|
|
|
|
|
In less than a decade, the
internet has been compulsively colonized by all and sundry.
Panic stricken corporations plough funds into website after
website in pursuit of their, 'potential market' while less
profit minded purveyors and consumers of all conceivable data-types
have also staked their own claims. Because of its disparate
and fragmented nature, no overall design has been successfully
applied to this largely unregulated global network, and it
is only in recent months that any real attempts have been
made in Europe to legislate for what is now regarded by some
as a distinct geographical realm. So for now, the way we experience
the Internet is controlled by the tools we use, and the speed
at which data can be exchanged from place to place. This is
the defining moment however, and with each new browser and
browser version, our perception is shifted a little. The terrain
alters.
So it is hardly surprising that amidst such confusion, an
identifiable culture and counter-culture is emerging on the
web, of its own accord.
One example of this, is what could be described as the patois
of on-line chat. A way of writing messages quickly enough
to other chat-line participants, while keeping pace with a
channel-wide conversation. This dialect tends to read as,
'syntax-slang' sharing common roots with ASCII Art, where
the appearance of the letters and symbols available on a standard
computer keyboard is often intrinsically linked with linguistic
content or exclusively used as a restricted palette for the
production of images.
Bedroom subversive and artist(s) antiorp, known primarily
for their music, have taken to posting a more systematic permutation
of this patois on various on-line discussion groups and messageboards.
What is interesting about antiorp's way of writing is its
seeming similarity to some forms of untranslated or corrupted
data. Entwined into this way of writing are bracket-ridden
protocols borrowed from programming languages, a tendency
to replace vowels with symbols or to use numbers phonetically,
and a mixture of German, French and English spelling. The
result looks something like this:
.. // !f
1 = lokatz !t nesessar! 2 ut!l!z "phat" { un"phat" || "rave"
!t = !nd!kat!v ov fakt 1nz prnzl m9nd konta!nr = rezpond!ng
2 market!ng msgz oral s!r!nge. zttz.}
The text seems caught in a kind of limbo, partially revealing
something of it's truly incomprehensible nature as raw data,
while retaining for some part a linguistic coherence. It is
almost as if these messages have been dissolved in some way
by the act of transmission itself. Antiorp web sites play
similar games where the user will often lose control of the
browser, helplessly left to watch it breakdown or alter in
some way, and sometimes disappearing altogether only to be
replaced with flickering streams of numbers, grids and diatribes
written in 'antiorpeze.' We are reminded how fragile electronic
data really is when the devices we use to translate and interpret
it fail in some way, and how easy it is for our own precious
documents to dissolve irretrievably into a stream of ones
and zeros.
It is a shame that much of what antiorp actually writes is
so lacking in substance. Most antiorp messageboard postings
seem to be part of an on-going series of comfortable pranks,
where various individuals are baited via email so that their
angry and confused responses can be publically re-posted again
and again amidst didactic antiorp commentary and ASCII imagary.
An interesting process but an essentially unconvincing voice
presenting us with little more than a tired mirror image of
all it seeks to criticise. Yet despite the laddish behaviour
(or perhaps even because of it), antiorp's output remains
remarkable as neurotic exhibitionism fueled by technological
innovation.
The homepage is another phenomenon associated with emergent
web culture. Social spaces where families, individuals (and
their pets) represent themselves on-line, often uploading
quite revealing personal information amongst a mass of the
Banal and the Familiar.
Nick Crowe's recently launched project, 'The Citizens' has
tapped this resource by downloading hundreds of homepages,
translating some of them to simple line drawings traced onto
typographical detail paper, and then returning them back on
to the internet as a downloadable bookwork. By rendering these
narratives and documents of everyday life as meticulous drawings,
fleeting and ultimately disposable moments are preserved and
graduated to the status of relic. Relics imbued with both
benevolence and contempt.
The time spent in translating, for example, Margo Barbour's
website (dedicated to "my son, my life, Tyler-Logan") can
be viewed as a largely caring endeavour, with every mark and
line validating her story in some way, singling her out as
our worthy representative. Even so, by paying homage to such
domestic white noise and through his editorial process, Crowe
also seems to mock a confused, narcissistic and ubiquitous
use of electronic space. A simple contradiction making, 'The
Citizens' such a compelling compilation. An honest and sometimes
embarrasing account of what and who we are both on-line and
off.
Unlike antiorp's myopic self-obsession, Crowe takes a wider
view, drawing anthropological material from our world wide
web and showing us how compulsively we are colonising this
new territory. Uploading all that is familiar to us with no
time for re-evaluation or retrospection. Just an instinctive
need to mark out a patch in our own image, whether it is as
homepage, corporation or nation state.
The Citizens is a bookworks project made with support from
Artec in London.
http://www.nickcrowe.net.
Antiorp have no fixed address and can be found on various
servers. http://www.m9ndfukc.org
is one starting point.
Jon Thomson is an artist based in London.
www.thomson-craighead.net |
|
|
|
|