once said that the sun never sets on the British
Empire, and likewise it seems the moon is ever rising on a Chinatown some-
where. Provided that Chinese people occupy a place, there is a Chinatown
there, and it becomes increasingly bustling as the night wears on. I placed a
toy gun in the center of the installation so that viewers could pick it up and,
like a police officer, interrogate the unknown figures in the surrounding pho-
tographs. There is a sign next to the gun that reads, «You have the right to
remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in the
court of law.» With this I suggest that those in power often use legal means to
supervise or prosecute foreigners, whom they view with prejudice, to consoli-
date their power and gain the greatest advantage.

< timothy  > I’m also interested, given its commonality in our work – yours artis-
tic and mine theoretical – in the theory of seriality itself, particularly as it per-
tains to the uncertainty of aesthetics. As I reflect in Digital Baroque when writ-
ing on the sequences of Peter Greenaway, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
emphasizes the interstice as inscribed in the seriality or its staging of the dif-
ference of duration and time. → Deleuze reads modern cinema as profiting → Timothy Murray: Digital baroque: new media art and cinematic folds.
from a move away from the centralized truth-content of movement and panora- Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 111 – 113.
ma to the constant adjustment of a more democratic space and depth. Thus
providing for an «art of masses,» the new depth of field stages the differential
of space and time in contrast to the equation of place and subject; it engages
repetition rather than representation; and it frames the disparate as opposed Long March – Shifted the Universe
to the identical. While these kinds of shifts and shifters might be understood
to constitute the networked openness of internet culture, your work similarly In the summer of 2002, I took part in the project of
has prompted me to think further about the differentials of seriality and even the Long March (of the Red Army, 1934 –1936,
referred to as the «Thousand-Mile Flee» by
the vibrant excessiveness of its theatricality when the playful simulations of
the Nationalist Party, or KMT). A group of us
fiction envelope the biting realities of history. undertook the drawn-out and grueling journey, living
the struggle and history of the Chinese Civil War.
< yao  > Your idea is very interesting, I have never thought of that before. There After surveying on-site to find shooting angles,
certainly is an element of seriality in my work, but I definitely didn’t start out I decided to photograph myself in the handstand
making the work with this in mind. It seems that certain things call to me, and position, and then displayed upside-down the large,
every time I finish an artwork another problem waiting to be solved appears. black-and-white photos, in order to construct
a disturbed imagery. Like most young people in
For example, I came up with the idea of urinating where foreigners made incur-
Taiwan, I know little of this past, but what really
sions into Taiwan for my work Territory Take Over (1994) when I was atop Tai- interests me is the question of whether history could
wan’s highest peak thinking about Taiwan. I came up with my idea for Recov- be rewritten. It might be a Quixote-like fantasy or
ering Mainland China (1994 – 1996) during my military service in the air force. wuxia romance in wanting to change the world.
Feeling a certain kinship with Don Quixote because he also faced strange and However the main reason to investigate the present
changeable times, I threw myself into the torrent of modern Chinese history. Taiwan-China relation with art is not to illustrate
Therefore the idea for this work came from China, which sits across the strait the history or provoke ideological opposition.
Through the contrast between the burden of history
from Taiwan. The World is for All (1997 – 2000) is about Chinese communities
and our rebellious, willful action, it intends to reveal
living abroad. It seems these three works follow one another, but actually are
the absurdity in life beyond human control.
related more like the layers of an onion; peeling back one layer naturally re-
veals another. There is also a little theatricality, but far less than the politics
underpinning the artwork. The idea of reversal in my later work, Long March
(2002 – 2004), is also a metaphor: if history could go in reverse, then the three
260 261

previous series of works wouldn’t exist. Actually history cannot be changed,

but our attitudes toward the past can be changed through art. Tradition can be
changed, but we must first change our ways of seeing and thinking. My instal-
lation, photography and paintings all have one fundamental aspect, and that
is I use them to subvert orthodoxy and consider the margins.

< timothy  > Given the success of your artistic career and your prominence in
art circles in Taiwan, perhaps we can discuss your recent activities that seem
to emphasize artistic collaboration over individual creation. This would include
not merely your role in sponsoring open gallery spaces in Taipei, where the
gallery site is mixed with the irreverence of bar and performance spaces, but,
most importantly, your recently successful «public art» project for which, if I un-
derstand correctly, you served primarily as the conceptual manager of a mas-
sive undertaking for which you solicited scores of students to traverse Taiwan
to document abandoned public works projects, government buildings, cultur-
al centers, and gardens. Your students not only documented these unsightly
sites photographically, but also compiled data concerning their negative impact
on the economy, etc. For this project you seem to have stretched your private
aesthetic interests in ruins and performance into the heart of the public sphere,
from broad television coverage to direct response from the federal govern-
ment. I’m very interested in how this collaborative project on the unsightly has
had profound impact not only on the means and authority of artistic production
but also on national politics?

< yao  > I started an alternative space called VT Artsalon with a group of art-
ists, which was meant to advance the cause of contemporary art in Taiwan by
introducing young and talented artists. We have adopted a more nimble ap-
proach in this difficult art environment, hoping to fight for a way out. As for the
→ Mosquito Project, we were quite successful at challenging government poli- →
cies, as Premier Wu Den-yi promised a moratorium on these kinds of govern-
ment buildings. I even arranged for some of the students to attend a meeting
of the Executive Yuan, where the students suggested that the government re-
view its policies and release some of its disused public spaces for use by non-
profit or public welfare organizations. It was also suggested that the govern-
ment provide necessary assistance and gear its thinking towards professional
needs (rather than merely pandering to the public) so as to attain sustainable
development and not just temporary solutions. At a subsequent meeting of the
Executive Yuan the premier gave a directive to carry out these matters and
hold those who were negligent in their duties accountable. Of course I was op-
timistic about the results and expressed my support for the government’s atti-
tude, but nonetheless, we are preparing the second Mosquito Project book for
next year, which will document public structures overlooked in the previous
edition. Our intention is to document recent legacies of election campaigns for
future generations studying this phase of Taiwanese society.

< timothy  > Such an emphasis on documentation brings me to the overarch- Yao Jui -Chung: Mosquito Project.
Hou-li Sanitary Landfill, Taichung City.
262 263

ing obsession that always has fueled your art practice: what I call the «archi-
val event.» Here I return again to Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge where
he disturbs confidence in the historical archive by situating it not as something
closed and passively awaiting archeological excavation. Rather he celebrates
the «anarchive» as something of an inter-active event. It is precisely the surge
of accumulation, the continual surprise of informational texture, and the lay-
ers of enunciational multiplicity that lend to the archive its enunciational pow-
er. The archive, he writes, is the horizon of «enoncés» marked by their «thick-
ness of accumulation» which never cease «to modify, to change, to disturb, to
upset, and sometimes to demolish.» → Such multi-layered thickness, which → Michel Foucault: L’archéologie du
we might understand as a fractal conglomeration of accumulated data, is what savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976,
constitutes the lively energetics of the archive’s discourse. Something you and p. 164.
I share in common, in addition to our love for upside down people and artists
who piss on revered landmarks, is our compulsion to give ourselves over to Yao Jui -Chung: Mosquito Project,
the archival event. Hualien Aboriginal Cultural Industry Promotion Center.
Indeed, you have generously collaborated with me by donating to the → Rose → Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art,
Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, which I curate in the Cornell Library, your Cornell Library Ithaca, New York.
extensive archive of Taiwanese performance and art videos, not to mention the See: http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/
8,000 images you have digitized of postcards announcing all contemporary art
openings across Taiwan since 1992 (you have to admit your obsession is rath-
er perverse!). Although you probably would be reluctant to attribute to this proj-
ect the status of an artistic event, akin to the many photographic projects we’ve
already discussed, it certainly charts your own mobility as an artist and partic-
ipant in contemporary Taiwanese art history. → Doesn’t the fact that you per- → See my reading of this and similar Chinese archival projects in my essay The Archival Event:
sonally supervised or actually performed the scanning and digital organization Thinking Electronic Art Via Cornell’s Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. Intelligent Agent, 06.02
of these materials lend added significance to your Archive as something of a (August 2006), 1 – 7.
See: http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_pacific_rim_murray.htm
performance event? Indeed, I remember how, when we worked late into the
night in Ithaca to recode the digital organization of these materials, you took off
on a magically quick performance of the imagery on your computer as if a VJ
mixing and matching his video and sound tracks. Buried deep within the code
and quantity of these materials seem to be the many traces of your own con-
ceptual commitment to and intervention in archivization as an artistic practice
that also enfolds private and public practice and access.

< yao  > I agree with your description of archival event. Surely there are some
things connected with these archives, and this fascinates me. Nonetheless, I
have some romantic ideas about archived imagery. While an individual’s art-
historical archive, that has necessarily been manipulated, is not at all like one
found in a library or research institution, the latter isn’t objective either, as it is
the result of subjective choices and therefore reflects accumulated bias. I don’t
think there is any such thing as completely objective history, just like there isn’t
any such thing as completely objective artwork. Nonetheless, more than ten-
thousand items can certainly serve as a good foundation for a study archive
as well as an entry point for research and dialogue. I am interested in latent
art histories that run parallel to official ones due to the possible connections
this idea has with my own artwork. I have always been suspicious of authorita-
264 265

tive histories, and in my own books, photographs and materials I collect about
art, I not only reflect mainstream values, but more importantly the perspec-
tives of those who are marginalized. This can be seen in my fascination with
ruins, which I photograph because of the traces of authority and violence be-
hind them. Another example is my ongoing collection of exhibition announce-
ments, which to a certain extent represent an aesthetic evolution through suc-
cessive eras, and by analyzing the designs of these announcements, we can
determine styles and trends at different times. Through the material quality
of the invitations, the artist’s pecuniary condition and individual taste can be
determined, and we can also establish connections between various artistic
trends and movements. I get great enjoyment from collecting these exhibition
announcements.
Of course collecting is a never-ending quest and archives are never complete,
but this impossibility means that we must forever strive to fill the gaps, and
our desire to piece together the features of an age is motivated by the power
of the fragments we find.

< timothy > It is your understanding of an archival aesthetics as both a never-

ending quest and a viral incubator of overlapping cultural signifiers that makes
it most appropriate, in my mind, for a provocative approach to unsitely aesthet-
ics. It is in this way that your practice embodies, when not specifically miming,
the novel archival conditions of artistic practice in the age of the internet.
266 267

in conversation: Lucas Ihlein with
Teri Hoskin
Title (perhaps): the art of telling neither rhetoric nor dialectic, or a joke!
During April and May 2011 Teri Hoskin and Lucas Ihlein carried on a corre-
spondence inspired by Ihlein’s projects Bilateral Kellerberrin (2005) and Bilat-
eral Petersham (2006) both site-specific residencies blogged live with post-
Lucas Ihlein is an artist who uses communicative
exchange as a key component in his practice.
In recent years this interest has manifest itself in
«blogging-as-art» projects – but since 1993 he has
also produced zines, artist books, conversational
situations, performance art, video and film works,
re-enactments, essays, radio broadcasts and
podcasts, lectures, children’s workshops, sculptures
made of wood, drawings, SMS poetry, gallery
installations, silkscreen & lithographic prints, and
postal art … In the Bilateral projects (which
the conversation explores rather tangentially) Ihlein
developed a method of blogging as a means of
deepening his connection with two local
neighbourhoods. This process could be thought of
as an instance of «performative, place-specific
art practice.»
Teri Hoskin is a writer / artist and thinker. Art that
worked between web and print was the primary
medium for her practice between 1994 – 2007. From
1997 Teri curated, designed, coded the pre-web 2.0
eWRe (the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble).
Virtual Catastrophes: stories from trauma & technicity
is the title of her doctorate in Architecture and
Design. It is performative in its approach to writing,
memory, and spatial practices as it considers
the production of death by National Socialists in
World War II, and locally through the dispossession
and colonization of Australian Aboriginal peoples.
The thesis has a stand-alone print component that
references endless beta sites. It is performative in
its approach to writing and spatial practices. Teri
occasionally curates exhibitions and writes about
the practices of artists. She makes, collects and
remixes images and her current endless beta
project, OHLogic, is inspired by the lives of birds.

event book and other productions.1 The dialogue between Teri and Lucas took
place within the pages of a small (cut down to-fit-in-an-A5 envelope) notebook,
which the two artists posted back and forth. The intention was to facilitate a
slow writing that had to practically consider the limits of pen, paper and letter
post. Initially, the correspondence was intended to follow a strict weekly turn-
around, in order to facilitate «proper turn-taking.» The reality, however, was that
the book often lingered with one or the other for longer than a week at a time. In
this way the conversation became multi-layered, taking on the shift between
the technics of language, meaning and community.

In July 2011 Teri Hoskin transcribed the journal to a manuscript and wrote the
following on paper sticky notes:

Transcribing is itself a technique – it allows a distance from the text – and dis-
tance makes the text appear new, other, from elsewhere. It becomes clear why
certain diacritic marks were necessary in handwritten script – and are now in-
creasingly defunct. Current artpress typography tends to use as little as pos-
sible to interrupt the smooth sameness of a block of text to the point where
without italics, strikethroughs or underlinings the only «flourish» is to keep the
ragged edge instead of hard justifying the type into a rigid block of text, there-
by making it as smooth as possible and ironing out all striation. Yet every detail
of writing is fascinating – the technics per se – whether it’s handwritten on pa-
per, or stickies, or screen / keyboard. Space is important too in the handwritten –
a place for the eye to rest, the mind to be. I’m fond of a littered text for its hesi-
tation and thinking in motion, the way it signals a person or life inside the act of
268 269
making. Perhaps it is what Sarah Kofman termed «writing without power.» The
litter makes apparent that the contract one enters into with the text is founded
on a lie or an untruth – that this truth or proof of presence is no proof or signa-
ture at all – there is no stable «I» here – rather a moment of time passing – this
is the untimely of the text, the unheimlich, or is it a sacrifice? What «I» must sac-
rifice to write this apparent proof of a stable referent is in fact the very multitude
that is «I» communally.
At one point in our exchange I wrote to Lucas «it strikes me that you are primar-
ily a writer.» It makes me very uncomfortable when people fit me into this cate-
gory: writer (not artist) the silent part of the equation – so how did I come to think
this of Lucas’s work when writing is clearly such an integral part of his visual art
practice? Clarifying that judgement (for that’s what it was and is) will be fruitful
for thinking about reason and language of from and for community. Lucas Ihlein
has the skills of a storyteller, an active voice that brings together community de-
sires, anxieties and possibilities. It’s a documentary style that works with the 20th
century trajectories of fluxus and happenings in their field-blurring methodolo-
gy of everything is material with the addition of digital technologies and vehicles.
In the conversation that follows Teri and Lucas play with how such a practice
might be «sitely,» «unsitely,» «unsightly,» «certain» and «uncertain,» seeming-
ly without contradiction. (In what follows the writers refer to the Bilateral Keller-
berrin and Bilateral Petersham projects via various nicknames including «Keller,»
«The Sham,» «BP» and «BK» …)
10 April 2011 Sunday 6:30 am
Dear Lucas,
First things first – the right pen, tools are so important yes? Names always
arise – Bernard Stiegler on «Technics» – its almost too simple, but something
like tools become us as we become them. Poor Ber That does his thought no
justice. But certainly, he is one of the thinkers / makers who include toolness
as an evolutionary force with a trajectory peculiar to humans. Still I have not
acted to find the most appropriate pen for this task, this paper, this time and
my personal writing pleasure – though this one makes a pleasing sound as
it moves across the paper, alas its mark is too defined definite for the weight.
Do you reckon moleskins once used a heavier GSM?
Now this is a lovely pen to use. It scratches the paper slightly and at the same
time is smooth – no squeaks like the felt tip. I hope you don’t mind Lucas –
all this navel gazing narcissism over pen as extension of self – bear with me
as I write my way into our conversation here. It’s not «our» yet of course until
you reply but given we’ve had a quick conversation in between our day jobs
that signalled YES let’s do it, I’ll call it «ours» yours and mine – between us  –
for now. I’m reminded again of another philosopher (why does it feel like a
guilty secret, or an embarrassment to «confess» their constant presence in my
understanding «take» on the world? Philosophy is so «grand» and «Europe-
an» in this strangely anti-intellectual culture): Derrida and the thinking he did
around «address»: sending and taking; who is one writing to – addressing –
in the letter; the postcard; the sending too «out there.»
I’ll step back a little to «address» purpose – the premise for this undertaking  –
before I get lost in the multitude of thoughts and associations around Uncer-
tain Practices, Unsightly [sic] Aesthetics. Less «stepping back» than landing at
a place that demands immediate explication so the reader can engage, yes?
(premise. The «house» or «place of?» well yes … but and, get this, its origin
(1325 –75) is the feminine praemissus from to send before equivalent to praet-
mittere to send.)
I met the beautifully lyrically named Maria Miranda at a large communal dinner,
one of those rare events amongst artists to have such an enormous sense of
the convivial. We talked about art and «the net» and this project, it’s title such
an apt and rich description of my own practice … always uncertain and unsit-
ed, without home, without «site,» place to land land. I had to stop after the «I
met» paragraph … going places I never go in writing for someone else to read.
It strikes me I’m trying hard to write «out» of «toward» a zone forc for this task.
OK. I’ll try again – all the stoppages – a network of stoppages (my favourite
270 271
Duchamp) will arise of their own volition in any case. I’ll just note them before
continuing …
huh! I can’t! I am stopped! Stop thinking! Start writing! I am writing. OK. Start
telling!
The method / form: hand writing, on paper, in a book.
The concept:
slow writing
phew. what a relief. I can take my time
take time
send time
a page for limits
… this book
… end of april
… un certain practices
… write → send
receive → write → send
receive → write → return
Favourite memoir #1: Laurence Durrell, Bitter Lemons, MCMLVII
about his time in Cyprus 1953 – 6. Personal, political, Durrell’s writing attests
to the time when [British] colonialism is becoming distinctly uncomfortable and
morally adverse for those still able to enjoy its pleasures. This is before post
colonial studies. A sticky note on page 178 reads; «‹There’s such an element
of patronisation in Durrell’s tone – still a colonialist despite his equally compel-
ling distance from the Empire.› e.g., 178, 193, 293 and others.»
10 April 2011 Sunday 7:15 am. Transcribed from another a journal,
date 3.4.2011
Hi Lucas,
I prefer reading your blogs in book form: today mostly Bilateral Petersham,
and a little from At the Cemetery – the episode from the Bon Scott Blog.
It strikes me as I get stuck inside for the second time on this second reading,
that here you are primarily a writer – and that none of this would work if you
weren’t able to hold the attention of the reader. Two of my favourite forms over
the last several years are the memoir and occasionally travel writing, and only
the latter when it amounts to the same thing. It’s less the place or the travel-
ling that holds my attention – and more the suspended state of elsewhere-not-
here in the intimate sharing of life as it happens or unfolds, depending on the
writer’s take on life: fate, fated, chaos and chance. In the time of letters (which
has ended in my lifetime – I had pen-pals as a child) all that waiting in between
one destination and another encouraged slow thinking. I have diverged from
the transcription of(f) course – impossible …
Favourite memoir #2: Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (trans. The War: A
Memoir. NY, 1985) is a devastating book written from the uncertain time be-
tween victory and liberation in Paris, World War II. Duras’s husband, Robert
Antelm, was still in a concentration camp, the war over she waits for his re-
turn. It’s a terribly human book about the morally unsure time and territory be-
tween victim and perpetrator. See too «Ter of the Militia,» the second story in
the volume.
… to be a copying machine. Writing in long hand like this is such an old tech-
nology now. Though I keep journals they are not written «to» anyone, and nei-
ther are they diaries in the sense of «a record» of the daily minutiae of events
and thoughts. The challenge for me here is to «re-learn» the art of letter writ-
ing  – of writing «to» another. «Voice» and the literary memoir share a lot.
There’s the first person «I» story (a Japanese literary genre – Uno Koji possi-
bly its most marvellously absurd practitioner – read In the Storehouse, Love of
Mountains), the shared humanising understanding that one is reading some-
one’s experience of life whether «true» or not true. The memoir does this dif-
ferently than autobiography which seems tied to a linear life – «I was born,
this happened to me. ‹I› die – will die.» Autobiography asks «us» to assumes
an «us» on the same time. Whereas in memoir that veil of pretence is lifted,
there is no claim to universal time-truth and the reader is engaged in the in-
consistencies and uncertainty of a life. Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love does it
with such élan vital: fragmentary and always awake it slips between dreams,
events, times, places, rumour, events, violence and love. I’m too tired to con-
tinue (she wrote last week). I haven’t even got to a question yet.
It’s something about the «you» in the telling Lucas. And it’s barely even a ques-
tion. If I form it into a structure I’m afraid it will direct your thoughts in ways that
merely answer the question guided by the assumptions that structure the
sentence.
A question then with as little scaffolding as possible – perhaps more like tap-
ping and waving an errant feather your way – these are thoughts arising from
community, the «com» of communication (communion); where is the «you» in
your telling, the «I» and the «me.»
274 275
The thinker I’m keeping by my side here is Jean Luc-Nancy and his essay The
Inoperative Community. Nancy tries to trace the idea and practice of «com-
munity» & «society,» and the assumptions and understandings that structure
«our» use of these concepts, terms, and practices. «History is thought on the
basis of a lost community,» Nancy writes, and it strikes me that your practice
of face-to-face interfaced with blog-as-art sidesteps the assumptions of histo-
ry with the capital H – scaffolding for sure – and makes community as it goes,
or rather, opens to what is already (t)here.2
«Society» is an attempt to reign in the unruly force of «community.» Nancy
claims that Rousseau, the great romantic enlightenment philosopher (I see jun-
gles made safe by the pictorial plane), was the first of his tradition to experience
the question of society as an unease directed toward the community. Does the
instrumental stack of the blog format work to rein in the unruly thought, the er-
rant force of a «visual» horizontal connection? After so many years spent mak-
ing work at the small screen for a network of disembodied strangers, now I
crave making with materials I can touch and share, exchange, these moves
seem more meaningful and in the world of ground and sky. And it’s not about
«things» or materials (these are the «given» details), but rather the action of
making and the action of making «with»: a thought, an idea, a conversation.
But while we are still here, with the «H» of History I want to pick up on some-
thing the forever / always tri-part in our friendship Anne wrote in an email – or
«post» in blog-speak – to you after attending the opening at Artspace for the
«make-the-book-of-the-blog» show. What she has so astutely noticed is some-
thing medieval about your approach – the «shire,» your «worship» (joke), the
admirable and somewhat rare quality of openness that characterises the art
that you make (instigate, participate in), the shared conversations with «folk.»3
If there is a problem it has to be (for me) the one about well-being and com-
munity and art. How can one live a meaningful life amongst and with others
(art = sensitivity to all life / death) contributing somehow?
It’s 9:21 am. Sunday still. The washing is on, I’ve timed it so it can be retrieved
as soon as its finished. Other tenants (my neighbours I am privileged to live
amongst such a good bunch of strangers) will need the machine. I’m going to
stop this for a while. Dishes beckon, there are some prune plums here I want
to gently cook, and some pears. The colours of autumn.
Perhaps before I send this tomorrow I’ll try to think of a couple of clear salient
DOT POINTS
or → deliverable → projection → outcome (buggered up the order)
and a joke!
un site ly aesthetics
home less
without a site or sight
foresight
oversight
insight
site situation
co of community
space public commune
We should be suspicious of this consciousness [of the lost community and its
identity] first of all because it seems to have accompanied the Western World
from its very beginnings: at every moment in history, the Occident has given it-
self over to the nostalgia for a more archaic community that has disappeared,
and to deploring a loss of familiarity, fraternity and conviviality.4
Given the friendspace twitter chatter exchange of me, me, I, I, you, us; the «lost
community» as a longing has perhaps been replaced by calls for a return to
values «we» all hold true – the way «we» once were. There are plenty of com-
munities, in a decreasing range of registers. Language as instrumentalized lit-
eracy becomes superseded by other modes of reception and address. Or, as
Peter Sloterdijk describes, the philosophy of spirit and language is abandoned
in favour of systems theory.5
Great talking with you earlier about the autonomy of the artist (Rancière, note
to self – follow up when I have glasses on after sleep) in the age of digital repro-
duction. Here we are then Lucas «framing everyday experience.» Funny isn’t
it, that writing by hand to each other is now a novelty – in such a short time too!
Signing off now,
Your Public Servant (from Mon – Fri)
Teri
278 279
13 /4 /11 7:45 am
LUCAS FIRST NOTES while reading up to here
MEMOIR – p13 vs autobiography
ABOUT THE «YOU» (me) – p 14 – writerly voice
J.L NANCY – p 15 – low «h» history, making community as you go along, and /
or opening to what is already here / there
note to self (COMMUNITY-(SMOG SONG))
FLIP FLOP BETWEEN DIGITAL + MATERIAL page 16
ANNE W: «Medieval» – page 19
«FOLK» – page 20
Nancy – page 24 – nostalgia for «lost» community.
Hi Teri.
First housekeeping action was to number the pages so that we can refer to
what has gone before + locate it. «Offline URLS» (when metaphors get used
upside down e.g., «the brain is like a computer,» «the eye is like a camera,»
«page numbers are a bit like URLS» etc) …
Second thought – we shouldn’t worry yet about how all this is going to synthe-
size itself into printable shareable bookish form. A solution will present itself
as we go along, or afterwards, in the ensuing deadline-created crisis!
Third thought – above I noted down a few things you mention up to here,
which strike me as sparking replies from me. So I’ll use those notes and write
to them. Despite your desire to not «shut down» the conversation, I’ve obvi-
ously picked up on some key dot points in your ocean-crashing waves of text
which I’ll use as «enabling constraints» to get going on something. Eventual-
ly we’ll get somewhere.
THE MEMOIR (a)
I’ve never really thought about the distinction between memoir and autobiog-
raphy before. I must admit I don’t read much of either. I’m going to try and re-
member an example. Oh yes, Robert Adamson, the Australian poet, wrote an
… autobiography I think called Inside Out. Not sure if I remember the title well.
It was «as moving and compelling as a novel.» Compare this to A.B. Facey’s
A Fortunate Life – a novel (?) which was as boring and worthy as an intermi-
nable yarn from the old-man at the bus-stop. (This distinction between novel
and autobiography – paradoxical? – each form striving for the qualities which
are the hallmark of the other – makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s absurd up-
side-down speak in A Picture of Dorian Grey.) I guess my point is that wheth-
er autobiography or memoir or novel (or blog), there needs to be a compelling
aesthetic structure and form, even more than any supposed requirement for
authenticity or truth. Oh, this «dictum» should also apply to the interminable
yarns of the old man at the bus stop, or mine here on this page!!!
THE MEMOIR (b)
In a minute I want to write about the idea of memory embedded in «memoir,»
but first I want to mention something related to what I was just writing about
aesthetic structures in art and in life. Stories have aesthetic qualities; the way
we tell stories in our own lives (even just over dinner) borrows formal tech-
nique from the reading of novels, or of newspaper articles, or joke-books. Just
as these literary forms get their impulses from their oral cousins – the two in
a dance together, co-evolving. Richard Shusterman has a wonderful essay
about this stuff called «Art as Dramatisation» the way that art is a framed «pro-
scenium arch» version of life – and that life is lived with the shadow of drama
throwing a frame around all we do, meaning that we are able to turn poten-
tially banal events into aesthetic experiences – but this is not granted – it’s a
learned (art / life) skill. My great uncle made a million bucks off the DRIZABO-
NE company in the late 1960s – he purchased it for next to nothing, then The
Man from Snowy River came out and a year later he sold it for a bonanza. A
few years ago he had a ghost-writer create an autobiography for him. It was
the most boring document I’ve ever tried to read.
THE MEMOIR (c) – vs the DIARY (BLOG?)
This bit returns to the idea of memory. Some of what I want to write about is
described in Keller & Petersham blogs. It’s about method, I guess. The point is
that a memoir is written at the end of one’s life, or autobiography – a whole lot
of memories are «batch–processed» and transformed into an intelligible linear
story. But at the same time, the daily events will be discarded, or (worse) syn-
thesised into a generalised version of themselves – losing their fine-grained
individuality as experiences and being co-opted for a greater cause. You see
what I’m getting at? Many of the things that actually constitute our lives are
a mystery as to how they fit into the «bigger picture.» They exist for them-
selves, perhaps, rather than for «us» (and the coherent narrative that creates
our identity). So the question for me – when I was working on Keller & Sham –
was, how to allow those things to exist for themselves, at least at the time, but
to also honour them, in themselves. My method was to shorten the gap be-
tween experience and memoir – effectively, to write a memoir of «yesterday,»
every single day …
282 283
THE MEMOIR (d) and COMMUNITY
The point of what I just wrote is that when you write from the temporal proxim-
ity of just 24 hours, you cannot know whether the events being narrated are
«significant» or not. You have to trust that they have something in them, but
you do not yet know what it could be. I think this discipline (?) or practice can
be handy more generally. Allowing things to «be for themselves» lets them
keep the mystery of their «purpose» (or their multiple purposes, or «purpose-
lessness») for themselves. If I can train myself to be this way about events,
(most of which consist of interactions between people) then can I also train
myself to be this way about people? Perhaps this suggests a way thru the in-
dividual Vs group thing in discussions of «community.» What is a community?
Usually it’s a clichéd meaningless term deployed by politicians, or by well-in-
tentioned people. It denotes «good» inherently. But I think it’s worth being sus-
picious of words which denote a «good» or a «bad.» A Mafia grouping is also a
community, just as much as the people who seem to live harmoniously in your
housing apartments. Community isn’t anything special, it’s just something that
humans do. Individuals don’t owe anything «to» the community. They are it.
Just to finish off that idea. I think my point is that a community is an oscillation
between individuality and community. Think about collaboration. If you have
2 people working together on a project, you always have more than twice as
much work being done. There’s «yours;» there’s «mine,» and there’s what’s
«between you and me;» and you can blow this up on a larger scale. In a way,
what I was trying to get at 2 pages ago is this – if I can train myself to allow
each day to be itself, and to have a value of its own, even if I don’t know what
that value is – can I do the same with people? Can a community be conceived
with the same respect for mystery? perhaps a kind of faith (?) inherent value
despite incomprehension.
A L O N E I N M Y R OO M
I F E E L S U C H A PA R T
OF THE COMMUNITY
BUT OUT IN THE STREET
I’ M A ROBOT BY A RIVER
L OO K I N G F O R A D R I N K
from a song by SMOG
either from the album
«knock knock» or
«red apple falls»
(I can’t remember)
A note on «FOLK» (or folks).
It’s true I use «folk» a lot. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that Teri. Why do I
use it?
«People» is so bland, somehow avoids connection with the entities to be la-
belled. «Folk» seems old-fashioned I guess. Affectionate. Maria Miranda in
her thesis (I think?) describes the language in B.K. (Billateral Kellerberrin) as
«cutesy.» Sandie Bridie has called it «folksy» – and compared it to Garrison
Keilor’s Prairie Home Companion. I feel something of a criticism in these de-
scriptions – maybe that the writing is not critical enough of its subject(s). I
don’t know. It will be worth dwelling in more detail on the way in which the cir-
cumstances which surround the writing shape its form. And reveal something
about me; about my repertoire of strategies for social engagement and rela-
tionship building.
THE MEMOIR (a)
Touching the Rock by John Hull traces the author’s transition from being sight-
ed to being blind. It’s written over several years, during the period of transition
itself. It’s not written at the end looking back. The authorial voice is always «in
the middle of the action» rather than at the end of it, looking back. Thus it’s a
memoir-in-action-completed. There’s something very empathetic about this,
for me as a reader. I, when I read, am always in the middle of the action – not
knowing what will happen next.
Bilateral Kellerberrin – the particular «case study» we’ve been asked to consid-
er alongside the questions you’ve written on page  25 re «public space» for me
it’s hard to consider B.K. in isolation without B.P. (Bilateral Petersham) its «city
sister.»
uncertain practices
What could this mean? Why «uncertain»? I think when I began working on
BK I was «uncertain» as to what the practice would be. It was only later (how
much later? can you find the precise moment in that blog?) that I realised
«what I was doing» – it was «blogging as art.» And then, I had realised a kind
of certainty about what I was doing, so that I was able to «apply» something
of what I’d learned in Petersham. An increased certainty led me to launch into
another unfamiliar kind of project (B.P.), to regain my uncertainty again for a
time, until I began to recognise with increasing certainty what was going on.
And so on, with Bon Scott, with Environmental Audit etc.
So it was with an increasing degree of certainty that I was able to approach
uncertain circumstances.
286 287
unsightly aesthetics (a)
She’s used a pun here. Not a bad one, since sight is often the dominant sense
used (or discussed in) aesthetics of «visual» arts, if not music or literature.
Again I think of John Hull’s Touching the Rock – he’s a christian, and as he be-
comes more and more blind, he realises how offensive to him are the christian
linguistic metaphors used commonly – «I was blind but now I can see,» «see-
ing the light,» «in the dark,» «insightful,» «sheds light on,» etc.
SIGHT (THE VISUAL) enables an overall «grasp» in a way that other aes-
thetic approaches don’t. You have to live through sound, it envelops you. You
have to read a book, in time, one page after another – you cannot grasp it all
at once, unlike images.
So an «unsightly aesthetics» [sic] would value the temporal, the immersed as
opposed to the detachment of vision), and so on.
site unsightly aesthetics (b)
The other end of the pun is «unsitely» – retaining to site, physical (or virtual) or
geographical location, place. Where stuff happens. The stage upon which the
drama unfolds. ETC. So what’s «unsitely» It makes me think of Robert Smith-
son’s «site/non-site» opposition – the gallery as a non-site to the «site» of the
«real» place, out there in the world, where stuff happens. The non-site is where
a version/representation of the site’s specificities get transferred , after the fact.
But I don’t really think this is what Maria is getting at with her unsitely. Maybe
it is more about questioning the authenticity of the site; something about how
sites can be strange, uncomfortable, uncanny, detached, un-real seeming, de-
pending on what you do in / with them?
unsightly / unsitely
(Q) What happens when you compare unsightly with unsitely?
Thinking this through makes me realise another meaning I’d overlooked  –
the ugly (unsightly) things which are a mess.
An «eyesore.» Back to Smithson (or R. Morris) and the «formlessness»
debates of the early 1970’s.
(A) Essentially, combining «extra-visual» (methods involving but not limited
to or boiled down to sight) methods of aesthetic engagement with specif-
ic locations or places.
What plays out with these methods in these places – is «the work.»
(EG) – think of «AN EASTERLY DILEMMA» in B.P. (the blindfold episode).
[Note from Teri: this involved the artist breaking the rule set by the artist that
he should not leave the geographical boundary line of the Shire of Petersh-
am to attend a family meal for Easter. He discussed the option as a dilemma
with his readers, eventually taking the decision that the experience warranted
the exception to the rule and further that the opportunity to attend blindfolded
and unsighted would make a point of further testing of the limits of the project.]
Hi Teri
it’s friday, obviously I’ve missed the deadline, you’ll only get this on Monday.
All the best
xx Lucas xx
26 April 2011 Tuesday
Hi Lucas
this could be dreamy – I am feeling very unintellectual
medieval or mediaeval
I think I mean it as feudal – again that return to some kind of archaic notion
of community Nancy talks about (as comfort?) – as village-life. Perhaps what
your practice does is «make» the village life by connecting events, people,
time(s).
I see you write in blocks – underlining entries – that’s the blog-like «stack»
you spoke of recently on the phone. (I’ll come back to this when I write about
«site» and «aesthetics.»)
Bilateral Petersham is next to me, open at the very last page where you write
a few lines about what art is for you, and this line grabs me:
«Can art slip quietly into bed beside life without stealing the doona?»
I always think of art as a revelation – it shocks me awake. If not now, then – or
later. It can sneak up and then Kapow! a Eureka moment. I don’t reckon we’d
disagree on that would we?
Deleuze said we need «vacuoles of non-communication,» he was / is incendi-
ary though. But I get what he means. The world is so convinced that «it» / «we»
know what communication is – and that is Plain English. But I reckon plain
english has left too many out in the cold. (The bloody doona! how powerful
narrative is – one starts a story with a visual metaphor and the tyrant (of mem-
ory) takes over!)
→ «You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of re-
290 291
sistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the ‹trans-
versal organisation of free individuals.› Maybe speech and communication have
been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident
but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been
something different from communicating. They key thing may be to create vac-
uoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.»
Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Toni Negri, Spring 1990 in Negotiations,
1995, p.  175.
This would have to be
violence or music
or love or art
… Art is you walking a goat around Brunswick, and then recording and sharing
to
break the
circuit of violence
and criticism / critique
In the essay she is most known for and the least «typical» of her work – «The
Laugh of the Medusa» – Hélène Cixous warned of the «cops of the signifier.»
She was writing in the 80’s about feminists with RULES.
So this is the aporia then … yes your use of «folk» makes me uncomfortable
(discomfort); how can I /we (I /we who squirm) think about it (the possible causes
of the discomfort) without scaring away the obvious and clear JOY that drives
a /your practise? What does the word «do?»
I went on an Italian movie-fest and watched The Leopard and then Bertolucci’s
1900 to help me think about fascism, peasants and folk – both great stories about
class and social struggle.
(folk: «simple, unaffected, unsophisticated or open-hearted people» one of the
many definitions in the AED Dictionary app. on the little computer called a «smart
phone.»)
On page 36 you wrote, «… repertoire of strategies for social engagement
and relationship building.» This language is so familiar – it’s what I’m charged
with in my paid job. And naming is a problem there too: «public» is too blithely
used – as if we know what it is – «Mums & Dads» one person says – revealing
more about themselves than the «nature» of «the» public. «General Public»
is used to broaden out the term from generalisation to massive generalisation.
In any case, a little differently to your situation, «public» in this sense are the
people «we» are charged to engage with, who I know are diverse, … I’m go-
ing to stop for awhile and come back to this differently … before I do I’ll just
note that it’s about «naming» the ones who are not me or further, «us» being
the ones who are doing the talking, making, doing, and want to connect with
others in their talking, thinking, doing … another diversion – this time around
critical and uncritical (did you know it was Shakespeare who first used «un» as
a prefix thus opening up a whole new spatial / critical dimension to language?
Heard that on the radio).
«Public,» «Folk» are used uncritically – and there is purpose to this uncritical-
lity. Sometimes, in order to do anything, one has to put aside the critical, the
edge conditions, to reassure, to open space. As a tactic it works to varying
degrees.
the experience. The impromptu conversation with the ex-mayor for example
and the goat wee6 stops, and the artist who had recently gone to live in Mel-
bourne posting that running in to you walking around Brunswick was the first
time she’d felt a sense of community there.
Hi Lucas,
I’ve written to you on the fly, and it feels inadequate. What to do? Shall I send
it now and keep up the bargain – just a little late – or hang on a bit longer and
give it dedicated time. Dilemma. Institute time beckons. I’ll keep it another day
or two. You’ll get it Monday.
} control societies
nte netwrecked
} line of flight
30th April. The web for me (in the mid 90’s – early 00’s) was a medium to make
things with – this was before blogs – atmospheres and affects – much more
small scale cinematic or maybe expanded cinema (!) & expanded writing – ex-
panded everything on a scale that redefined notions of scale, reach, time, space.
Nothing at all to do with representation or instrumental language – more to do
with the limits of the code, the browser, the flip between the code and style: un-
derneath and surface. This is quite different, and now dated, along with a jad-
ed or ineffective … here I have to pause before I damn abstraction entirely –
abstraction is still attractive and attracting in a world which has to know what
meaning and communication «do.» So yes the «Life of the Artist» as a life as
art or an art-led-life. It’s affirmative.
292 293
Lucas, on page 34 you wrote, «… can a community be conceived with the
same respect for mystery, (a kind of faith?).» I like it a lot. It’s the artist-as-heal-
er model – rather than artist as revolutionary, or one who «sees» more. The
«training» too – it’s a practise yeah? Attention: to be able to let things be. It’s
also a kind of relationship to life that tries to do away with judgement – and
that’s so damn hard because it’s what has to be done all the time – choices to
be made – do this, do that.
In his little book, which I think was a lecture, titled Fearless Speech, Foucault
writes about parrhessiah.7 It was a Greek concept and action, intimately con-
nected to the «polis» and the notion of «public» and «citizen.» The parrhesi-
ac was one who, at great risk to themselves, told the truth; they told the truth
to the Ruler of the day (or to the assembly), because someone had to do it –
it was a duty.
This is the question I think of in response to Maria’s question and your blog-
as-art work, it’s Foucault’s suggestion that this kind of truth-telling isn’t possi-
ble today – because the «idea» of public is just that – an «idea» a represen-
tation with no authentic limits. So what I’m left with when I read your blogs in
their paper form is not so dissimilar from when I read memoirs (the ones I like
that are written in-the-middle). It’s the pleasure or the discomfort of reading
someone write about their life and the things that happen – the small remark-
able things of the everyday. And is this not participation? Do I have to leave a
comment to participate? Is that really social or more succinctly – is it anti-so-
cial of me NOT to want to write another word online or PARTICIPATE! I worry
about this even as I resist the rush to lay it all bare.
Lucas – do you Tell The Truth? and what’s the difference between truth and
authenticity? (a question for another conversation) gotta go!
xxxTeri
P.S. … just a quick note, my sites were / are always uncertain – horizontal, end-
less beta versions, home-page resistant, and tricky on purpose. Unlike your
sites which record and seek and make community if anyone looks at mine or
comments I get embarrassed! and I always wanted them to be beautiful – with
a tricky bit or two. Always authentic – never True.
Monday 9 May 2011
Authenticity/truth
Pre 2.0 web (1. x ?)
«folk»/concreteness
Hi Teri,
well, how about this: «always true, never authentic?» Because the notion of
authenticity is never something I argue for, in my work or others. Authentic is
the way they cook sardines in Petersham, in the «authentic» Portuguese style.
At least, as far as we know. Until someone comes from Portugal, a modern Eu-
ro-citizen, and tells us that the Portuguese diaspora in Petersham is a throw-
back; that in the «real» Portugal of today, they’re doing their sardines another
way; that the citizens of Petersham are fixated on a nostalgic notion of a moth-
er country which no longer exists as such. Or, alternatively: we learn that mod-
ern scholars of Portuguese cuisine are taking government funded research
trips to Petersham to study the «authentic» way of doing sardines – they way
which has been long forgotten in the old country in its rush to «European Cap-
ital of Culture» modernisation. So does modern = inauthentic? I guess au-
thenticity is relative, situated, context dependent. And therefore is it a useless
term? And what if truth? Somewhere in B. Petersham, my mum writes a com-
ment to the effect that «the opposite of truth is not lies. Often the opposite of
truth is truth.» (I think she says this in relation to one of the entries about the
gay-friendly church.)
OK I want to ask you about the aesthetics of pre 2.0. (Shouldn’t we call them
«1. x») this is one of those strange terms, where 2.0 was the start of the num-
bering system. It’s not as if we ever referred to «Web 1.0.» Or did we? It’s like
how we refer to «normal» telephones now as «landlines» – but it would’ve been
silly to name them like that before mobiles took over. Anyway it strikes me that
the conversation between you and I is a chance to talk a bit «inter-generation-
ally,» about web 1. x -vs- 2.0. Can we think a bit about the aesthetics of each?
What they enabled/embodied/produced? What kind of «sites» they were?
I remember you making «daily bred» with Anne. How it was like crafting some-
thing, or sculpting something. Each aspect painstakingly coded from scratch
(or hacked from shonky code and reshaped to be what you wanted).
Whereas blogging involves a template. Something given, a vessel into which
daily content is poured. Once set up, the template is left alone, becomes invis-
ible somewhat. And what’s more it becomes a recognisable template: «blog
(noun) daily writing posted online in reverse chronological order.» A stack,
with the topmost item the most recent – like envelopes being stacked on the
kitchen table as they arrive in the letter box.
294 295

I can see the distinction you make – abstraction -vs- instrumentalism. The blog
a mere instrument for the transmission of a message; the more clearly the mes-
sage arrives with the receiver, the better. -VS- the web 1.0: object-like, mys-
terious, «this and that placed here and there,» a matrix of L-R, UP-Down, no
fixed template, something to explore, hyperlinks not having to serve a rational,
«communicative» function, poetic and improvisational …
Talk soon Teri!
xx Lucas

1 Bilateral Kellerberin and Bilateral Petersham blogs. See:

http://www.lucazoid.com/bilateral/projects/
2 Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community, 1991, p. 9.
3 Lucas Ihlein: Bilateral Petersham. Sydney: Everwilling Press, 2007,
p. 168 – 169. 2nd edition published for Publicity, Artspace.
Curator: Reuban Keehan.
4 Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community, 1991, p. 10.
5 Peter Sloterdijk: Derrida, an Egyptian. Polity, 2009, p. 3.
6 The Great West Brunswick Goat Walk. West Brunswick Sculpture
Triennial, Melbourne, 2009. See: http://www.lucazoid.com/bilateral/
the-great-west-brunswick-goat-walk/
7 Michel Foucault: Fearless Speech. Semiotexte, 2001
296
Darren Tofts: Possible rendezvous –
Art as accident in urban spaces
Life defers to art; art defers to difference.
McKenzie Wark, Dispositions
The experience of walking in the city has a long history. Well before ’80s
cultural criticism laid its claim on the «everyday,» an archetypal figure
had roamed the streets of modernity for the sheer pleasure of simply be-
ing there. Charles Baudelaire situated this figure, the flâneur, at the «cen-
tre of the world.» For Edgar Allan Poe the flâneur bathed in the fluidity
and flow of the crowd, possessing a «calm but inquisitive interest in ev-
erything.» For Walter Benjamin he lived in a perpetual state of «anamnes-
tic intoxication.» Poet of the ephemeral, the accidental and the unexpect-
ed, the flâneur’s obsession with becoming lost in the midst of the infinite
and complex distraction of the crowd is synonymous with the development
of the modern city and the cosmopolitan imagination. While a figure, and
usually a male one at that, the indulged and indulgent wandering known
as flânerie is in fact a sensibility that strolls in various guises and genders
from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, a chimera whose shadow
can be found in the Surrealists’ pursuit of la mervellieux in the arcades
and boulevards of Paris. Still further into the century it can be traced in the
dérive of the Situationist International, and further still into the next cen-
tury in the hypermediated experiments of unsitely aesthetics. This passage
traces and reveals the evolution of how the local pedestrian wandered into
the networked era as an always-connected, wireless global nomad.
Contrary to most orthodox readings, the flâneur and the Situationist
are not always, or not necessarily mobile. They are often characterized as
297
motionless creatures removed from everyday life, rather than immersed
in it. Nor do they excitedly court the small cosmopolitan miracles of unex-
pected encounter. The opening paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe’s «The Man
of the Crowd» (1840) sets the scene for the flâneur as one who is resting
after an illness, grateful for and alive to what experience brings to him; de-
riving «pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain» (Poe,
1967, 179). With Poe’s textbook on strolling in the city at his elbow, Charles
Baudelaire also characterizes the flâneur as a convalescent, whose «return-
ing strength» stimulates the «keenest appetency» (179), electrifying the in-
tellect and the imagination:
…lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all
the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remem-
bers, and fervently desires to remember, everything (Baudelaire, 1995, 7).1
Convalescence, as a period of waiting, of recovery, finds resonance in the
Situationist notion of recuperation, the rehabilitation of that which has
been isolated or spurned from society (Marcus, 2002, 5). I want to recu-
perate the notion of the flâneur as Situationist manqué, as an «eternal con-
valescent» isolated from the crowd he desires to become (Baudelaire, 1995,
8). From this recuperative, convalescent sensibility we witness the incipi-
ent beginnings of the aesthetician of the unsitely, a wanderer «in the midst
of the fugitive and the infinite» (9); an alternative kino eye on the way «to
a ‹possible rendezvous›… without warning to a place he may or may not
know» (Debord, 2006, 65).
Détournement, the dérive, the urban psychogeography of the conva-
lescent flâneur. These are the formative architectural and psychological el-
ements of unsitely aesthetics. Baudelaire’s seeker of modernity is looking,
no less, for the «fugitive pleasure of circumstance» (Baudelaire, 1995, 12).
But rather than simply terrestrial phenomena of movement, flow and dis-
traction, unsiteliness also signifies and presumes the simultaneous media-
tion of remote sites; the contemporary flâneur, even more so than their pre-
decessors, takes up «residence in multiplicity» (Baudelaire in White, 2001,
36). Timo Kopomaa’s characterization of the «e-flâneur,» the navigator of
«variegated» virtual worlds, adds a further level of multiplicity to the ter-
rain of flânerie (Kopomaa, 2000, 20). As a hybrid wanderer through phys-
298
ical and virtual space simultaneously, the term flâneur comes to signify a
double inflection of being here and there at one and the same time. In this
the flâneur flanerie has never been so busy in their long history, having «a
multiplicity of engagements,» in Norie Neumark’s words, «which open up
lines of flight, to the rich potentiality of the virtual» (in Chandler & Neu-
mark, 2005, 3).
The notion of the unsitely, as out of site, as well as unsightly, or not im-
mediately pleasing to the eye, presumes this general broadening of the grid
of traversable space usually associated with flânerie. As well it assumes a
conceptual widening of the aesthetic potential, or potentiality, of the unex-
pected siting. Siting implies the dual inflection of that which is simultane-
ous and coincident. It is remote, out of site, but capable of being cited or ref-
erenced telematically. It is sitely, in an aesthetic sense of becoming, in that
it could be artifice, accident and /or the inadvertent expression of design,
taste or whimsy. In the section on the flâneur in The Arcades Project, for in-
stance, Walter Benjamin quotes from another commentator on the arcades
of Paris, Amédée Kermel, writing of the lighting in the Passage Colbert: «I
admire the regular series of those crystal globes, which give off a light both
vivid and gentle. Couldn’t the same be said of comets in battle formation,
awaiting the signal for departure to go vagabonding through space?» (Ker-
mel in Benjamin, 2002, 422).
The state of intoxication associated with flânerie, described by nearly
all of its commentators from Baudelaire to Benjamin, brings to mind that
prototypical aesthetician of the unsitely, Arthur Rimbaud. The «adept» of
«elementary hallucination,» Rimbaud describes in A Season in Hell (1873)
the duplicitous double vision of sight and site. In a famous paragraph he
describes how
I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse
carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake. A vaudeville’s
title filled me with awe (Rimbaud, 2008, 234).
Edmund White, in his splendid book on Paris, The Flâneur, described how
the dramatist August Strindberg wandered the streets of nineteenth cen-
tury Paris paranoid, «high on absinthe» and «projecting parts of the drum
above the Invalides as Napoleon and his marshals, he felt the ground along
299
the Avenue de l’Opéra trembling» (White, 2001, 39). In a more stylized,
sober manner, Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method attempted to sys-
tematize hallucination or paranoid phenomena through the use of «double
figuration,» thereby making «the very world of delirium pass to the level
of reality» (Dalí, 1935).
The altered, duplicitous perception of the flâneur suggests that site
is multiple and ambivalent; it is something in the environment that can
be miss-seen as mise-en-scène. As with the «magical sophistries» of Rim-
baud’s «alchemy of the word,» the «little miracles» of Strindberg the «seer-
drunk-genius» (White, 2001, 39), Dali’s paranoid-critical activity enabled
different spectators to see different images in the same painting; produc-
ing an ambivalent co-existence of the possibility of a thing and its oppo-
site (artifice/accident, presence/absence, difference/différance). Or some-
thing suggestively and entirely other, as in one of Amédée Kermel’s visions
of the street in his «Les Passages de Paris»: «The gas lamp illuminating it
looks like a coconut palm in the middle of a savannah» (in Benjamin). It is
this rich yet undecidable irresolution of opposites that distinguishes un-
sitely phenomena. In his 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist In-
ternational, McKenzie Wark describes Situationist architecture as a kind
of Utopian space, «an imaginary enclave within real social space… a result
of spatial and social differentiation» (Wark, 2008, 22). Michel Foucault’s
«heterotopia» immediately comes to mind, which he describes as a «coun-
ter-site» capable of «juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, sev-
eral sites that are in themselves incompatible» (Foucault, 1967). This is
helpful in conceptualizing the unsitely in territorial and relational terms, in
that Foucault privileges space over time, describing «our epoch» as one «in
which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.» However the
differing aspect of both Wark’s and Foucault’s spatial ecologies needs to
be broadened to include temporal contiguity, the bringing together of two
dislocated, heterogeneous sites in time via mediation as a «single time,»
thereby constituting a manifold complex, a «virtuality» in the Deleuzian
sense (Deleuze, 1988, 83).
Australian artist Maria Miranda has coined the term unsitely aesthet-
ics to capture this aporia, the co-habitation of unsitely (small, unspectacu-
lar) and unsightly (beyond normative artistic taste or doctrine). The notion
of site/sight presumes encounter with public spaces beyond the white cube
300 301

of the gallery, but also the «paradoxical multi-sitedness and situatedness aesthetic quality of the network that transposed the locomotion of walk-
of the work and its reception» (Miranda, 2009, 44). As a formation defined ing to the scanning of the eye over the screen. This was a kind of virtual
in relation to contemporary media art practice, unsitely aesthetics extends take on the dérive. It was weirdly suggestive of a kind of perambulation
the notion of public space into the distributed, networked and increasingly that could make sense in the world of atoms and friction, especially with
mobile space of the Internet. The flickering différance of sightly/sitely as- respect to its connotation of drifting. The spectral phasing of the screen of
sumes the relational and distributed nature of the space which constitutes the Streetview algorithm creates the illusion of movement along the street.
the work, as well as the dislocated temporal conditions of its reception. As It then resolves itself into a clarity akin to the physical sensation of pausing
Miranda has suggested, the «emphasis for unsitely is the use that artists in front of a specific something.
are making of the internet, in the actual world» (48).
Melbourne / Rome is the blandly provisional name I have given to
an experiment in unsitely aesthetics. It is deliberately non-descript in or-
der to see the work as an almost didactic engagement with the process of
conceiving, performing and documenting an unsitely aesthetic. Taking its
starting point from the Situationists’ use of maps, I wanted to use the expe-
rience of physically walking through the streets of the immediate and em-
bodied city in which I live (Melbourne) and map it on to a virtual journey
through a remote city. A set of personal preferences established the guide-
lines and principles for determining the latter: the last international city
which I have visited (Rome), where I stayed during that time (the Campo
dei Fiori), and the exploitation of an essential difference between the two
sites (the definitive grid structure of the Melbourne CBD and the labyrin-
thine tangle of streets that circumscribe the Campo dei Fiori). The idea was Palimpsest of Melbourne and Rome.
to see what might happen in the way of sitings in one city and mark any-
thing of conspicuous interest on the map. The contrast of the topographi-
cal characteristics of each city was chosen as a variable, an algorithm that
allowed for the possibility of rendezvous, of potential co-ordinates.
I chose the legal and corporate section of the Melbourne CBD for ob-
vious reasons, in that it was as far from the local, residential and communi-
ty vibe of the Campo dei Fiori as Melbourne is from Rome in geographical
space and time. I partitioned a selected grid of Melbourne streets roughly
comparable in scale to the area around the Campo dei Fiori I was familiar
with. Then using tracing paper, I assembled a manifold palimpsest of both
areas so that a siting in one city could easily be mapped on to an equivalent
coordinate (relative to the shared grid) in the other.
Then, using the Streetview function in Google Maps, I traversed the equiv-
alent co-ordinate in Rome in the hope of possible synchronicities: a syn- Rome, StreetView.
302
As an analogue of pounding the pavement around Melbourne in another
city, it was pleasingly complementary as a vector that connected unsitely
spaces of flow. A series of annotated findings of this experiment constitute
the second part of this essay.
The idea behind Melbourne / Rome was a kind of Oulippean «poten-
tial» art of happenstance in urban space; a space-time in which something
that might or could be art finds you, or could become art through fabulation,
combining the various sitings into a narrative. The superimposed maps
constituted a kind of aleatoric interface, a dialectic of chance and choice
similar to a John Cage prepared piano: you can play it, but you can’t con-
trol what might resonate from its operations. An early working title for this
project was in fact Atelier aleatoire, a preposterously Francophile appella-
tion for a work that has nothing remotely to do with France. However the
idea of conceiving, executing then documenting a process that may or may
not yield results was suggested by the convergence of the traditional notion
of the studio (as a place of design, planning and practice) and contingency.
Most artists, of course, talk of being courted by chance as much as inspira-
tion in the studio. I wanted to modify the inflection to incorporate the very
notion of the studio as an effect of chance.
The studio, as a virtual object in space and a contingent process in
time, was an emergent property of the provisional mapping of the pre-de-
fined and partitioned streetscape. The actual negotiation of its embodied
layer, the streets of Melbourne, was random, in the spirit of flânerie, of
simply going where the dérive takes you (fortunately, too, the Melbourne
CBD is graced with myriad laneways, alleys and cul de sacs, many of which
are not even named). The atelier aleatoire is in this sense less a thing than
a rhythm that blends and hustles the ordered and the random into a kind
of dance.
A work that certainly influenced my thinking on the design of the
event was Wark’s 2002 book Dispositions. Dispositions is described by its
publisher as a kid of diary that «tracks the secret passage of free time and
free thought through the spaces of everyday life lived increasingly in the
shadow of the satellites.» It is a more thoughtful, meditative, even self-
conscious take on the dérive, of the «art of walking in crowds» in the age
of the aphorism and the mobile GPS (Wark, 2002; April 6, 2001). Though,
that said, it is no less attentive to the incurable distraction of the crowd
than the flânerie of Poe and Baudelaire:
303
4.45 pm EST April 14th 2001
North 42.37514˚ West 071.114920˚
Elevation 188’ 245’ Accuracy
Looking up from the notebook. Lost for a moment, lost to context. Mind and muscles in
that context of the notebook and the pen. There is no text, only context.
The museum guard, in a neatly pressed uniform, shoes shined. He sits in a red chair a
few inches from the wall. He gently eases his head back until it touches the wall, and
closes his eyes. He sits that way, legs folded and turned, for some time. When he wakes,
he sees me looking at him, and smiles. Exchange of smiles. Both arriving for a period
at this point.
Wark’s project partakes of unsitely aesthetics in that his dérive is assem-
bled through the mediation of his immediate location on the streets of New
York City by the virtual, panoptical gaze of a hand-held Global Position-
ing Satellite. To signify the virtual confluence of different experiences and
definitions of space, Dispositions is unpaginated, each entry (as in the ex-
cerpt above) catalogued in terms of date, time and latitude and longitude.
Wark’s experiment in unsiteliness is at odds with the spatial organization
of the book form itself, which seeks to impose a certain kind of order that
is linear and sequential.
The consensus among scholars of Debord and his followers is that no
actual situations were ever staged, well at least not in the name of Situation-
ism. They remain conceptual, potential, like Fluxus event scores awaiting
their performance, their manifestation at another time and place. Perhaps
Melbourne / Rome is such a vector of time and place, an emergent proper-
ty of the outcomes between ordered and random conditions. With Asger
Jorn’s notion of the «event» in mind, Wark describes its aesthetics and its
politics as a «block of time and space that varies, deforms, morphs, but that
happens in time and may not happen again» (Wark, 2008, 19).
1 With respect to this notion of rehabilitation, Anke Gleber describes flânerie as a
«walking cure» against the prevailing melancholy in capitalist modernity – the
melancholy to which modern subjectivity is subjected in its periods of waiting,
transit, and transition.» The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film
in Weimar Culture. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 60.
304 305

melbourne / Rome

… a set of coordinates that give your position here

with respect to there. Dick Higgins

Do you see, Madam, a narrative in these apparently

unrelated episodes?
Mr. Neville, The Draughtsman’s Contract

Melbourne /Rome. Composite map.

306
A palace of light and truth. The Sancta Sedes, the Holy See, arbitrator
of truth and light in the name of the crucified Christ. The architecture of
power and administration, the Word and the Law.
Congregation of the Holy Office. D for Dominican, the Catholic order
responsible for conducting inquisitions and trials at the request of the Ro-
man Curia. And the accused, the controversial friar of Nola, interrogated
for seven years, imprisoned in dungeons of the Tor di Nona. Cardinal Bel-
larmine’s repeated calls for his Dominican brother to recant fell upon deaf
ears. D for deaf.
On the 17th February, 1600, he took his final breath amid the flames.
D for death.
Near Circle Alley, Melbourne
307
Paranoiac-critical reflection. Giordano Bruno as water fountain. But what
book? A Roman telephone directory? And why that open page? A reading
suspended, interrupted or the fickle vagaries of the wind? The Index Li-
brorum Prohibitorum, a book of forbidden books published with Papal au-
thority in 1559. And what of the other book, the book Bruno clasps in his
bound hands? Erasmus’ Commentaries? De Umbris Idearum, the Shad-
ow of Ideas, the first of his own books on the hermetic arts of memory? A
field of flowers, campo dei fiori, once a place of execution, a nondescript
meadow. Ideal for burning heretics and throwing their ashes into the Tiber
nearby.
Looking South, Campo dei Fiori, Rome
308
An archive of numerous features, the puncta of architectural memory. A
fearful symmetry of holes and filled cavities. Bolts tidied up with an angle
grinder. The holes, something that has been. The fugitive trace of a com-
memorative plaque, ripped from the wall, perhaps by a souvenir hunter.
But more likely an act of casual malice. Now simply the suggestion of a life
once lived, who lived here, engraved into the judicial face of the business
end of town. Or died here. The site of a Masonic Lodge from the 1910s,
a Friendly Society of Odd Fellows; the marks not holes but signs, a mys-
ticism of welcome and protection from persecution. Perhaps bullet holes,
puncturing burnished granite in a calculated manner that would seem to
contradict haphazardness, fury or a casual drive-by. A gangland execution
with a steady hand. Another name for the Inquisition.
Collins Street, Melbourne
309
A face in the grip of some obscure transcendence. Ecstasy and agony fused
into a distorted visage. Perhaps only half glimpsed, as he averts his gaze
from the image of Christ shown to him by the inquisitors. Naked and top-
sy-turvy, silenced with a wooden stake through the tongue. The smudged
insult of a broken nose, administered during the long walk to the stake.
The resignation is strangely beatific, a calm defiance captured by Ettore
Ferrari in his 1889 monument to heresy in the Campo dei Fiori. A rictus or
a smile? The anticipation, in extremis, of imminent knowledge of higher
truths, pursued during a lifetime of Gnostic discipline.
North West corner, Campo dei Fiori, Rome (detail)
310

References

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trans. J. Mayne. London: Phaidon Press.
Benjamin, W. (2002) The Arcades Project, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. H. Eiland &
K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chandler, A & N. Neumark eds. (2005) At a Distance. Precursors to Art and
Activism on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dalí, S. (1935) «The Conquest of the Irrational», trans. J. Neugroschel [online].
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March 4, 2011].
Gleber, A. (1999) The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in
Weimar Culture. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Kopomaa, T. (2000) The City in Your Pocket: Birth of the Mobile Information
Society. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.
Miranda, M. (2009) Uncertain Practices. Unsitely Aesthetics, doctoral thesis,
University of Melbourne.
Poe, E. A. (1967) Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: Poems, Tales and Reviews,
ed. D. Galloway. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Rimbaud, A. (2008) Arthur Rimbaud. Complete Works, trans. P. Schmidt,
New York: HarperCollins.
Wark, M. (2002) Dispositions. London: Salt Publishing.
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White, E. (2001) The Flâneur. London: Bloomsbury.

Thanks to my colleague Dr. Rowan Wilken for pointing me to some useful references
as well as helpful observations on the text.
Maria Miranda
Unsitely Aesthetics
Uncertain Practices in Contemporary Art

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