Neil Wiernik and Greg J. Smith in Conversation

[A Page from Marius Watz's 2006 submission to Vague Terrain 03: Generative Art]

Greg J. Smith: I think an important starting point in defining our process and describing our experience is acknowledging where we've come from. As a digital arts publication, Vague Terrain is rooted in series of events called clonk that we curated together between 2000 and 2003. With these events, we hashed out a middle ground between DJ culture and emerging laptop based performance as an immersive space for what you used to describe as "live art events". We programmed a wide variety of performances from artists from the (then vital) glitch & dub techno movement such as Robert Henke, Kit Clayton, Sutekh, Rechenzentrum, Rhythm and Sound, Deadbeat, Tomas Jirku, etc. One of the serendipitous developments of hosting these events was working with local artists and designers like Patricia Rodriguez and Andries Boekelman and trying to reinvent venues on an event-to-event basis. Without really setting out to do so, we were promoting multimedia events right from the get-go. What are your thoughts on how these events helped define how we promote and curate art and media?

Neil Wiernik: Actually, I don't think it really affected the way we work. I think these events laid the ground work for Vague Terrain to happen but I think in a lot of ways that if we didn't do these live art events and went straight to an online project that we would have worked in a similar manner. For me, the interest in the content for me was there long before the live events and event promotion was more of an outlet for me to share this type of work with the Toronto community that was not interested in seeing art/media in a traditional gallery or art space. I had a long history of curating electronic art happenings and participating in them as an artist before we met, so for me what we were doing was not new other then the fact that we were taking events out of prescribed art spaces. This made me rethink/realize that art can be curated or presented outside of traditional venues, like clubs, old warehouse spaces, bars and online as we did with Vague Terrain.

GS: Ah yes, the mythical space that was halfway between the gallery, the club and the warehouse space. I remember lots of discussions about that "perfect venue" in the late 90s. I wonder what that makes online curation? A space halfway between the gallery and the database? I remember when we were formulating Vague Terrain, we were talking about the project in terms of it being an "online magazine", which for the summer of 2005 was actually pretty regressive thinking. I knew at the time that I didn't want the project to be (strictly) a blog and I'd never been that interested in zines either. If anything, I think something I aspired for the project to resonate with the multimedia driven (branded) aesthetic of record labels like Mille Plateaux. For those unfamiliar with the imprint, Mille Plateaux was part of a family of labels run out of Frankfurt by Achim Szepanski in 1993. The various labels functioned as kind of a distribution machine that churned out a boatload of releases over the course of a decade. The releases, design and related theory essays had a profound influence on me around 1999-2003. In many ways, I think Vague Terrain could have been a record label if we had met several years earlier. So, all of this said how do these independent, self-authored channels of distribution I've just referenced relate to what we do now?

I think the key connection to be made is we've always viewed online publishing as an arena for the informal exchange of ideas. Once or twice we've been attacked for not being a peer reviewed journal, but I don't necessarily see peer review as a litmus test for legitimacy. If anything it is a roadblock for circulating ideas and also speaks to a certain exclusivity that has never sat well with me. With minor exceptions (a smattering of rejected submissions), the material we've published has always been grounded in our trust with our invited contributors and curators. I'd like to come back to this point, and address policy and format but I have a question for you first: Given your experience as a recording artist, how would you relate this project to the operation of a record label?

NW: Well in my experience, the way we operate can be very loosely compared to a label, I think we are more of a themed archive than a recording label. I say this simply because if we were a real record or even media art label, we would have a stronger hand in the final product. So as an artist I submit pre-mastered recordings along with accompanying print ready artwork, from there the label takes that raw material and refines/packages it as the final product. With Vague Terrain, we ask artists to send us the final product which we insert into an archive on a specified, curated theme. We also give full control of the material back to the artists and when an artist is releasing with a label the materials rights are shared with that label for a agreed upon period of time, so for instance, if I were to sell a piece of music to a film the label will get some of that money. With Vague Terrain when an artist wants to release material that we've featured all that we ask is that they reference/credit the original publication. Even if we were to compare what we are doing to a netlabel, that type of content is presented quite differently than what we do. A netlabel retains that "product and marketing" aspect of operation that we don't partake in.

[Gregory Shakar / Analog Color Field Computer (ACFC) / published in Vague Terrain 05: Minimalism]

GS: Since we are talking about practice, and context I think it is worth drawing attention to the "released" material here on Vague Terrain. When we started this project, we thought in very prescriptive terms and sought out texts, audio contributions and visual work. At the time we considered these independent streams of content with which we tried to assemble a coherent body of work, sometimes this worked quite well and other times the issue didn't quite congeal. By about our third issue, (Spring 2006, on generative art) the lines between these categories started to blur and we started to get an increasing amount of flash video content. By this time we also realized there a few patterns in the types of submissions we received. We could recognize the following patterns in our received material:

1. Contributors using their submission to present a "mini-retrospective" of their work
2. Contributors highlighting a specific facet of their practice, sometimes quite tangential to their primary body of work.
3. Contributors highlighting a very specific project - Vague Terrain has featured several detailed documentations on specific. installations. I've always enjoyed these contributions, because they often are presented in a tone that is half "archival" and half "artist talk", often the technical execution of the work is discussed at length.
4. We've had several authors test drive book chapters on Vague Terrain, and in a few cases we've pulled chapters out of existing texts to sit alongside a relevant body of work.
5. Interviews, interviews, interviews! These just work so well on the web.

So to return back to your comments about us being a "themed archive" what I find quite challenging about this project is the idea of building something coherent out of a myriad of windows into a range of distinct creative practices. I think there is something to be said for putting a theory essay, a musical EP, video documentation of a specific performance and an interview into orbit around one another. As we've got a bit more comfortable with this activity, we've started to play with our format a bit and our Process issue (all interviews), and this current issue are examples of these experiments.

[Defasten / Untitled #2 (01.20.48_d) / published in Vague Terrain 09: Rise of the VJ]

NW: I think playing with format was a natural evolution for the project, in fact I'm sure this publication will evolve further as time passes. Bringing in guest curators for specific issues and inviting people from within the community to contribute to the blog will make that happen regardless of what vision we have. I mean how many times have we approached a guest curator with the theme and our guidelines only to get a reply that says "thanks for the opportunity, but can I do this instead and can it be presented as such?" I think in some ways, as co-curators and co-editors we are lucky to have had such a compatible view of how to present things, it allowed us to create a mold to establish what we were/are doing but because of the fact that from day one this was a giant experiment, it allowed us to break that mold when inviting outsiders into the project for an issue. In fact I think it forced us to even rethink how to present the issues we curate ourselves. What I'm excited about is seeing how the blog evolves as there will be more fingers in the pie delivering content to that part of the site, will the journal take a back seat eventually as the blog portion grows or will the blog just end up acting as a place for people to post related content they come across on the web? In other words what kind of archive will the blog turn into?

GS: I think that is an important question. My instincts tell me that the blog will function like the journal, but be more open, informal and ephemeral—a microcontent counterpoint to the journal proper. There is something to be said about inviting our readers into the space of this project a few times a week as that suggests an intimacy that would be impossible as a "quarterly publication". As an endgame for Vague Terrain, I'd aspire for the site to function similar to an artist run centre, whereby we'd have content and resources that speak to craft and production, a formal context in which to present and archive work and opportunity for socialization and networking. I look forward to opening this site up and seeing what other people can bring to the table as we've learned a lot from our guest curators David McCallum, Carrie Gates and now the CONT3XT.NET collective. It is getting to the point where I'm more interested in developing Vague Terrain as a platform than programming content. It is great to develop a solid workflow and network of peers, but if you can hand the controls of that infrastructure over to an interested and enthusiastic party you simply can't anticipate how exactly they might utilize it, that's truly exciting to me. What strikes me as both perplexing and fascinating is how expansive the idea of "online curation" is at the moment and how much that overlaps with the capabilities and architectures of content management systems and the expectations of engagement fostered by ubiquitous social networking.