ESSAY: Carlos Katastrofsky and Internet Artworks: Conceptualizing Centrality and Maritime Networks
04.17.07An essay devoted to the work of Carlos Katastrofsky by conceptualizing his work through ideas of centrality and maritime networks.
For the past decade or so, artists have been increasingly relying on the Internet for communications and collaborations. Email, website, forums and mailing lists have all contributed to these new and emerging communicational methods. For me, as an emerging artist in the late 1990’s, communication and collaborations between artists was a product of late night drunken and drug induced squabblings in a comfortable home environment eventually emerging as some sort of theoretical epiphany that might or might not be forgot the following day. As unproductive as these ‘sessions’ would sometimes be, those were the good days!
Unfortunately (and fortunately for ones health!) as artists have a greater and greater need of expending their palette across localized and territorialized borders, the Internet develops for them into a finer and more accessible medium for artistic communication. Rather than linkages to specific artistic parties formed through common expressive relationships based on personal and physical interactions, artistic collaborations through internet technologies have created a type of nodal mesh that is much more reminiscent of a maritime network than a centralized territorial state ‘capital’. As Manuel Delanda (2006) explains in the case of maritime networks “it was not the increased differentiation of one and the same regional culture that expressed a dominant position but the gathering of expressions from all over the world.” (p. 110)
Artistic cultural expressions were once, for the most part, homogenous as far as cities and city centers were concerned. This is because cultural creators tending to have fixed relationships with other cultural creators that were localized as far as territory goes which allowed creation of singular cultural entities to be amplified in their unique qualities giving ‘cities’ their cultural significance and legitimacy in relationship to the rest of the world. As Delanda (Ibid) remarks on these localized relationships:
The largest central places, often playing the role of political capitals, attracted talented people from the lower-ranked towns: people who brought with them linguistic and nonlinguistic elements of their own local culture. Over time, these capitals gathered, elaborated and synthesized these elements into a more or less homogenous product which was then re-exported back to the smaller [centers]. The higher prestige of the more differentiated culture at the top acted as a magnet for the short-distance migratory patterns of cultural producers and gave the synthesized cultural product the means to propagate throughout the region. (p. 111)
New York and Paris dominated the global art scene in the 20th century in fact because the finest artists and cultural producers of the world centralized in these specific areas: this is where the industry for cultural communications between like-minded individuals took place. In the first half of this century, the dominant capital for artistic production shifted from Paris to New York and in the case of Marcel Duchamp, for example, as Paul Virilio (2005) amply points out, this was who the “much vaunted NY ‘art scene’ centered around” (p. 48). As a reason and as a byproduct of this centralization the artistic and cultural global significance was averted in their gaze “from the Medusa of the twentieth century, deserting the fields of horror of totalitarianism” (Ibid)
At this point I would like to introduce the work of Carlos Katastrofsky (see http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net/) who I have been communicating with in artistic and conceptual collaboration and communication over the past year. Based in Vienna, Austria, our relationship has evolved over distances rather than proximity because of the ‘speed’ of new communications technologies. What I have observed is a relationship that is more closely related to a ‘maritime network’ that a centralized cultural ‘center’. Also, what is interesting, is that this sort of collaborative expression and idea exchange does not divert the gaze from world situations in the same way as a central ‘art scene’ very often can do. Locality contains a certain amount of unique information that can be ‘exchanged’ with other specific localities thereby increasing the potentialities for new concepts and ideas to emerge. Rather than centralized exchanges that amplify one specific concept and create rather homogeneous variations as an ‘art-scene’ can do, global communication methods between heterogeneous artistic elements can produce very interesting and unique results that all contain capacities for new and unique variation. This is the nature of recent discoveries in artistic practice and collaborations often deemed as ‘net.art’, ‘generative art’, ‘emergent art’ etc.
In this essay I would like to focus on two works by Katastrofsky that have both a conceptual impact and a material one: works that express themselves via networks and that create a communicative structure with other artists and collaborators to vitiate upon and elicit a response. One work is called ‘internet art for poor people (2006)’ (http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net/poor.html) and the other is called ‘russian roulette (2006)’ (http://roulette.cont3xt.net/)
First let us look at the work ‘internet art for poor people’. I am forced to imagine for a second that I am without connection to the outside world. There is simplicity in its execution that is almost laughable in that it is just a reoccurrence OR replication of what we, as internet users, have seen on occasion – though a lot less frequently lately: “404 Not Found. The requested URL was not found anywhere”. Because information can also have an ecological crisis associated with its creation, appropriation and dispersal, ‘access’ to this information has become detrimental in establishing previously hard-to-make connections that have historically been reserved for ‘the elite’ and ‘powerful’ that have all the means of procuring any information available. Those with the least access to information historically have been those most subjected to the will of ‘the informationally informed’: the poor and lower-classes.
Electronic information creates no less of a circumstance and those that do not have access are continually on the ‘catch-up’ as new forms of information and information dispersal (technologies) emerge. But rather than engage in a lengthy discourse on ‘information freedom’, some neo-Marxist ‘net Theory’ analysis, or any other prevailing theoretical thought on ‘net culture’ – let go back and take a look at this idea of the ‘maritime network’ and ‘centralized territory’. On a computer network the ‘404 Not Found’ error creates an immediate grounding to a persons centralized and fixed territorial locality. It is an error whereby the computer browser is looping back upon itself. There are no distances and speed is only approximated by the computational power of ones own CPU. The ‘404 Not Found’ error is a textual loop as an image loop that, as Virilio (Ibid) states “has become the signature of contemporary disasters” (p.85)
If hurricane Katrina exposed a population of poverty that was masked from the outside world (as many urban, centralized American city populations are) than ‘404 Not found’ exposes the lack of interconnected communications between heterogeneous populations. If hurricane Katrina exposed a ‘looping’ or continuous ‘folding back’ of special parameters towards its center then ‘404 Not Found’ exposes the ‘folding back’ OR looping of the poverty effect – one that is barley escapable. Lets make a note that the city of New Orleans ‘imploded’ from its edges inward rendering it ‘inescapable’ also!
The ‘net effect’ of continuous looping due to lack of proper network connectedness can be a fatal one. ‘404 Not Found’ is an example patch of a singular number sequence that has nowhere to go and affects nothing thereby rendering useless the machine (or software in this instance) it is run on. Emergent wholes have the potential to “react back on their components” (Delanda 2006 p.118) to either enable them or to constrain them. Cities, populations, and even cultural creations can exhibit these phenomenon and can choose, though way of connections, maritime or centralized properties. Yet others can not ‘choose’ which system OR assemblage to become apart of but are subjected to the constraint and freedoms that they emerge within.
Let us now look at a work of Katastrofsky’s that exhibits another spectrum of conceptual properties - “Russian Roulette”. This work highlights the nature of ‘maritime networks’, which also are not immune to disastrous results. Interconnectivity, speed and the ease of communication technologies do not necessarily mean a more democratic or ‘equal’ system. What I am interested in through this work, is the difference in the relationships that are exhibited comparatively to the previously discussed work – “internet for poor people”.
“Russian Roulette” is a ‘download’ button that will download to your computer a random file. As the work points out:
the file you can download below by pressing the button is randomly chosen. but be aware! it could be pornographic, a virus that crashes your entire system, a britney spears - song or other bad data. but it also could be some really great stuff... who knows? (Katastrofsky 2006)
We do not know what we are downloading to our computer. By pressing the button ‘the void’ becomes known – it materializes on our desktop and/or becomes apart of our computer system. What we are doing when we press this button is allowing an external world, one which is not of local origin, to access our desks – to become apart of our system and to create a synthesis between two historically unconnected locals.
The maritime networks of Europe engaged in a similar exchange. As ships traveled from Venice to Antwerp to Genoa to Amsterdam (Delanda 2006) to deliver goods and merchandise, and to make exchanges, these ships also brought with them this same unknown – ecological ‘voids’, pieces of information from previous localities. Sometimes these pieces of information were in the form of viruses that would mutate and take hold on a population as these networks developed and became denser. The viral holocaust of the Native-Americans in the Americas was one such result of these new and emerging networks of trade and organization. Ecological exchanges were also present in genetic ‘plant’ information such as herbs and spice plants from Asia and other exotics and invasive species. Animal life (domesticated) also found the speed of ‘breeding’ as different versions of the same species were much more easily breed due to breed exchanges from different parts of the world.
Warfare is another exchange that became quicker as networks became faster and more accessible. Weapons and war machinery could be remote, dictated from over-seas such as the British war in the Americas was. And wasn’t September 11th 2001 initiated by a ‘network’ from a distance both in time and space?
The ‘download’ button is always a gamble because we do not know what might be received from the other end – we do not know its immediate or its eventual consequences. Choosing to become apart of this network or ‘maritime’ role is choosing to take risks with outside materials and information’s that are not always apparent as ‘this is this’ or ‘this is that’ from the start. There is always an accident waiting to happen because as in ‘Russian Roulette’ ones chances will eventually run out.
The ‘download’ button is metaphorical (ecologically, materialistically) but it is also practical because we can see and directly observe the results electronically on the computer. It is not though, a simulation or simply ‘virtuality’ as we might hope. The computer plays a vital role in the exchange of information and has the ability to affect remote assemblages in unpredictable ways – unpredictable in the sense that there is a cause and effect, of course, but also unpredictable in that the creation and dissemination of information always has the repercussions of eventually folding back upon oneself. This can have positive of negative consequences such as in the case of 9/11 or the New York ‘blackouts’ of 2002 where the capacities to provide (energy) could not meet the capacities to consume – what came in externally could not meet the demand for what a population increasingly became reliant upon internally. The energy networks crashed as a result of there own empowerment – the inevitable accident on a grand scale which was the result of a complex gamble of reliance on an imperfect assemblage.
The ‘download’ button is also an ‘upload’ button. Ones consumption of information does end on the computer but is consumed and ‘uploaded’ the local assemblage through persona, physical and electronic information exchanges. The ‘download’ button, the virus, comes form ‘outside’ to affect the ‘inside’ – it is destabilizing mechanism for the greater assemblage whole. This deterritorializing affect creates and information explosion – an ‘information bomb’ wherever it might land. Like the centrality and homogeny of a system that accepts nothing form the outside has the potential accident of imploding, a ‘maritime’ allows for the potentialities to exist for ‘exploding’ (population explosions, viral explosions, ecological explosions).
The ‘download’ button means ‘I want too know’ NOT ‘I do NOT want to know’. This comes will all the weight associated with it, a window to the world is not always the best of choices! Katastrofsky could just as easily be Catastrophe! As Virilio (2006) stated, “Perhaps this is what they mean when they talk about an ‘open society’ – like the city offering itself without resistance to its invaders?” (p.110)
In this essay I tried to create a novel approach to critiquing art (internet art) based on the work of Carlos Katastrofsky. Rather than simply view and critique the internet works ‘internet for poor people’ and ‘Russian roulette’ I tried to make connections and synthesize a new way for critique that looks at artwork though a contemporary theoretical lens. This was done by combining Manuel Delanda’s concept of ‘maritime networks’ and ‘centralize territories’, and Paul Virilios style of writing as well as examples from ‘City of Panic’. My attempt was to draw connections between the three entities and to understand Katastrofsky work through theory while creating my own language for art critique.
References
Delanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
Katastrofsky, C. (2006) Russian Roulete. Internet Artwork residing at http://roulette.cont3xt.net/
Virilio, P. (2005) City of Panic. New York. Berg.
No trackback:
Trackback link:
Please enable javascript to generate a trackback url