Domenico Quaranta In Your Computer Domenico Quaranta In Your Computer Publisher: Link Editions, Brescia 2010 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Translation and editing: Anna Rosemary Carruthers, Marcia Caines Printed and distributed by: Lulu.com www.lulu.com ISBN 978-1-4467-6021-5 «There is this hacker slogan: “We love your computer.” We also get inside people's computers. And we are honored to be in somebody's computer. You are very close to a person when you are on his desktop.» _ Jodi, 1997 Domenico Quaranta is an art critic and curator. His previous publications include Gamescenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (2006, co-edited with Matteo Bittanti) and Media, New Media, Postmedia (2010). He curated various shows, including Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (2008, with Yves Bernard) and Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art (2009 - 2010). He is the founding Director of the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts and a co-founder of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age. http://domenicoquaranta.com Contents Aknowledgments 1 Introduction 3 The Legend of net.art (2005) 9 0100101110101101.ORG (2009) 13 Generative Ars (2006) 17 LeWitt's Ideal Children (2005) 22 F For Fake. Or how I Learned to Manipulate the Media to Tell the Truth (2006) 29 Interview with UBERMORGEN.COM (2008) 34 Remediations. Art in Second Life (2007) 39 Gazira Babeli (2007) 47 Interview with Second Front (2007) 56 Holy Fire, Or My Last New Media Art Exhibition (2008) 63 Lost in Translation, Or Bringing Net Art to Another Place? Pardon, Context (2008) 70 Interview with Jon Ippolito (2005) 80 Don't Say New Media (2008) 85 Interview with Oron Catts (2005) 90 It isn't Immaterial Stupid! The Unbereable Materiality of the Digital (2009) 96 RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting (2009) 100 Art and Videogames. Enclosures and border crossings (2009) 117 Cory Arcangel (2006) 124 Eddo Stern (2009) 131 Interview with Tale of Tales (2005) 136 Reality is Overrated. When Media Go Beyond Simulation (2010) 141 Interview with Joan Leandre (2008) 146 Is the Future What it Used to Be? (2010) 152 The Unbereable Aura of a Website (2010) 157 Petra Cortright (2010) 163 Interview with Oliver Laric (2010) 165 The Art of the Netizens (2010) 169 Domenico Quaranta – In Your Computer Acknowledgments This book is a collection of texts written between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews. In the beginning, the idea was simply to experiment with print-on-demand publishing, and to make available in printed, or printer-friendly, format, a series of texts that – even if, in most of the cases, are available online – suffer, for some reasons, a low level of accessibility. Some of them were simply too long to be read online, and too badly formatted to be printed; some others have been made available in a really bad English translation; and some, fnally, were simply invisible in that Library of Babel that is the World Wide Web, hidden among hundreds of documents on the wrong shelf, or buried under a stack of dead links. Quite soon, unfortunately, I realized that if I didn't want to make a 400 pages, expensive and unreadable book I had to be selective. Being the editor of myself, the risk was to make an authorized, celebratory portrait of myself and my recent past. I made my best to avoid it, and to move the focus from myself to the wonderful people I've been in touch with in the last years. Still, this book is a pocket version of what, among the things I did, I'd like to bring with me after the universal food, in a world without computers. Most of the felds of the research I developed in the last few years are represented: from Net Art to Software Art and videogames, from biotechnologies to the debate around curating and the positioning of New Media Art in the contemporary landscape, and back to Net Art again. The prevalence of recent texts – most of them have been written between 2008 and 2010 – is not just the consequence of an error of perspective (like anybody else in his thirties, I like my present and I dismiss my past), but also of my working conditions. I still write a bad English and have more to learn than to teach, but I have more friends from all over the world asking me to put some ink on paper. My gratitude goes to them all, for allowing me to have these texts published and then re-published again in this book. I also have to thank my good friend and comrade Fabio Paris, for his invaluable advices and for the great work he made on the cover design of this book; my wife, Elena, and our little monkey, Dante; Marcia Caines, for her friendship and for editing some of these texts in a way that make them look like actually better than they are; all the hardware and software I used and abused and, last but not least, all the wonderful artists that got inside my computer and used it to put a virus in my brain. It's still there, and I love it. Brescia, March 2011 1 Domenico Quaranta – In Your Computer 2 Domenico Quaranta – In Your Computer Introduction «What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it - or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce — from any preserve. For the frst time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power». [1] At the beginning of the last decade of the Twentieth Century, some pioneering artists discovered that they could not only use their computer in order to make art, but also that they could deliver it, through the Internet, to many other online computers. In other words, they could bypass any system of selection, mediation, contextualization and filtering and address the viewers directly, making their way into their computer screen and using it as a trojan horse to break into their minds. They also discovered that this very process could become their work of art, and that the viewer could be involved in it, and thus become something more than a simple user. The same happened, sooner or later, for any other cultural object, not just for art. It began with academic papers and information resources. Then came images, music, video and cinema, personal and corporate informations, creative writing, material items. But for art it was different. At that time, if we exclude street art and a few media stunts, there was only one way, for an artist, to reach an audience: the exhibition space. Galleries, temporary exhibitions, art fairs and museums. You had to submit yourself to an hard process of selection, and for what? To show your work always on the same white walls, and always to the same, few people. Then came the Internet. I was definitely not one of the first people to be reached by an artist through my computer screen. When this practice started, I didn't even have a computer. I didn't need it. As a teen, I played some arcade games, without enjoying them that much. I was a nerd, but not that kind of nerd. At the high school, the math teacher thought me Turbo Pascal. I still hate them both (I mean, math and the math teacher). Then, in 1997, my uncle got out of prison, and for some unknown reason, he bought me a computer. At the time I was 18 years old, and at the University I just discovered that a computer wasn't good just for math and videogames. Furthermore, my uncle was the charismatic kind of crimina and, when I was a child, he seducted me sending from prison some wonderful matches vessels. So, if he thought I needed a computer, I probably did. I no longer admire my uncle, but I still think that a computer is as fascinating as a matches vessel. Anyway, it took me another couple of years to discover that this vessel could bring art into my bedroom. Not reproductions, but the actual thing – the distinction was very important for me at the time. It was exciting. The matches vessel proved to 3 Domenico Quaranta – In Your Computer be an underwater relict, full of recent, yet already classic, masterpieces. I intuitively felt I was witnessing the very beginning of an extraordinary evolution in art production and circulation, and I wanted to be part of it. I talked with my contemporary art teacher and advisor, Luciano Caramel, who had been a militant art critic and curator in the Sixties. He understood and supported me. I wrote my MA thesis on äda'web, a pioneering website commissioning online works to established, as well as young, artists and active between 1994 and 1998; and I started writing for a couple of online Italian art magazines. These are the antecedents of this book, whose timeline starts in 2005. Along these years, I've been witnessing to what was happening in the realm of art, for most of the time, from behind this small, rectangular window, that grew up in size and resolution along the years.