< Women in New Media >
I thought I would start off by talking about Rhizome as an organization and then in a more personal way about why I was interested in Rhizome and what is precious about it to me and then I thought I would look at a few art projects by women that really cover a range of different styles and issues.
First off, a Rhizome is originally a biological term for a root that grows off in different directions connecting plants into a living network and it became a philosophical term when Deleuze and Guittari named the first chapter of their book The Rhizome, their book is called A Thousand Plateaus, which is considered a very important philosophical book in the sixties. And in that iteration, a Rhizome is used to describe anti-hierarchical networks of knowledge and thinking and also an a- centered unconscious.
This Rhizome project was stared in 1996 by my colleague Mark Tribe. It started off as a mailing list that was run off of a free server in Amsterdam and then the story behind it is that Mark had been living in Berlin and working as an artist, increasingly interested in new media art. and as he started getting more involved and going to festivals and conferences and meeting people in Europe and artists coming from Eastern Europe who were interested in technology.
He sort of noticed that traditional art discourse and art magazines were not thinking about network technologies or new media. And on a more social level-- there were all these people who were working on similar things with similar interests and they would see one another at festivals. And, you would figure that since they were often all on-line and techno-literate that the Internet would be a good way for them to connect and share ideas and experiences. And also to start critical discussions.
So, he started Rhizome as an e-mail list in early '96. Since then it has grown to be a community of around 2,000 subscribers. But it is sort of difficult to gage the numbers of on-line communities because obviously there are people who are subscribed and we can quantify that, but then alot of people come and use the Web site and we have traffic numbers.....We definitely feel that without any marketing or advertising, Rhizome has really flourished. We had 100% growth last year in terms of our subscribers.
Another important thread that I'll bring up is that when Mark started Rhizome there was so much interest and optimism about new media industries and people really thought that you could have a Web zine and it was a viable economic model and that people would pay to advertise and that it was alternative but lucrative publishing space. It soon became obvious that that wasn't actually happening. And that even though Rhizome had a really hard to reach community of subscribers-- artists and academics-- people who are impervious to advertising-- it wasn't going to be financially self-sufficient.
So for a long time we were a part of Mark's other business which is called stock objects which is an on-line stock library. But in February of this year, we became a non-profit organization, which in my view was absolutely the right decision. It has really allowed us to re-focus on being a community platform and a critical platform.
I thought I would like to walk around the site a little bit-- (sometimes people say that it's a little obtuse.) The first thing like to say about the Web site is that it's really sort of a front end to the Rhizome community, as Tina could attest to because she is fairly active on one of our lists, it's really just a front end to these e-mail communities. Everything that we publish on the web site has been posted on the e-mail list. And most of the content that we publish is subscriber generated. That means that people who are in the Rhizome community contribute text to the list and then they end up on the web site and also our content base.
So, this is basically three texts from this week and last week. This is our content base which is indexed by key words. And the keywords seem fairly academic-- Colonialism, Desire, Gender, Meme, but you could look up Laurie Anderson or something a little more basic. And you would find the information that you are looking for, so I encourage people to ignore Post-Modern. This is our subscriber page, one of the thing that is most exciting about Rhizome is that we have subscribers in 43 countries. Our editorial policy used to be that we would not edit text of people who didn't have English as a first language but we have started doing that a little bit more now.
I never really know how to refer to Rhizome and when I sent in the bio to Tina I wrote that it was an on-line publication but it is difficult to describe because it is somewhere between a publication and a magazine and a community center and something that is live and constantly changing. And the only things that are constant about it is that there is a focus on art and technology. We really do have very different kinds of writing-- from more formal academic reviews to much more conversational, informational, social posting.
My background is in Literature and History and what was interesting to me about the Internet was that it was an alternative publishing and community space. Soon after I got involved in that aspect of it I thought that it was incredibly interesting as an art space. And what has been so gratifying to me with my work at Rhizome is the very special dynamics that develop between readers and writers, and people who are involved. I think that happens with alot of small publications but I think with Internet publications, when publishing happens so quickly and communication is so easy the dynamics are really special. And also the kinds of interactions and communications are very subtle and they are generally not as hierarchical as other kinds of forums, and those are things that are important to me too.
It is a very exciting place for me because, I think perhaps as everyone on our panel feels art on the Internet and art and technology is a field that is evolving every day. So, I think that it is a fluid scene to be a part of and it involves people from design backgrounds, and art backgrounds, and hacking backgrounds, (and I think that the hacking contingency is my favorite subculture of Rhizome,) and people who are interested in more academic way, or a more social way..... So. I do think that it is a really interesting mix.
Artists who work on the Net, in particular, don't necessarily come from straight forwardly art backgrounds, at least alot of the ones that emerge on Rhizome. Alot of them aren't American, come from Eastern Europe, or places that are interacting with technology in really exciting and new ways. So they come from hacking, design, software design, students, poets, etc.
The last thing I will say about Rhizome is everyone who works there-- Mark has a background as an artist, Alex, who is my colleague, has a background in theory, I have an indeterminate Liberal Arts background. I think that we work well together as a collective. And it is a mix that if we were a traditional art magazine if we would have made it this far.
I would like to now talk bout some interesting projects.....This work I would like to show, is by the artist Olia Lialina , I would describe her as a native Net.artist. Though she has a film background and works as a film curator, her reputation as an artist has only come from her work on the Net. This project is actually a few years old and it's very low-tech. It's called My Boyfriend Came Back From the War. Olia's work is always very much about story telling and is very influenced by film and I think in particular by the Russian film tradition. Someone said that her work is like Eisenstein on the Web because she creates all these montages and all these different screens. She very much uses the internet as a kind of stage.
This is a war-movie project and another work of hers is about Anna Karinina and another of hers is about the Great Gatsby. This work is a mix of dialogue and images, and the whole time this window up here is flickering like a film projector and also the war outside and I think that there are all sorts of screens going on here. She is one of the few Net artists who is really successful and has won alot of cash prizes. Her work has been purchased by a number of different organizations and has been commissioned.
I have to say that one of my beliefs about this kind of art practice is that it really won't survive until there is a financial market for it. So I'm always thrilled when a Net.artist has been paid for something.
I just want to mention that Russian artists and Eastern European artists are a particular interest of mine, mostly because of the paradoxes of Post-Communist state controlled economies and people growing up in that kind of environment and then discovering the Internet and all of a sudden becoming intimate very quickly with things like Microsoft and Netscape and the uber-mall that is the Internet. So it is always interesting to me to see how artists from those kinds of backgrounds deal with the Net. And because the Net is Euro-centric, Olia always works in English as do all the artists I will talk about even though none of them are American.
This is a Web project by a successful, traditional art world artist called Vanessa Beecroft who is an Italian Woman who lives in Brooklyn. She gets about ten young women and she dresses them in "uniforms" that are generally fairly degraded-- sort of weird yellow stockings and maybe a bra or a leotard and sometimes they're topless, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're wearing wigs but they generally look kind of peculiar and have an inforced kind of comorodery because they are all wearing the same thing and they are all attractive though they all look fairly different from one another. She usually installs them in an art space like a Museum or a Gallery and instructs them not to interact with the audience or talk to one another. The entire performance consists of the audience responding to the Women. And then the whole event is taped and photographed and that is what she sells in Galleries. I think psychologically her performances are very powerful..... because it is about objects being arranged in space-- objects of visual pleasure and visual consumption and another thing that is interesting about her performances is that it is a never ending exchange of looks-- back and forth. It is very much an experience of looking.
I used to think, when I first saw this project, that it was refreshing because it used the Internet for distribution. But I actually think that having these photographs on the Internet complicates Beecroft's work alot. When I was putting together this presentation I was downloading photographs and my colleague, Alex, said "Rachel what are you looking at?" I started to notice that when the Women are put into Net space I think the whole experience is alot closer to cyber- porn and to fashion photography also. His immediate thought was that I was looking at on-line pornography. I would just like to end by saying that perhaps this is a good thing for the artist because Vanessa Beecroft has been doing the same kind of performances and installations for about four years so I think that maybe cyber-porn is a good direction for her to go in.
This next work is by an artist who is called Shu Lea Chang who is a pretty well known video artist and media activist who I think had made a pretty successful crossover to work on the Internet. This is the first Web project commissioned by the Guggenheim and it has taken them an incredibly long time to finally give Shu Lea resources to work on this project. Some of the concerns for a space like the Guggenheim, which I think has a very different agenda then the Dia for example, is that if they put a project on the Internet it wouldn't necessarily help them in getting people into the SoHo Guggenheim-- walking into the door and supporting the Museum. Also, as is the case with any kind of project on the Internet, it is possible that the hardware that this project is made on and all the platforms will be extinct in a few years and so I think it has been very difficult for those kinds of art institutions to invest in Internet art. But I am very glad that they have decided to support this project because I think it is going to be a good one.
They way they are displaying this project, is they have a new video wall with about 35 different video screens and so in some ways they are making it into a site-specific piece at the Guggenheim because they are going to show all the different Web pages simultaneously so it won't be sort of a traditional hyper-text experience where you're limited to one CPU Monitor. I don't know how that will work, but I think that it meets their needs. Another problem for Net.art is that often it is time based. Just like with video, and how video was initially received in Galleries-- it is very difficult to show things that are time based in Galleries.
Brandon is a project based on BrandonTeena who was a woman who passed as a man and she lived in a small community in Nebraska. When two local men found out that she was actually a woman they raped her and when she went to the sheriff, they found out, and she was murdered a few days later. This is kind of a recuperative project and I know that some of the things that Shu Lea wants to explore are transsexuality and cyber justice. She will have an on-line court room-- a sort of live, open environment. Part of the project is based in Amsterdam, at the Theater Amatomacomb which used to be a place where prisoners were experimented upon about a hundred years ago.
I briefly want to mention Jodi, they create work which has no art, no narratives and no representation. Half of Jodi, which is two people, and one of the people in Jodi is a woman. I think the expectation is not that a woman would do something as totally net specific and technological. Jodi's work is supposed to crash your browsers and give the feeling of being inside your computer.
And I wanted to end by talking about this project which I was involved with because I think it shows a certain kind of critical awareness that there is on-line about women's issues and representation of women. This was a project called Mr. Net Art '98
it was a response initiated by three European women to male dominance in on-line art communities and in on-line art. What they did was to create a parody of beauty and personality contests by having this contest Mr. Net Art.
The jury was all women, and I was actually on the jury. It was a way to promote women who were working in and around these communities by reversing everything and putting alot of emphasis on the accomplishments of the jury. It was a little bit uncomfortable to be on the jury because it was so self promoting. But, I'll end by saying that in the end we had about 12 or 13 contestants all of whom are active artists working on the Internet. In the end the winner was a piece of software that hadn't been nominated. I am proud to say that I was the one who suggested that the Webstalker be Mr. Net Art 98. I think that we just wanted to move in a different direction as a jury and maybe even try to get a little bit beyond really dramatic gender differences.
I want to end by saying that I would encourage all of you to check out Rhizome and all the other projects that are being talked about today. It really has been my experience that it is an exciting time to watch the development of these communities and this new artistic field. If you have any questions I can always be reached at rachel@rhizome.org.