The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing / typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised. E-mail, blogs, all kinds of digital media can be given a “human touch” by TBT. The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities. The special TBT website offers space for TBT-created messages, haiku’s and poetry, so that visitors can admire each other work.

TBT was made by Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and JoDi. Following is a short interview with Jaromil about this new tool.

Annet Dekker: TBT was born as an idea formulated by you and JoDi. An interesting relation, a computer programmer/artist and an artist couple who like nothing more than to deconstruct soft -and hardwares. Could you describe your relation and your shared interest?

Jaromil: It is definitely a result and very much inspired by JoDi. What brought us together, besides the curiosity we nurtured about each other, was this commission for “Net art is dead” by Impakt. So we spent two weekends together. JoDi initially thought of taking the dyne:bolic operating system and subverting its functionalities, but the perspective of working further to subvert something I already invested a lot of effort on building was really discouraging for me.

So I opposed their intention and argued that, if we have something in common, surely it is a minimalist aesthetic and a passion for text and inner processes. At that point JoDi mentioned their interest in building a “key logger” that would record keys typed in any program running, in particular word processors. I insisted in focusing on the aspect of literary production, stripping down the approach to a reference implementation of a time-based text protocol for recording time-based literature - I was extremely excited about developing a software tool for literature. We all realized we like literary experiments in automatic writing and we would be interested in a tool to publish online time-based poetry as well to be used in email communication, where hesitations in writing can be a vehicle for sentiments?

AD: One of the important changes in the way of thinking about language, typography and poetry came from Italy, Marinetti said “my revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page, instead I want to grasp words brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.” is this something you can relate to? Does your own background, also coming from Italy has been of influence in your work?

J: Yes, I was born in Italy, but I’m part of a generation that starts, for necessity and virtue, to think about a common European heritage rather than a restricted (and in case of Italy over-celebrated) national identity. I guess this opens even more ways to play with language than Italians used to do in Italy anyway. My education was as classical as it can get in the south of Italy, mostly focusing on literature and philosophy, in particular ancient Latin and Greek; such traditions of written poetry respect metrical schemes and sometimes adopts a richer punctuation than the modern one we are used to. This is certainly a point of contact with the concept of Time Based Text, but by now I’d say my frequentation of digital haiku circles as the ‘five7five’ mailing list played a more important role in this project.

I find it very difficult to relate to Futurism, which I consider a decadent re-use of Symbolism. While it might be considered true that Marinetti’s furor has contributed to syntactical innovation and modern design, I do believe that was too functional to the mission of the industry to be considered art. Furthermore I fear the aggressive attitude of futurists, but that has more to do with personal taste I guess? My inspiration is coming from writers as James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to name just a few that challenged in various ways the performative act of what used to be called “automatic writing”.

AD: As the title indicates an important aspect of TBT is that it is time based, something that seems almost paradoxical when linked with a computer. How do you see this relation?

J: TBT is about the dimension of time in literature. The act of writing a flow of consciousness discards information. Such information is very abstract when compared to words and concepts, it can intimately describe the writer’s thoughts with all the hesitations occurring in the creative act. TBT offers also to preserve all the sentimental information that is related to the mediation of text in human communication. With TBT we preserve the emotional information produced when writing, at the same time opening the media art domain to the world of literature. The existence of a software as TBT draws complex relationships between code and language: it softly unveils the mutual influence between literary art and computer programming suggesting they can benefit from each other not just in terms of productivity.

AD: TBT reflects much the Japanese haiku’s or dada experiments. Most of these actions in poetry have a strong relation with the human, organic and emotions. Very little do they relate it seems with the ‘hard’ and ‘cold’ language and command lines of computers. How do you view this difference or better, change? Can we finally start to emotionally engage and understand our mechanics?

J: I guess the exploration of our mechanics (as opposed to the mechanics of machines) is always doomed to a sweet failure, the one that poetry celebrates with the best tears one can cry. The literary approach shifts the analysis to a produced fact, which reflects our inner sentiments: a production that is written out of our inner emotions but still sub-consciously shaped by them. Today the act of writing is arguably the most natural act of creation human kind engages on a regular basis, so there are chances to access a precedented undisclosed intimacy of thoughts there, in everyone who writes, between the lines.

AD: What do you think is more artistic the TBT software, as being software art, or the poetry that can be made by using it?

J: I think what is most artistic is the concept of TBT. The software itself and the poetry that can be made by using TBT are also a propagation of the artistic value of this exploration, but the artistic value is rather conceptual, probably definable media art. There is a formal approach in the realization that also can be argued as artistic: it is not by coincidence that both from a programmer’s and user’s point of view TBT will result minimalistic and, when adopted, extremely flexible. At least I refuse the usual rhetoric of presentation for “artistic software”, instead caring very much for functionality and a design that is faithful to text.

AD: In the past you have also talked about making the net more ‘organic’ by devising ‘new ways for information’, is TBT a step in the right direction?

J: Hopefully yes, at least it is an attempt. I hope that it can work in a natural and spontaneous way. That is why the work consists of a portable source code that works as a clean reference implementation and can be included in any other software (being open source and licensed GNU GPL), rather than building a TBT software that does it all for you, that would probably limit its usefulness on the long term. I also expect it to inspire people to think about less superficial ways of communication: right in a time in which our media-scape is getting polluted by opportunist automatas abusing our attention, the difference between us and them might be just…sentiments.

AD: How can you use TBT in your email program?

J: As an external editor: it can be called when the message needs to be written, once done will quit giving back the TBT message, which can be sent in an attachment. The reference implementation is working with the mail client Mutt, but hopefully some mail client will implement TBT natively in future.

AD: Could you tell me step-by-step what I should do to make TBT poetry?

J: once you have downloaded and compiled the source code (or you have booted a dyne:bolic liveCD or downloaded the OSX binary), just open a terminal and type ‘tbt -h’, you will get this help:

TBT - Time Based Text - v0.7 - tbt.dyne.org
Usage: tbt [options] [file]

-h print this help
-v version information
-D debug verbosity level - default 1
-c console interface mode (S-Lang)
-r record tbt - option alias: rectext
-p playback tbt - option alias: playtext -m mail composer - option alias: recmail -s save format in [ bin | ascii | html ] -x convert binary tbt to html or ascii

which suggests various possibilities to write your message, for example to simply write a message type:

tbt -c -r mymessage.tbt

and type your message, once done quit pressing ctrl+c

you can then play the message on the screen with:

tbt -c -p mymessage.tbt

in case you want to create a web TBT do

tbt -c -r -s html mymessage.html

then type and quit with ctrl+c

you can then upload mymessage.html to your website together with the tbt javascript code to be put in the same directory.

TBT currently also include a full website with “guestbook” functionality for others to upload their TBT, it is written in PHP and quite easy to setup on a normal web server.

Jaromil is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the GNU/Linux platform (the free counterpart of commercial brands like Microsoft and Macintosh). He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne:bolic GNU/Linux liveCD, and of various free software projects, including MuSE (a streaming server) and FreeJ (a free VJ software to live mix and adjust images and sounds). As an artist, he has created performances and netart works as the :(){ :|:& };: forkbomb (when typed in the command line of a Unix system the computer crashes). He also founded dyne.org in 2000 under the flag of Freedom of Creation, playing hybrid between the fields of politics, art and technology.

Annet Dekker is program manager at Virtueel Platform and freelance curator and researcher based in Amsterdam.

“… What are the challenges of curating and exhibiting works of new media art today?

I think that there is presently a very exciting turn happening in new media, with respect to both the art world and the context of “traditional media.” It used to be very important to carve out a separate space in which to show, discuss, and teach new media. Nowadays these spaces are sometimes seen as ghettos, but at the time, they were safe havens championing under-recognized forms. Things are more co-mingled now. Not everyone will agree with me about this, but I think it’s great that some people no longer even know new media when they see it. I know curators who turn their nose up at that phrase, but they love Cory Arcangel or Paul Pfeiffer. There doesn’t seem to be a need to distinguish, any more, whether technology was used in making the work–afterall, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything. What is even more interesting is the way in which people are starting to make what I’ve called “Post-Internet” art in my own work (such as my Monitor Tracings), or what Guthrie Lonergan recently called “Internet Aware Art.” I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline. Of course, it’s an exciting challenge to explain to someone how this is still internet art… If that really matters… ” From Interview with Marisa Olson by Regine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art. [Related discussion: The Rematerialization of Art on Rhizome.org]

“Literary hypertext and hypermedia have been made for 15 years with a wide variety of development systems. When the ELO curated its first Electronic Literature Collection in 2006, in an open call for works, the 60 selected were made in some 10 different development systems, from HTML to VRML. Who is in this game, and how do we draw in new readers and players? Our featured artists answer this question in our interviews.

In a world that challenges (and sometimes defeats) writers with its constantly multiplying means, we chose to focus this issue of TIR-Web on two committed long-time practitioners. Donna Leishman, coming from both a fine arts and commercial background, creates finely wrought narrative based on folkloric or historic myth, using very few words. Jason Nelson, coming from a print MFA program and self-taught in software, creates poetical / fictionary “creatures” in great numbers, many of whom use text he has written or appropriated, while others focus on screen morphology or interface, as if “interface” were itself the real “critter” at issue…”

[Eduardo Navas]: You explain that you are interested in the concepts of transparency, visibility and access. Can you explain how these came to shape your project “Exposure” and your interest in surveillance?

[Marie Sester]: The situation that became a reality in the U.S. after 9/11 had been developing in Europe for some time. Bombing attacks were part of my reality in France, hijacking planes and taking passengers as hostages was something we lived with day to day. This was often done to ask for money, or demand for political prisoners to be released. Such unfortunate events were not part of U.S. reality.

Terrorism was already present in Europe. Sometimes, when bombs exploded. There were many individuals from small groups using what today we call terrorist strategies; it was at this time that surveillance devices were introduced. I was intrigued by this shift, which was a bit disturbing. As surveillance technology started to be introduced at the airport, it became normal to have one’s luggage X-ray scanned. It became common to find scanners at the airport, as well as government buildings like City Hall. The unexpected beauty of surveillance technology fascinated me.

Suddenly, there was a new form of presence and reality defined by these new devices. And I wanted to work with the images they produced. I had already been working with pre-made objects and images for some time. At that time I forged and assembled the notions of transparency, visibility and access and they are still the basis of my work.

[EN]: You found this imagery beautiful, but at the same time, this imagery was very pervasive, were you ambivalent to it?

[MS]: Yes, I found it ambivalent. This is how the notion of access came to develop eventually in my work. In the Nineties, we began to live with a whole combination of pre-requisites, especially when computers became common. All of a sudden one is expected to log in in one way or another, to get access to information, or to an actual place — but this is nothing new. The mythic city of Jerusalem, for example, had 12 gates, which were well guarded, and in ancient cities as long as we can remember, one had to show or pay a right of entry. So the same thing happens with the digital world, the cyber world. It’s another way of also keeping track of access, in this case more often to information. This is the function of cookies in the browser, and in the end it’s an issue of knowledge and possibility.

Then I reflected on access as a concept and realized that its opposite would be exclusion, which also became very present. Exclusion divided the world in parts. Before we had the wealthy and the poor, and now access divides people in classes. With all this in mind I looked at the X-rays of luggage at the airport, and also thought about our bodies in medical progress, and my work began to take shape.

This is what I call the politics of seeing. For example, in ancient China, the emperor would have privileged access to the highest mountain close to his city to prove that he had the power to oversee and rule. So today we have improved technology to see deeper, to see through objects and bodies. Seeing is a way to attain information. It gives unquestionable power, and today computer infiltration plays an important role. With all this in mind I developed my approach to transparency, which for me comes ultimately from architecture.

[EN]: When contemplating “Exposure” one wonders very quickly how you got access to X-ray imagery of trucks. How did you move from the luggage at the airport to X-ray of passing trucks?

[MS]: It came by chance. I did not know I would be working with such large vehicles. The trucks were being scanned at the airport, by a research lab which was experimenting with the technology at that time in France. During 95 and 96, at some point, I wanted to see the images of scanned luggage, and I said, “how can I get such images?” I wrote a letter to the airport director and asked him if it was possible to record scanned images at the airport. It took me one year, but finally I got a letter signed by the director that allowed me to record images at Orly airport.

I went to the airport with this letter and an expert in recording, who used a high-end camera. He hooked it up on one of the scanners and we started recording, but after three minutes and three seconds I had a hand on my shoulder. A security person told me, “You have to stop.” And I said, “I have a letter.” And he read it and he said, “It is not signed by us. Anyone who has luggage on this plane can sue you. Take your tape and come with me.” Then he took me upstairs for three hours with several policemen. I kept the tape under my arm and we discussed what I was doing there. Eventually they thought that I was just an artist who wanted some images. And they said, to go away and not tell anybody about what I had done. So I kept the images.

However, I was not satisfied. I became more interested and wanted to show the luggage metaphorically, to stand in for a person. I decided to use my own luggage to avoid any problems, because the only thing I would need to do is get the right to use the scanner. During this process, I became close to one of the people working for a company that provided the scanning machines to the airport. This private company was based in Paris, and the director was young and he was open to questioning what he was doing. He opened the doors of his lab to me and started to show me images of trucks and other vehicles like tanks and boats.

This was very efficient technology; a truck of 17 tons would be scanned from both sides and the top in four minutes. The first scans were black and white and the second scans were in color, because they show information differently. People were trained to read the different scans, and I attended training sessions to learn how to read the images.

I got these images of the trucks from this person. I started to use them with the project “Four Engines”. I had engines instead of luggage; eventually, I decided to use them for “Exposure”.

[EN]: That explains the trucks, but why a house in the East Bay Hills of San Francisco? How does the house come into play?

[MS]: When I moved to the U.S. I wanted to explore other ways of scanning. And I met a researcher from Cyra Technologies, Inc. who was also teaching at Berkeley, and was doing research with laser scanning technology. Among a few possibilities I chose this house because to me it was a typical American house. I gave instructions to render a scan moving around the house, as well as through the foliage and through the walls. You can do a lot with a laser scan: the stronger the beam the deeper it goes into the material it encounters. It’s the same thing with X-rays. This is another reason why it’s so incredibly fascinating as a form of representation.

Think for a second: here is this thick concrete material around us, and now we have the technology to see through it. In the future, perhaps even with Google Earth, we could go into people’s houses. I don’t want to put that idea out there, but I think it’s possible. It would be scary. In the end, the gathering of scanned images is a reflection on our obsession with control and hyper vigilance.

[EN]: You are combining two moments in time, the material from Paris and Silicon Valley. So what happens today, seven years later?

[MS]: For me it makes sense to show “Exposure” today, thinking about 9/11, especially because when I listen to people in the U. S. it’s like surveillance just appeared (which is not the case). It was always here, only today the technology is more pronounced. Politically, today the states are using it much more. It has become a kind of obsession, and an actual part of corporations.

[EN]: Since you have traveled so much, do you think that the U.S. implementation of surveillance has changed how surveillance is understood globally?

[MS]: Yes, other countries are obliged to adopt similar strategies everywhere, because the ideology is promoted through entertainment, news, and propaganda. The U.S. says, “We need surveillance.” And the message is so powerful. It stands for personal power, but also a country’s power and it is a way to cope with the ideology of terrorism. The paradox is that the more that one resists the terrorists, the more they find a reason to exist. At some level it cannot be avoided because it is inscribed in the current structure, our technology and even in human nature.

People are influenced by this, of course. Online it started with Jennycam, and now we have the show Big Brother, and there is Flicker, Facebook, and Youtube supporting this ideology of self- exposure and self-promoting, along with surveillance and control. People think that this technology gives them a certain visibility, but at a certain price.

[EN]: In your artist statement you also argue that surveillance depends is a “two-way action”: 1) it retrieves information and 2) it outputs propaganda. Is there anything positive that can be found in surveillance? Can it produce anything else but propaganda, is there a grey area?

[MS]: I should clarify that I’m not passing judgment. I’m questioning, and I’m fascinated by this technology, in part because I find it beautiful. Even before I began with this work, I was intrigued by surveillance images because I found them so loaded and questionable, but I don’t wish to give a personal statement/opinion. Nobody cares about what I think. What I’m interested in is to find and stay on the edge, between playful and scary. Each person who experiences my work has to question herself. “Exposure”
works on this level. But to answer your question precisely, what is fascinating is invisible: it’s incredible how advanced this can be, how human beings can get access to things that they can’t see with the naked eye, and then we can use the material and manipulate it. What I’m concerned with is in having autonomy when using this information, and ask what is the value of information?

[EN]: In relation to this relationship of architecture and network society, how do you see the concept of exposure functioning in the future.

[MS]: I became invested in the three notions, transparency, visibility and access, which you mentioned in the beginning of this interview when I was exploring architecture. In architecture it is about the whole environment, not just the building but the signs and its surroundings — even circulating traffic in the street is part of architecture. From my point of view, our understanding (i.e. notion) of transparency comes from architecture. A shift took place in the 19nineteenth century (1851) with the Crystal Palace, which was made with steel and glass. This building started the process.

I consider that the way of being transparent has many possibilities: a house made out of concrete — no color no paint, nothing on the wall, with no decoration is a specific form of transparency. Center Pompidou, where they put everything outside is also a manifestation of transparency. And then you have the Glass House by Philip Johnson. And today’s latest, is in New York, where there are new apartment buildings, with walls made of glass. This was done on purpose; tenants who live there know that people will drive up and down a highway, and can look into the apartments.

[EN]: The building you are referring to is the Richard Meier Apartments beside the West Side Highway in Manhattan. By contrast, would you, then, say that with his Glass House, Johnson was exploring this idea of transparency, or exposure, as a way to reflect on certain shifts in culture?

[MS]: Since the Crystal Palace, there has been this transition towards transparency and exposure, on to Johnson, a tendency at play with Flickr and Facebook. I believe this started with architecture and then it moved on to biology and other areas in culture. Today, architecture is found so often as discourse, even in Second Life.

[EN]: It’s interesting that you mention Second Life, because it’s a reflection of our world. One could argue that what you describe started in the 19th century is today solidified as part of network culture. Now you can log on and view a mirror version of anything in the world as a virtual replica in Second Life.

[MS]: Now, military and entertainment work together (combining their efforts). They used to be counter-balancing each other, i.e. one was violence, aggression and power skills; the other was play, creativity and beauty when it was at its best. My concern is with monitoring, how far it will go, to engage us and encourage us to spend our time in networks like Facebook or Second Life, building a world reflecting our world, including war games. World of Warcraft, is another example that has various business deals behind it.

What all this adds up to is that architects today try to make something interactive. Buildings start to become more like machines. Buildings and streets become communication tools and the city is turning into the most intelligent output of the human brain.

[EN]: Let’s relate your interest in architecture to “Exposure.” In your artist statement you reflect that today “what had disappeared is not the visible, but the invisible, in other words, all that is considered incorrect.” How do you find network culture and architecture, as you have discussed them so far, linked to visibility and invisibility?

[MS]: I’ll answer with a few examples. The Greeks did not have a name for the color blue. They thought of it as part of the color green. Now let’s think about a landscape; it exists when some of the criteria we define as part of a landscape are at play. Another example: if the whole world were wet we would not have a concept of wet. All this is to show that we define and see cultural values according to pre-existing definitions. This is how ideology develops.

What we define as invisible, then, is what has no right to exist. We remove it. Today, we have tools to see everything, and we define what we want to see. When desired, we penetrate through multiple layers with the purpose of seeing more and more. Yet like the Greeks, if we don’t value certain things, we simply don’t see them, or we think of them as part of another element (for example, green as part of blue). If an element has no function, or is not desirable, it has to disappear. This is what “Exposure” in the end explores on various levels.

In gaming parlance, what does “QQ More” mean? How does this relate to the concept behind your program “QQ More”?

QQ is an emoticon that means crying or sobbing - think two big round eyes with lil’ tears. The program contains a few real tearjerkers hence the title “QQ More.”

When and how did you start working on “QQ More”?

I’ve spent quite a few too many hours watching fan made machinima from MMOs on fan sites, most of which I would call “vanity videos” — short films of players’ tributes to — themselves, set to emotionally charged music. Then one day I stumbled on a video called Rest in Peace Ignoramus — a Norwegian World of Warcraft video made by a few guild members to commemorate a fellow guildmate’s death — the video’s intended audience appears to be Ignoramus’s family and his online friends. The video is uncomfortably intimate, and the production is very amateurish - it runs way too long, has terrible camera control, sappy music and no editing whatsoever but it still will bring you to tears. (Oh pathos, I cannot resist thee!)

After unearthing Rest in Peace Ignoramus and watching the infamous video by Serenity Now about the memorial massacre, I started a more systematic search through fan-made WoW videos and found a few other oddballs — the selection for QQ More represents some of my finds that could be appreciated by gamer and non-gamer audiences alike. Last year, I compiled a shorter version of the screening for the Australian Machinima Film Festival in Melbourne, and since have added a few finds.

What do you see behind the development of this “real-world” genre of machinima? Do you feel like this is a phenomenon specific to gaming? For example, to my knowledge, this narrative genre doesn’t exist in home video culture. Why would users gravitate toward this sort of video in the world of gaming?

The emotional attachment that playing MMOs for extensive durations forces a melding of the player with their playe character that essentially collapses the premise of roleplaying. That is to say, the hardcore players are no longer taking part in an act of “roleplaying” but are essentially playing as themselves in an alternate world as the relationships with real other human beings bring out..well..real emotions. In a single player game, say when a player character is disrespected, or in turn revered by an automaton NPC - the emotional weight of the encounter is emotionally inconsequential (unless it affects game progress in which case we are getting into another issue altogether..). In an MMO when real humans do the disrespecting — there are emotional consequences for the players. All of this is old news in multiplayer virtual worlds — think of the emotional attachment of players in text-based MOOs as narrated by Julian Dibble’s wonderful book My Tiny Life.

What I find interesting about the machinima that reflects these more intimate and intense emotions is that they are made public outside of the game’s immediate diegesis — yet thanks to the internet and MMOs operating as a kind of feedback loop, do find their way back into the game world. Especially true in the context of World Of Warcraft which has gone mainstream or “post-geek” and represents a new type of fantasy based world in comparison with earlier MMOs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, or Dark Age of Camelot — which represented cordoned off sub cultural islands with very little dialogue with main stream culture.

Many of these videos represent elements of gamer culture that are still “officially” kept out of the game world — sex, drugs, real violence, death, etc. — but fan-based machinima, and forums postings become the spaces where these aspects of the gaming culture find an outlet, their expression in-game is repressed by the game companies censorship - they offer a glimpse into the subculture of the subculture.

RE: The idea of “vanity videos” or narcissistic self documentation that I mentioned earlier — I think there do exist analogous practices outside of gaming, in mainstream culture and in subcultures — look at surfing and skateboarding videos that show off physical feats, vanity videos made by soldiers, and the now ubiquitous form of the music video — the band recording and then editing itself performing.

Your work similarly channels the slippery divide between fantasy and reality proposed by games like World of Warcraft. (For example, Tekken Torture Tournament, 2001) Can you comment on the connection between the quandaries explored in your own art practice and the “real-world” genre of machinima?

I am interested in all aspects of fantasy really, but I am specifically drawn to the moments and contexts where fantasy collapses unto itself unto “realism” in the various senses of that word, whether this uses the body as a site for this collapse, the sudden shock when humor turns to tragedy, fear, anxiety, or historical specificity.

RE: “QQ More” - I like these particular machinima because they represent this same sort of collapse of a seemingly banal and artificial fantasy world like World of Warcraft into something that, at least for me, succeeds in evoking an emotional response where 99% of fan-made machinima and the “narrative backstory” and “lore” of MMOs fail. [posted on Rhizome]

Model of Influence by Tal Ben Zvi / Jack Faber: Tal Ben Zvi: from the various constructions of meaning that artworks can create to influence other structures of society, the recent and relevant work to the Model of Influence investigation is to my opinion ‘Watchmen’ - an ongoing 3 years project ranging from guerrilla filmmaking, through gallery installations, to an innovating international precedent court verdict in the field of art, human rights and the freedom of expression.

Jack Faber: Watchmen was originally a short guerrilla film shot trough the CCTV system of the Tel Aviv museum of art - the most influential and strongest institution is Israels art field - without the approval or knowledge of the museum administration. It features a masked character wandering through the empty spaces of the museum’s contemporary art galleries. Under the watchful eye of the security camera, the figure interacts with the art works on display, in ways which are far from being acceptable, in what is normally a highly regulated space: caressing the works, affectionately hugging the statues, running around in a wild amok. To be sure, no physical damage was done to any of the works. And despite the associations evoked by all too familiar look of the CCTV monitor, this video is by no means recorded evidence of an act of vandalism, neither it is the footage of a crime - but rather a visible violation of a museum’s internal rules of behavior. the museum merely acts as an experimental field for this investigation in transgression of cultural capital, and represents larger scale power institutions in contemporary culture that dominates social perspectives and behavioral patterns under the garments of conduct and manners.

The film, entitled Watchmen (following the known saying ‘Who watches the watchmen?’ that encapsulates it’s core), was censured by a court order to the Museum’s request a day before it’s first public screening - Despite the fact that this work was never seen by the museum, nor by the court judge. This act lead to 3 years of legal procedure (during which the museum continually refused any sort of mediation suggested by the filmmaker), as well as to a local media storm, with newspapers headlines and television discussions following the questions raised by the forbidden film. constructions of meaning examining the role of museums and art, the human right for free speech and expression in a centralist pro-censorship society, the expansive growing usage of surveillance and control mechanisms were among the main topics delivered to the center of the public arena, creating discussion space in places where such issues usually avoided and dismissed as irrelevant and their broader social sense is ignored, to the best parts, or miss guided by political and conservative preceptions.
.
JF: The strategies used to create the film ‘Watchmen’ - infiltration, interference and intervening guerrilla textbook tactics to a wider context of cultural struggle - proved matching precisely to implement at art institutions in the magnitude of the Tel Aviv Museum. the narrow minded, closed attitude and the deliberated separation from current social and cultural affairs (which is forced by it’s construction and cultivated by it’s management), caused to the wildfire spread of the censorship story and led a widen struggle criticizing it’s destructive actions (including a lawsuit for 30,000$ damaging compensation from the filmmaker) against an artwork which never been seen by anyone.

By showing the so-called “crime” from the perspective of its own closed circuit system, the museum becomes exposed, revealing itself as part of a system of supervision and regulation. The surveillance camera’s point of view emphasizes the fact that while in the gallery observing art, we are in fact being observed, our behavior monitored and controlled into a specific mode. We are directed to an attitude that actually affects the way we experience art. In the context of a museum, a physical distance is enforced by the security system (using guards and cameras). But this physical distance is more than an affirmation of the traditional, established understanding that art should be observed from a “distance”. It is primarily a reminder of the art object’s monetary value, its financial worth.

It seems that by symbolically shattering this distance, we in fact pose a very real threat to the museum. Watchmen, it seems, undermined the museum’s precious image as the guardian of this distance. Moreover , by using the same tools with which the museum usually enforces its authority to show a contrasting picture of disobedience, we revealed in a harsh and uncompromising way the museum’s main function – to act as a guard, as a protector of valuable objects, as a safe keeper of commodities.

While the court procedure escalated as the public interest faded, in the long duration of the trial and extended intermissions between court hearings, those strategies were soon employed and advanced in different contexts. another guerrilla film, Seeing Art, was created in the museum space, featuring a fictitious group of blind art lovers who try to find meaning within the crowded gallaries during the yearly ‘Opening of the exhibition seasone’ public funded event.

Several more unorthodox art actions, such as public bonfire protest performances of in central urban locations, critique site specific instalations, free lectures in various forums and a large solo exhibition (in the non-commercial Minshar gallery, Tel Aviv) dealing with Watchmen implications and meanings, were created during the ongoing project. the outcome effect of those strategeis was the faded public discussion was arroused again. expended and intensified, this discussion now rexamined hierarchical power structures in contemporary society from new perspectives, revealing the important role of art in deeper collective meanings, it’s function as a process to understand and oppose assimilated social conditioning, and as an abillity to addres the wide public and create an open dialogue with whomever wishes to participate in it.

3.
JF: Institutional critique still exist, although mostly in the margins of the field, and therefor have rare opportunities to receive any attention or serious consideration by large crowd or the institutions themselves. adding the cynical approach toward such critique and complete lack of support it usually gets, those margins are getting thinner and further away from reaching the critical mass needed to influence on the state of affairs. but sometime it happens.

In december 31, 2007, a final verdict was given is the Tel Aviv municipal court and set an international precedent. This innovative verdict states clearly that there is no reason or cause to censorship a work of art, even if creates in transgressive or unlawful means.

The Judge Ruth Ronen stated that she refuses to accept the claims or attitude of Museum’s director, Professor Omer - “To stand in front of a statue and talk to him it’s humiliating, and so is to stand in front of the museum’s cameras and talk to them’ (page 9, lines 3-7 in the protocol) - and that the film is not manipulating but representing reality. the film and it’s materials are the exclusive property of the filmmaker, and not the museum’s by accepting the fact that ‘the filmmaker never set out to target the Tel Aviv museum specifically, The film is a critique of the function of a museum as such. although the film was made while committing law breaking acts, those are not sufficient to prevent it’s public screening. more than that - freedom of expression is a basic right given not only to the individual, but also to it’s public. when a spokesman is deprived from his right of expression - his potential audience is being deprived as well from it’s rights to listen, know, form it’s own opinion and create dialog that discuss such issues. rights that are fundamental to the democratic regime. Exposure to works of art is also an important fundamental of the democratic regime. watching the film could lead to important and inspiring discussions - dealing with the borders of art, the legitimacy of breaking the law to create an artwork, among other issues - and screening it will allow the mass public to be expose to such vital questions. therefor screening the film is the not only the right of the artist, it’s the right of the public.’ ( from the verdict, 31.12.07)

Since this verdict is indeed an precedent, being no similar cases no verdicts in this field, it present with great acuteness that institutional critique is not only important but also essential in the present context. it is a necessity for the existence of contemporary culture and to the development of any society.

The Picture attached to this text is Framed (2007, newspaper scan of original CCTV frame from the film Watchmen) which was the only frame available from the work in the last 3 years, due to the censorship of the film and all relevant material. the frame shows the watchmen kneeling in a prisoner of war gesture to the feet of Manager’, a sculpture by Kerry Stuart’.

The following discussion, led by Jelena, considers the impact of the networked performance Radioballet and the ethics of collective action, not least with the absence of material and reciprocal relationships limiting expressions of solidarity. It was recorded 14/07/07 with the participants Rael Artel, Anna azar, Karol Sienkiewicz, Margus Tamm, Airi Triisberg and Andreas Trossek, in the workshop on ‘Collectives, Actions, Re-enactments’ held as part of the ‘Exercises on Adhocracy’ camp in Parnu, Estonia…” From Miraculous Mass-communication - Radioballet by LIGNA, Variant issue 31.

Radioballet gegen die Nato Sicherheitskonferenz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAr7_kcZE4k

The free radio group LIGNA exists since 1997. In several shows and performances they have been investigating the importance of dispersal in radio as well as of the radio. One of the main focuses is to refer to forgotten and remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new forms of interactive practices (Mental Radio Show). Another emphasis has been placed on the development of concepts and the production of performative audio plays (Labyrinthe und Interferenzen), in order to find out how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations (Radioballett: Übung in unnötigem Aufenthalt).

Radio Ballet Leipzig Main station Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpT-wb3TPXk

Brooklyn is Watching is a project sponsored by Popcha, a New York based media technology company, and taking place simultaneously at the art gallery Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, New York and in Second Life. A performance space and presentation / sandbox in Second Life have been set up for this. (Teleport directly from here) An avatar, in the shape of an eyeball and under the name Monet Destiny will view and project the goings-on there at all times onto a large screen monitor at the Real Life gallery.

A computer at the gallery will run the Second Life application at all times when the gallery is open (every day from 9am to 3pm SLT, except for Tuesdays and Wednesdays) – via the eyeball avatar Monet Destiny - and when visitors to the gallery so choose, they may drive the avatar and take it wherever they want. The BiW avatar is scripted to follow anyone who approaches the stage, if its not receiving any commands from a person at the gallery. The stage itself, is rigged with a giant spring that raises the stage suddenly and violently when someone in the tower presses a special button, catapulting anyone on it, off it immediately. This creates a ‘gong-show‘ effect where people in the gallery can express their displeasure or boredom with the activities on the stage.

Avatars will be able to send a jpg snapshot to the gallery and anyone inside the gallery will be able to email snapshots back to the BiW avatar. A dedicated blog will document the exchange and other activities.

A weekly podcast called Brooklyn is Watching will be recorded at the gallery featuring ‘guest stars’ from both the Real Life art world and Second Life. The format will be unabashedly patterned after Diggnation, a popular podcast about tech-news.

Jay Newt: Brooklyn is Watching is about “cultural colonialism,” marketing, the attention economy, critique, dialog, power-relationships, and the difference between potential and actual with four parts spanning the virtual, 3d space of Second Life, the two dimensional “traditional” Internet and the ultimate hipster mothership, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is an artwork, an entertainment product, a venue for critical dialog and a marketing vehicle. It also will be a hell of a lot of fun…” Continue reading Brooklyn is watching (us) by Bettina Tizzy.