JODI: COMPUTING 101B JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 Am Page 2
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JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 1 JODI: COMPUTING 101B JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 2 Comments from FACT guest book during Computing 101B exhibition, 16 July – 5 September 2004 JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 4 JODI: COM PUTING 101B Published by FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology Computing 101B is an exhibition curated by FACT and presented for the first time in Liverpool from 16 July – 5 September 2004. JODI are primarily known for their pioneering work on the World Wide Web, but this exhibition consists entirely of recent video work created by JODI specifically for presentation in a physical gallery space. Led by the ‘tutorial’ aspect of the works shown, the exhibition was constructed as a crash course in (mis)using and (mis)understanding the computer. To further illustrate this theme, JODI and FACT collaboratively curated a selection of documents and artefacts related to the history of the computer, mostly taken from the web, which functioned as a parallel contextual exhibition alongside the artworks. This catalog is released to mark the opening of the exhibition tour at Spacex in Exeter, UK. The Computing 101B publication, tour and catalog were made possible through the generous support of Arts Council England, the Mondriaan Foundation and the Dutch Embassy UK. Following page: Installation view of Computing 101B exhbition at FACT. Image courtesy Nathan Cox. JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 6 JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 8 COMPUTING 101B or HoW I LeaRNeD tO StOP WorrRYiNg & LoVe ThE BoMb Steven Wolfram claims that he made 100 million keystrokes and moved his mouse more than 100 miles while writing A New Kind of Science, an 1100-page book about the mathematical foundations of the physical world. With all that time at the computer, Wolfram either created something of truly historical proportions, or developed an equally epic Internet addiction. He would probably go up to his office every night and spend hours on end bidding on eBay collectibles or playing some knights-and-maidens online fantasy game. It’s no use making fun of Wolfram, though. Everyone’s in the same boat: the computer is the biggest time-waster known to humanity. If human achievement could be measured in keystrokes and mouse miles, compulsively web-surfing, meme-addled, mp3-saturated twenty-somethings across the technologized world would be in luck. But no one would be more fortunate than JODI, the pioneers of Internet glitch art. By Wolfram's criteria, their recent works would rank among the greatest masterpieces of all time for requiring so many keystrokes and mouse movements – and yet their labours went to so little purpose. The works in the Computing 101B exhibition follow a simple formula: 1) Plug video output of computer into VCR. 2) Press 'record.' 3) Behave so badly with keyboard & mouse that the computer screen becomes interesting to watch. With this new methodology, the artist duo follow a trail blazed by the likes of You've Got Mail and Computer Beach Party into a new phase, their Screen Grab Period. JODI are most well known from the World Wide Web, where their work earned notoriety for upending the conventions of an emerging medium. Conventions of the World Wide Web, such as pop-ups, page redirects, and error messages were the raw material of a body of structuralist, conceptual artworks. Unsurprisingly, the work provoked as much sheer panic as it did intellectual appreciation. This visceral reaction was rooted in the human fear of loss of control over the machine that surfaces when unexpected things start to happen to one’s computer. With features like randomly opening windows and self- installing software, you could never be sure if JODI’s work was a benign or destructive invading force. Even if formal issues were their main concern, JODI quickly became notorious across the world for making work that had the potential to be hated, feared, and misunderstood – except by those who understood their inside joke. Where JODI’s early work challenged the norms of behaviour for a game, operating system, or website, the Screen Grabs shifts the focus to the norms of behavior for the computer Author unknown. Macintosh advertising brochure (1983). Image courtesy DigiBarn Computer Museum. user. Instead of interacting with the work, the viewer is put into the passive position of JODI. Desktop Improvisations (2004). DVD with sound.Image courtesy the artists. looking at a video recording of someone else’s computer screen. The viewer of a Screen Awaiting image credit from JODI. Grab work assumes the role of, say an office snoop peering over the shoulder of a JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 10 colleague, an aggravated IT technician explaining rudimentary computer use to a disastrous novice, or a 14-year old trying to show his Dad how to play the latest video game. The computer screens pictured in the Screen Grab videos are not under the viewer’s control. They are controlled by an unseen and irrational force. Being subjected to someone else’s computer use can bring on a sense of powerlessness and frustration, but this frustration is magnified when the computer user works or plays as frantically and incorrectly as JODI do in these pieces. The first work in JODI’s Screen Grab series, My%Desktop, takes on the minimalist work environment of Apple’s Macintosh computer. Appropriately, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh, or Mac, the computer that popularized the Graphical User Interface, or GUI. A GUI is computer software that translates computer commands into mouse-clickable icons. The rise of the GUI signaled a kind of democratization (the protocol-literate might call it a dumbing-down) of computing. In order to learn to copy or delete a file, or open an application, it would no longer be necessary to memorize and correctly type commands like ‘LOAD’ and ‘SAVE’, but merely to understand visual symbols on the screen. Lev Manovich writes that in the Mac vision of the future, 'the lines between the human and its technological creations (computers, androids) are clearly drawn, and decay is not tolerated.'I Apple articulated this promise through a full-on marketing campaign and through careful attention paid to the computer’s visual language. The Mac icons represented the office environment of a 'knowledge worker’: folders, a waste bin (named, in culturally imperialist fashion, the ‘trash can’), and papers neatly arranged on a desktop. Susan Kare was the designer responsible for the black-and-white, 16x16-pixel symbols of this new language. She attests to the painstaking work that went into the development of the Mac look-and-feel: "When I came, the title bar was always called the title bar, and I spent a LOT of time working on different designs for it. Should it have stripes, should it have little architectural details on the side?"II The extropic promise of the Mac, to bring order from chaos, was only true up to the point when it started flying off the shelves. As soon as actual humans got their grubby hands on it, things began to look very different – and this is the point where JODI’s interest in the GUI originates. In the hands of a human user, the Mac’s desktop would soon be littered with files named Untitled Document.txt, and the damn thing would crash all the time. And when it crashed, the Mac displayed an icon that had merited considerably less design attention than the title bars, but said a good deal more about the computer. It was the icon for a system error. "Apple told me to come up with whatever I wanted to for this image, and that probably no one would ever see it," Kare said.III She came up with a cartoon bomb with a lit fuse. Contrary to the expectations of the overconfident Mac developers, it seems that people actually did see the bomb icon, and quite a lot. It was JODI 4 9/11/04 10:58 am Page 12 probably the first computer icon designed to represent the failure of the computer – other computers would simply display error messages – and it struck fear into the hearts of those who encountered it. There are even (perhaps apocryphal) stories of users in some countries refusing to touch their computer, convinced it would blow up in their face.IV The onscreen appearance of the bomb represented the moment when the computer was not alien, but human. Irrationality, inefficiency, chaos, and failure are human traits; these are things we hold in common with the computer, and the things the Mac strove to elide. The appearance of the bomb onscreen, the moment when the machine fails, is the moment when we identify most closely with the machine, when the division between technology and the human identified by Manovich begins to falter. The dissolution of this boundary is what gives JODI’s My%Desktop its power. The four-screen video appears to depict mammoth computers running amok: opening windows cascade across the screen, error messages squawk, and files replicate themselves endlessly. In fact, what we’re witnessing is not a computer gone haywire, but an unedited video recording of a computer user gone haywire. In this video, JODI simply point-and-click, drag-and-drop so frantically, it seems that no human could be in control of such chaos. The line between human irrationality and the similar caprices of the computer is, at first, indiscernible in the piece, and yet as windows open and shut frantically and the computer beeps and squawks, we realize that what we had initially understood as a computer glitch was, undeniably and against all reason, human.