Syndicate: Aesthetics of Dysfunctionality

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

Dear Syndicalists,

with one foot still in Skopje ;-), I am sending you a text which was
originally held as an introductory lecture for the exhibition "body of the
message" at the NBK in Berlin (4 July-16 August 1998). A (photo)
documentation of the exhibition can be found at
<http://www.snafu.de/~inke/NBK/body.html>. With this lecture I intended to
contextualize the artists' works included in "body of the message" (Sandra
Becker, Joachim Blank & Karl Heinz Jeron and Daniel Pflumm).

â??Notes on the Aesthetics of Dysfunctionality, or: Why Some of Us Donâ??t Want
to Become â??Masters"â?? was recently published in: Erkki Huhtamo (ed.),
Medi-O-Rama, No. 8/1998 [English]
<http://www.forum.nokia.com/nf/magazine/mediorama/index.html>

Unfortunately, the text published in Medi-O-Rama does not carry any of the
illustrations I suggested. But you can find a TEXT WITH ILLUSTRATIONS at
<http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/Media/dysfunct.html>.

Best wishes,

Inke


--- --- --- --- --- --- ---

How do artists hi-jack new technologies?

Notes on the Aesthetics of Dysfunctionality, or: Why Some of Us Donâ??t Want
to Become â??Mastersâ??

by Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>


â??Donâ??t become a Master!"
Alexej Shulgin, â??Art, Power, and Communicationâ??,
Syndicate mailing list, 7 October 1996


Even if they are working with so-called new media, many of the artists of
my generation do not consider themselves as being â??media artists". They do
not use the term because â??media art" for them means a certain way of using
new media and new technologies which they consider being uncritical,
lacking distance towards the medium/technology, and generally being
affirmative towards the technologies used. These young artists identify the
notion of â??media art" with virtually another generation of artists from the
1980s. I am referring here to the very impressive interactive installations
and objects which were displayed at various ars electronica festivals in
Linz, Austria, and to the recently opened media museum at the Center for
Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Sometimes this is
being cynically referred to as â??ZKM-" or â??SGI-art". In many cases, visitors
to these exhibitions (the â??users") are merely confronted with the latest
technological achievements and â??high performancesâ?? of the ever growing
computing power: â??cyberspace", â??smooth surfaces", â??interactivity",
â??artificial intelligence" and â??man-machine-interface" are some of the
fashionable catchphrases used in the context of media art, which perfectly
fit the marketing strategies of the corresponding industries.

Although the artists of my generation who reject the notion of â??media art"
cannot offer a better term, they instead deal with new media and new
technologies in calmer and more relaxed ways. For them, new media are a
â??naturalâ?? part of the world; media constitute an integral part of their
world view. The world as they know it is inconceivable without media. Media
technologies are not being assigned a utopian potential anymore.

I would now like to briefly reflect on four artistic projects which I
consider to be especially interesting in the context of this article. These
four projects are not about using or applying new media and new
technologies in the sense originally assigned to them. They are rather
about appropriating, misusing and highjacking these technologies. These
projects take a critical and detached stance towards the media machines,
using the strategies of infiltration, irritation and interruption. They are
devoted to the aesthetics of the error, to the electronic disturbance and
technical breakdown, to dysfunctionality and the aesthetics of the
machinic; in short: they are about rendering visible those processes which
normally are at work below the smooth surfaces in the depth of the machine.
Or, as a colleague of mine recently formulated, these projects approach
technology â??not from the perspective of smooth, supple merging of material
and virtual worlds, but from the perspective of the accident, of friction
and rupture which are necessary elements of any technical reality."(1)


JODI

The Dutch/Belgian artist group JODI consists of Dirk Paesmans und Joan
Heemskerk, currently living and working in Spain. JODI, respectively their
web site <http://www.jodi.org> has, for its radicality, by now gained some
reputation among Internet users. When contacting the site, the first
reaction is â??Oh my God, my computer has crashed", or, â??shit, I finally
caught a virus". With their website, which makes extreme use of computer
generated gif/jpeg images, CGI programmes, Javascripts, ASCII characters,
and pure HTML text, JODI belongs to the most advanced representatives of
the so-called â??net.art" (which reads correctly â??net-dot-art"). By
scrutinizing the notion of â??interactivityâ?? and negating communicative
impulses, JODI focuses on the basic elements of the Internet, devoting
itself to what normally is being referred to as technical dysfunction: they
reveal the technical disturbances occurring in the communication between
machines.


Heath Bunting

A real â??alarming" infiltration strategy was implemented by the British
artist Heath Bunting during the exhibition â??discord. sabotage of realities"
which I co-organized at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1996-97. After an
extensive research in the commercial areas of downtown Hamburg, Bunting
prepared postcards with magnetic security stickers which usually are
removed or deactivated before leaving the shop. These postcards he then
mailed to shops that operate magnetic theft protection systems. Upon
delivery, it was the postman who triggered the alarm; a strange reversal of
the intended purpose of such systems. The text on the postcard read: 

>are you alarmed? yes [   ]   no [   ]
>sometimes protective media systems
>can be adapted into
>vulnerable presence devices


-Innen

Founded in 1993 by Corinna Knoll, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Janine Sack and
Cornelia Sollfrank, the group -Innen dedicated itself to analysing the
power structures surrounding the use of new technologies (â??old role models
- new media"). Joined by Susanne Ackers, the -Innenplus team took part in
the CeBIT â??96 in Hannover, the worldâ??s largest computer fair. Dressed in
look-alike uniforms, the aim was to parody the â??art of media commerce
through actionist simulationism."(2) -Innenplus says that â??in contrast to
the supposedly future-oriented technology (which is being promoted at the
fair), it is astonishing how traditional role models are fiercly being
clung to. Technology is a male domain. This is how the unproportional male
presence at computer fairs can be explained. Professional help is needed to
compensate the natural lack of women. The services of hostesses and
prostitutes are a welcome remedy."(3) During their action â??Women and Men at
the CeBIT â??96", the (female) staff of -Innenplus visited the booths and
established contact with (male) sales managers, distributing a mousepad for
free. The mousepad displayed a photo of the group as well as questions and
a multiple choice system of answers about sex, technology and gender roles.
A video tape documents the flabbergasted managers.


TV Poetry

On the occasion of the Medienbiennale Leipzig 94 which I organized together
with Dieter Daniels, the Austrian artist Gebhard Sengmueller installed a
system which actually functioned similar to JODIâ??s work. For his project
â??TV Poetry", Sengmüller set up satellite TV receivers in Vienna, Rotterdam
and Lueneburg, which switched the TV channel every ten seconds. On the
computers connected to the satellite receiver, a text-recognition programme
was running, filtering out the text elements; e.g. subtitles or news
headers. The software then converted the graphical text into ASCII
characters. Depending on the size and the clarity of the â??originalâ?? texts
in the TV images, the result was more or less correct. Every ten minutes
the computers connected via a modem to the central computer in Leipzig,
where the results - easily readable texts alternating with machinic
gibberish and vice versa - were displayed as an infinite text stream on a
monitor. TV Poetry was a silent meditation on the aesthetics of the
machinic and the uncertainties of communication.

The four projects which I briefly introduced, have in common that they do
not use new media and new technologies in the sense originally assigned to
them: They rather digress, appropriate and annex these technologies. To be
able to focus on the immaterial aspects of media art, generally the
material conditions of such an art work have to be rendered invisible (4).
Here, it is the exact opposite: these projects do emphasize the material
conditions and the generally unquestioned technical, social and ideological
assumptions underlying these new technologies. They focus on those
realities which through their invisibility guarantee the frictionless
functioning of the media machines, and as such they question the utopian
promises of the smooth system surfaces. 

Inke Arns

Berlin, August 1998


References:

(1) Andreas Broeckmann, from the concept of the Dutch Electronic Arts
Festival (DEAF) 98 - The Unreliability of Accidents, Rotterdam, 17 - 29
November 1998 <http://www.v2.nl/DEAF>
(2) Verena Kuni, â??â??Cyberfeminismus ist kein gruenes Haekeldeckchen". Zur
kritischen Netzpraxis von Kuenstlerinnenâ??, in: kritische berichte, 1/1998,
p. 65ff.
(3) Press release by -Innenplus, Xerox, 1996
(4) Cf. Hans-Dieter Huber, â??Materialitaet und Immaterialitaet der
Netzkunstâ??, in: kritische berichte, 1/1998, p. 39ff



i n k e . a r n s __________________________ b e r l i n ___
49.(0)30.3136678 | inke@berlin.snafu.de | http://www.v2.nl/~arns/