DEBRA A. SOLOMON
Web Art or - the feeling that you are lunch
With her own WebSite on xs4all.nl and her collaboration on the project "The Egg of the Internet" Debra A. Solomon, an american living in Amsterdam, created a unique contribution to the defitnition of art within networks. Kathy Rae Huffman talked to Debra Solomon.
Kathy: As Web Art, you have created: I m a g e s larger than 1:1 , a URL that the viewer must activate. Is there a story here? I ask because you questioned me whether or not I found the monsters? Is this a cyber fairy tale? Or, is Debra buried behind the surface that appears to be a dazzling beaded curtain?
Debra: I was kidding about the monsters! Its just that sometimes people stare at the blinking dots forever and never play with the surface. Only when you start *feeling about* do you discover that all the dots are links. And yes, I am some of the links behind the curtain, but I wouldn't go so far as to think of this as a fairy tale. There is no consciously planned allegory in the site.
Kathy: The surface of your site is wonderfully alive and active. How did this surface develop, and with what connections between technical and aesthetic concerns?
Debra: The blinks originate from the general distaste for things on the Net. It is interesting to me that many people have such embedded feelings about code and its presentation. It is as if a blink is a Web-culturally loaded trigger. I often hear people say, 'Blinks suck!' as an automatism. Nothing sucks!. On an IRC channel if you let something blink or if you reverse the text, (white on black) or if you use all-caps, everyone immediately asks you to stop. Blinking is frequently mentioned to be a Web page taboo on those mainstream how-to-create-Web-stuff pages. A group of people is trying to set aesthetic standards. 'Images have to be small', and 'Information has to be quickly attainable', or 'You use THIS to do THAT', sort of mentality. Whereas HTML was initially written to represent text, there's no reason why a function can't be (re)used to do something else. Artists and creative people do this all the time.
Also, blinks and colors are typically unstable elements. The page looks different according to the viewer's own screen-size, monitor, and type of machine. That's a feature! And, once you stick your finger into the blink, you go through to the other side. Two of the images that I have embedded there refer most definitely to the experience I had when I saw *Motion Control* by Granular Synthesi to the new. New tools are just new tools. I used the itsiest-bit of Java because I love to hate it. At the moment the VRML folks are busy creating fake physical spaces for the Net. I just don't see the lack of physicality in the present space! I would apply VRML differently - and if I could compress images in a better way, I would be able to produce larger images. I would theoretically like to have an entire earth surface 1:1, or (; D) a city surface, 1:1. Other artists would use the same compression technology to show video.
I am interested in the 'material' of the Net. Megabytes, protocols and code are materials to me. The space in which the viewer sits and the monitor through which she looks are real spaces. I want the viewer to experience her monitor as a viewport, and feel the enormous size of the image, or at least feel that it has an actual size.
Kathy: You recently started working for the Dutch Design Institute as a designer. How will this affect your work as an artist?
Debra: I have not been working very long as a 'commercial designer' so I don't know if I have enough of a handle on the business to be able to shed any new light on the issue. At the moment, there seems to be little connection between my artwork and the ideas I end up using for the Netherlands Design Institute. This has more to do with their understanding of Web presence and Web community, and my lack of seniority. So far, I have heard quite a lot of 'Well, you're an artist, that's an artist's sort of decision'. Almost everything I do seems to be looked upon as if it were an extreme move. A good designer can rise above the protocol, and change the minds of people who believe in 'status quo' and idea of 'establishment'.
For example, last week, I finished and presented a design for the European (Community) Design Prize, which although it started out as a jewel (if I do say so myself) got whittled away to nothing. Again, good designers are accustomed to scrapping ideas and continuing to work with certain elements of the original concept. I will continue to approach design problems artistically, in the same way I solve form and content problems. This is hopefully why I was brought into the DVI.
Kathy: The potential image quality and new aesthetic features for WWW are open ended for artists, and will enable them to explore Internet in new formal, and analytical ways. You are working on an Internet project where your focus is not so much on the image quality, but on the quality of life! Can you comment on your role as a Netband team member for Egg on the Internet.
Debra: My activities in Netband are focused on the life and culture of a chicken. At the moment I am creating an environmental and cultural interface in which the freshly hatched chick will grow up. This chick will need to know different things than all other chicks before it. It will need to be able to make decisions about its environment, whether or not it wants to communicate, or to have an identity. This chick will be living in cultural isolation because it is the first of its kind. The people that become its caretakers are also the first of their kind.
I am trying to set up a 'thought environment' where the chick/chicken will (be likely to) encounter certain kinds of ideas and concepts in its growing up process. Although I am well aware that although chickens are very intelligent creatures, there are tremendous limitations to their having a sense of 'self'. Taking that into consideration, it is nonetheless my personal goal that this chicken ends up understanding that it is a CHICKEN and that it communicates with HUMANS from its TELE-ROBOTIC ENVIRONMENT through the Internet.
This chicken will be like the (I know that I use this example a lot) the first human child on a Mars colony. Yes, there would be people there, but they would all be 'scientists' with 'scientist' values about truth and experience, with a certain homogeneity to their backgrounds (they would all throw like girls ; ) and maybe a baseball would be considered evil.). They would all be people who know what it is to be devoted to an extreme, and possibly even a dangerous project. And they would all have certain characteristics which loads the environment into which their future generations are born. Essentially they could create a culture (laden with values and concepts ) any way they choose. This project is a real use of the Internet as a cultural space.
Kathy: In your opinion, what is the most important thing for the viewer to understand about on-line, or Web Art?
Debra: People viewing on-line art should not ignore the fact that it exists within an environment which is a unique cultural phenomena. Values and sensitivities exist which are particular to the Web, concepts which couldn't exist outside of this environment. Web art functions as a Web-like expression, and most often explores concepts unique or pervasive to Web culture.
