Chris has proposed me as another potential collaborator in the Ordinary Aura exhibition, and suggested that I post here to explain my interests, in art in general, in Christianity in art, and in the project I have in mind for this exhibiton (if I get to be a part of it). Here, then, I go.
A bit of brief background on me: I started out as a writer, went to grad film school, and at the end of grad school became interested in (then-nascent) Web art. I did that for a while, and worked as a commercial web developer. This year I’ve returned to academia, teaching digital design at UNCG. I should say also up front that religiously, I’m a skeptic. To me, this is a technical term I use to distinguish my position from agnosticism. An agnostic might assert that we can’t know anything, and leave it at that; I think that this position of unknowingness in which we find ourselves, or in which I find myself, demands a constant and rigorous asking of questions. Asking questions is meaningless is you think that they can’t be answered; thus the largest part of my religious attitude is the attempt to be open to finding meaning in phenomena, without sacrificing any intellectual rigor or honesty. This is why this show seems like such a vital and fascinating project to me.
A big part of my interest in Web art and design has always been in the idea of distributed systems, that is, a structure that has no coherent physical existence but consists of a group of distinct parts acting in concert to produce the illusion of a single experience. As a filmmaker, I was very much a single author; I was interested in absolute control over the final work. Collaboration with other artists -- designers, actors -- seemed like a distraction. Thus the enforced lack of control over the end experience that happens in Web art became an interesting challenge to my own way of working. From hypertextual narrative work I quickly became interested in randomization as part of the artistic process.
This arose also out of my structural interest in how meaning arises in text; how the juxtaposition of individual concepts gives rise to new context and new associations. One of my earliest online projects, which seems not to be online any more, was based on Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." His idea was to create a sentence that had grammar but no meaning. To me, this is a failed experiment; the fact that these individual concepts fit together into a single structure forces them to acquire meaning, if only a subjective, poetic meaning that exists only in the mind of the reader, only for as long as they’re reading the sentence. My project used animated gifs (then cutting-edge technology) to make each word of that sentence cycle around between a series of five words, making a total of twenty-five words appearing five at a time in a sort of text-based magic square. The idea was to create a random assembly of five-word sentences, some containing grammar, some not, some sparking meaning, some not. This led to other dynamic hypertextual experiments, such as this one, and if you visit this brief portfolio, the projects "postcard" and "poor frances" in particular. These projects use various amounts of interactivity and randomization, in combination with my own supposed authorship.
So my interest as an artist and writer has been in the process of acquiring meaning. My main idea is that meaning isn’t transmitted by the artist, so much as derived from the project by the viewer. At this point, of course, this is a pretty old-fashioned reader-response type of theory, but really being engaged with it demands facing a lot of questions that don’t generally have answers. This is my attitude towards religion at this point.
I’ve been going on for a while, so let me come to the point with the project I’ve been thinking about lately. This would be an exercise in communal authorship, remote experience, and the discovery of meaning in received materials. This gets at another recent development in my thinking about religion; for most of my life I’ve thought about faith as a personal struggle between me and the universe, but lately I’ve been thinking more about communication between people as being central to the experience of religion. Let me explain what I mean.
I’ve been thinking lately about physical space and presence, since everything I do is virtual. However the technical aspects of this project demand that it be Web-based, so I’m imagining a Web-based project projected large on a wall. What you’d be seeing would be not just the site’s interface, but the site being actively navigated in real time by some other user, so that you’re confronted by, or trapped in, somebody else’s experience of the project. As for the project itself, it would be a series of anonymously authored text pieces, each springing from the last. The project might start with a single piece of text, a desription of a mundane experience or a series of events. A user could choose to add something to the project, in which case he or she could click to create a new text panel or text group. This panel would inherit some randomly selected words from the first text; these would be the words the user would have to work with to write their own piece. Then another user could choose to add a panel, springing either from the original text, or from the recently created panel. The ultimate effect is that of a constantly expanding labyrinth of text, anonymously authored by a distributed group, visitable on the Web but also presented within the gallery space as a single, undeniable experience.
The practical problem with this kind of project is getting people to actually add to it. I haven’t really worked out how this would work; I would love to simplify the project a bit, so that a fairly minimal amount of contribution from individual users would be all that’s required. What interests me about this project, though, is the idea of following other people’s trains of thought, of bearing witness, so to speak, to what other, unknown people are thinking.
Posted by seth at April 24, 2004 04:09 PMSeth, I am particulary intrigued with your comment about "communication between people being central to the experience of religion." Will you talk about this a little more specifically? Do you view communication between people as central to accessing the experience of religion or do you view communication between people as somehow creating the experience of religion?
Barbara
Posted by: Barbara at April 26, 2004 02:24 PMI suppose I mean a couple of different things. When I first started to ease away from religion as a teenager, it was a particular religious community that I was reacting to -- at that time, a small Methodist church for which my mother was playing the organ -- but this led later to a rejection of the idea of religious community in general, and replace it with an internal, solo confrontation with questions of faith and belief. That seemed to me to be more honest than a pointless fidelity to external ritual. This in turn led to my skepticism, but it's separate from it. Nowadays, I think that other people, a sense of community, is an important framework within which to talk about or access the experience of religion, and I say this even as a skeptic; skeptics don't really have communities to talk about this stuff, and it's important for ideas to move around in the open, between people, to keep them growing.
This is communication as a way of accessing religion, not as religion itself. But I've also been thinking about the act of communication itself, and its value. This was spurred by, of all things, an interview with Nick Nolte on the DVD of Northfall. This interview mostly solidified my impression that Nolte's pretty much a degenerate burned-out party animal at this point, but he also told an interesting story about the idea of witnessing. Apparently when his mother died, she asked that he sit by her deathbed until she went. This took four days. Nolte said he wondered at the time why she asked for this; she didn't ask for Nolte's sister to be there, and they didn't really communicate as she was dying. In fact Nolte said he wasn't really there as her son, because in that case he would be thinking mostly about his own grief. He was there just as another human, witnessing this woman's existence, and then her death. Witnessing each other, Nolte said, is the most important thing we can do. He didn't mean this in the evangelist Christian sense of "bearing witness," or proselytizing; it was a much simpler thing, just the act of being there and recording. He was, so to speak, the medium in which the fact her existence was impressed.
This is a very powerful and interesting idea for me: the idea that we are responsible to each other for knowledge of ourselves, in a way. This strikes me as something similar to the feeling or the Spirit that supposedly binds the Church together; at this point, I think of it in a more existential way, I suppose.
Posted by: seth at April 27, 2004 10:28 AMcouple things-
I would LOVE to work on a WIKI with some folks sometime. has seth or anyone else tried this? the structure of the conversation can be really free, like talking in hypertext, but with images too...
http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki
there's also some interesting new shared workspace apps out for the web, one even where you can annotate parts of pictures.
i share seth's interest in the distributed system models made possible by web-based work - such things even pre-date the web. i'm very into OULIPOlian literature, my favorite of which is The Anecdoted Topography of Chance, written by 4 artists who started with an inventory of Dan Spoerri's breakfast table and then footnoted the inventory and footnoted the footnotes until they had hypertexted off of each other's comments umpteen times. there's a little glimpse here: click on the red boxes...
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/legrady/classes/artst22/F02/l1/ds_overview.html
Posted by: kevin at May 24, 2004 12:07 AMalso, on communication with others being part of religious exploration/experience...
I relate to this through thinking about how it is that we are able to communicate to others at all - how we know someone is really there, that they will understand our language. phenomenologists and the like end up questioning whether we can ever really know that the "receiver" is there. yet we speak anyway - who are we really addressing? this is different in different times, with different people and power relationships...
something of the role of self-vision and acknowledgement in the experience of others...some lacanian stuff here maybe? i don't understand lacan.
Posted by: kevin at May 24, 2004 12:12 AM