Ursula Endlicher and Ela Kagel in ConversationPrologue We have been working for more than two years now together on a few projects, and our practice has mostly involved dialoguing online in edited text formats or conversations. We usually are emailing our ideas back and forth between each other, and so they are growing through add-ons and edits. Skype-sessions are another part of our exchange, and once or twice a year we see each other in person…! So, over the past couple of years, we have developed a working method and a way of communicating and sharing our thoughts, and putting them out into public sphere. Our curating-netart blog is one example. Another, the way we prepared for our collaboration Taboo Theater 2.0. Most of it was developed through emails, text and concept rounds (This is btw. also how this text evolved, by being sent back and forth). Altogether, in all of our projects, we are building a sort of online mental space first and filter it into the form we want it to take: The blog, curatorial ideas, or an Internet project for a theater space. Then, there is also our individual work, which shows where we both come from, and how we are able to intersect in our collaborations. So what we discuss here is what interests us about cooperating; and how our individual and shared practices are inspiring each other. New York, July 26, 2008 Dear Ela, I would like to exchange a few thoughts about how the two of us are each approaching our individual and our work together, and how it is responding to contemporary culture. I am, on one hand, curious about the ideas behind the term "translating", which plays quite a large role in my work, and then, on the other hand, I am interested in the notion of the already slightly unbearable term "Web 2.0", and what it encompasses, specifically on a cultural level, and what wider meaning it has. And, if this term has no cultural value at all, only the obvious commercial one. We made more or less fun about it when we talked about our theater project as a "lab for a theater 2.0", although it brought the right attention to our goal of bringing an Internet-driven–and participatory–piece onto the theater stage. So let me start briefly with how I see my individual work (net art and Web-driven performance/installations), and where I think we are connecting within our collaborative work (blog, discussions, curatorial and text contributions, theater production) and where we complement each other. I always find myself in a state of translation; my artistic work is based on structural translations from one medium to another: from Web-languages into visual formats, from Web-architectures into synthetic hair, or, from computer code into choreography. There is also a practice of bundling ideas into a form of participatory invitations, or even something close to curatorial decision-making. One of my works, the html-movement-library (2007), is a user-driven online database of performance video clips enacting the html language through movement; whereas html_butoh (2007) makes use of these clips by pulling them from the online repository into a "Web-theater" that runs through the top 500 Websites a day, interpreting their html code as movement. I have approached our collaborative project Taboo Theater 2.0 (2008) with a similar questioning–how to bring/translate the Web into space, into the physical realm, and back? Therefore the stage in the theater represented the Blog itself– visually and structurally–with all its online functionalities.
Having started to work with/on the Internet in 1994, I was even back then interested in structural questions online, such as "What are the most spoken languages in the world?", which resulted into a multi-part piece depicting a tongue when reassembled–after being downloaded and printed out (The Thing Vienna BBS). In some of my net art works, "Web Performer, 1.0" (1999), and "Web Performer 2.0" (2000), I focused on how information is structured online, especially pointing to the flaws within the logic of search engines. While the first piece dealt with the interpretation of historical characters (i.e. Karl Marx or Marlene Dietrich), and celebrating the deterioration of their listed meaning, the second piece performed the indexing of "any character" (= any name, any person.) The first piece was more or less static–one could just watch the decline of reasonable answers–whereas the second piece was dynamic–based on user queries. The way information is structured is still a fascinating topic to me, and still of quite importance to reflect on, I would say, because the Web is more or less what we do with; that’s why the idea of participatory activity is fundamentally important. So what has changed since the beginning of the Web versus its 2.0 version? Sometimes I am wondering about if this "epoch" labeling of the Web is something to reflect on at all. I think a good piece of net art or net-driven art does reflect on the cultural impact of the Web/the Internet itself, and uses, or smartly "abuses", the tools given at the moment. But I can’t help to feel irritated by the valuation that the Web is "better" now, how much it found its deeper meaning, i.e. communities, sharing, etc., how it became socially "viable." Funny enough, the early Internet-based art, like theater pieces that took place in the MOOs–btw, I was thrilled to participate in a few of those with Antoinette La Farge’s Plain Text Players–were dealing from the beginning with a sort of shared experience, a shared space… So the early (Inter-)net art / (Inter-)net theater was already inventive in terms of communicating, and as well in community building! Here, another thought: The idea of blurred boundaries of "stage" and "audience" –online but also in "physical" settings such as a theater piece: I see a parallel to how we deal with these blurred role assignments online now, to the developments in the theater starting in about the middle of last century, where the audience was often invited into the piece to partake. A "blur" of the functionalities of actors and audience… This is a second motif for me in html_butoh, and also in the performance series Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited where user input is utilized for the choreography of the piece, together with the code structures of the site itself. I would like to leave it here for now, and see what your thoughts and reflections are to the above. I think that in your work you have a lot of interest in the idea of user participation as well, and I would like to hear more about your perspective and approach in detail. Best from New York, Vienna, August 3rd 2008 Dear Ursula, Thanks a lot for your thoughts and questions. I think that this whole idea of user participation was the big promise of the Web from its very beginning. This increased with the advent of the so-called Web 2.0, along with a fundamental shift in the traditional role paradigms of users, producers, curators, artists and recipients. In your letter you have stated your interest in the notion of "Web 2.0" and its wider meaning on a cultural and social level. I think that Web 2.0 is the online analogy of what Zygmunt Bauman describes as liquid modernity: No matter what kind of cultural expressions evolve within our transient society, they won’t keep their shape for long. Plus they are being constantly altered by direct interventions from people. Bauman states that for the first time in our history we are confronted with change as a permanent condition of human life. This evokes another major shift: the material starts to give way to the immaterial, to the digital, to the flux - thus facilitating constant cultural flows. Those flows alter many institutional settings that we know within the art context – and it raises the demand of intelligent translation systems to provide access to what is happening out there. I want to give a few examples: Over the last years we have seen the reconfiguration of the traditional role of an author. The author is not necessarily any more the prime authority of the editing of a written work. The notion of the book shifts from a closed system into an open wiki platform, with the author as the host or provider of this platform. Editing, revising and updating the book can be shared endeavors by the author and his/ her readers. The readers also comment on what they read and compare it to similar works, thus creating new reference systems. As an example, I want to mention the book New Media Art by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana. This wiki book is published under the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5’ license. Also, artworks are perceived more process-oriented. The gap between museums as institutions and museumgoers as individuals is getting increasingly smaller. Curators create new concepts to provide access to artworks. Rhizome.org for example has been the first online art platform who invited the audience to become their own curators. Users are interacting with completed and ongoing artwork, using their individual tags to curate/create private collections, which can be taken home or accessed through the Internet. Art can be tagged the moment people see it, and they have the chance to move through linear and non-linear narratives to get to related works. A striking example for the digital preservation and dissemination of popular culture is steve – The Art Museum Social Tagging Project. They call their project "the first experiment in social tagging of art museum collections". The participants of this project are building a tagging tool, collecting tags, analyzing data and engaging in discussion. Their overall aim is to find new ways of improving access to works of art. You have asked me about how I approach my work. In fact, I see myself in many ways as a translator who tries to overcome not only the semantic gaps between audiences and artworks, but who also strives to use technology as a driver for creative processes and knowledge transfer among people. I want to take the Mobile Studios project, which I produced together with Public Art Lab Berlin, as a showcase for this approach: In spring 2006, we have brought 3 multi-media white cubes into public places of different cities in Southeastern Europe, such as Belgrade, Budapest or Sofia. We invited local artists to produce their works under the eye of the public and engaging their public audience in this process. In that way, the Studios became temporarily hotspots of art creation and discussion, along with an increasing online audience.
Our main tasks as producers was the translation on many different levels – national, cultural, linguistic, historical…I was mostly challenged by the fact that I had to let go off my perfectionism altogether – during the Mobile Studios my curatorial work was mainly based on improvisation. Which can be wonderful, but frightening at the same time… You have also referred to our latest collaboration, our "Taboo Theater for a Web 2.0" in the Theater am Neumarkt/Zurich. This was the same experience in many ways, as we wanted to mediate the translation process from Internet to theater (and vice versa) to the outside world. Not only to the theatre audience, but also to the online participants. I have to admit that at times I could not tell any more whether I was a curator, a director, a facilitator, a moderator, a translator, or a technician – and if I just spoke to "live" people or people "online". This "blur of functionalities", as you call it, was a curatorial challenge. What I also found quite striking was the constant reconfiguration of what was "online" or "offline" during our work. I know that your work is devoted to exactly that topic to a large extent. Therefore, I would be interested to hear from you if you have a particular translation strategy to bridge the "real" and the "virtual". Or are those labels outdated anyway? Greetings from my Vienna holiday, |
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