Once Upon a Time in the West - Catalogue Essay

Once Upon a Time in the West
Domenico Quaranta

I

Although the term “new media” is one of today’s great buzzwords, in actual fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, more streamlined versions of technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which drew life from the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there's no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet while we have grown accustomed to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode ray tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone who, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don't look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means, is proving to be a sound artistic strategy - undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university's warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley - or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

II

I wrote this call for artists around the end of April 2009. I had just become the happy father of a wonderful child, and I was about to become the happy father of a weighty PHD thesis. While the first was all about the new, the latter was an effort to understand what went wrong with so called “New Media Art” in the last fifty years or so. The answer, of course, is complicated and took about 300 pages to discuss and formulate academically. The bottom line is that “the exploration of the artistic potential of the new media” mantra and the very notion of “new media”, while not the only factors, seem to have a lot of responsibility for the problems that “New Media Art” experienced in its efforts to become something more than a niche for geeks.
This notion offers an insight into my call for artists and the thinking behind it. When you have to organize an event based on an open call, time is a key factor. Eight months is a really long time, both for a child and for a show. In eight months, my child went from about 3 kilos to almost 10, got sick once, cut his first two teeth and produced an incredible quantity of… well, you know what I’m talking about. As for the show, in eight months you send the call for artists, you get feedback from friends, you read new articles and books, you see new projects, you start working on another exhibition on a similar subject, and finally you get the applications in and start reviewing them. Some of them fit perfectly into the framework you set up, others don't fit at all, and a few force it to develop in directions that you never envisaged. And when you finally go back to the project, you see that it has grown up, that it has teeth, and that it's different from what you expected.
At that point, you start writing a text for the catalogue - it's late and you have to hurry. You dig into your hard disk and find the call for artists you wrote eight months previously. Reading it, you see just how far you now are from that point, how much the project differs from that first draft. But it wasn't just a first draft, something that you shared with just your team and a few other people. It is out there, published on web sites and magazines, and has been read by at least the one hundred and thirty eight artists who sent in applications. It's part of the story, like it or not. It's like the picture that shows how fat you were as a teenager, hidden for years in the family album until some so-called former friend you almost forgot about uploads it on Facebook and tags you in it.

III

Actually, I'm not that unhappy with that text, but I wanted to make this story longer because I have to fill up these pages and because - no matter how much you think you’ve changed - you always end up bumping into someone from the past who delights in telling you that you’re exactly like you always were. Nevertheless, there are a couple of points I'd like to clarify, disavow, atone for. The first one is the feeling of nostalgia, which was at the core of the call for artists and also inspired the title of the exhibition. Nostalgia is a good feeling, I like it. But in the field of art, nostalgia is often a synonym of mannerism, academism, and decadence. Artists are often nostalgic about another conception of art, or of another way of making art. The kind of nostalgia you can experience in art made with obsolete technologies is rather different: it looks back in a new way to the past of a medium which wasn't perceived as an art medium at the time, or to a set of aesthetics which were developed outside of the art field. An artist trying to remake jodi today is a nouveau Bouguereau; an artist working with animated gifs today is an innovator working with an obsolete medium.
Moreover, nostalgia is not the only feeling that takes you back, for instance, to your old GameBoy, and rarely is it the main one. Yet I still think that feelings play an important role in the process. In a way, an obsolete technology is more “human” than its newer counterparts, in the same way as, in Terminator II, Arnold Schwarzenegger is more human than the liquid metal T-1000, the latest output of the same technology. It carries the memory of the great times shared, but also the memory of its “initial promise”, as Walter Benjamin put it, and of its final failure. For all these reasons, it elicits an emotional involvement that is very different from that related to newer, still surprising and still successful, technologies. And this is true for both the creator and the audience. Look at what is happening with 3D animation, for instance. When you go to see Ice Age III, you expect it to be not just as entertaining as the previous two, but also more spectacular, with more advanced special effects, animated in a sleeker, more natural way. The people working on it are aware of this and do their best to dazzle us with top-level technology.
On the contrary, when we go to see Kirikù or Persepolis, for example, we are not expecting to be surprised by technology. But this doesn't mean that we are necessarily driven by nostalgic feeling - that we are looking for something old, reassuring, retro, done in the good old way and recalling our childhood cartoons. That is just one option. What most of us are looking for is something new made with old means. The implicit belief is that an old technology doesn't stop having something to say because it has been replaced by new tools. Quite the contrary.

IV

Obsolescence is the other face of the race towards the new. Focusing on nostalgia, we implicitly accept planned obsolescence, the marketing strategy developed to force us to buy the last release of something we already have. Saying that we like the obsolete because it's obsolete is like saying: “new is better, but we are old and prefer old things”. For many artists working with obsolete media, their art is not a nostalgic tribute to the past, but an act of cultural resistance against the present and this marketing strategy. Choosing lo-fi instead of wi-fi, lo-res instead of hi-res, the amateurish instead of the professional, the old instead of the new, can thus become a political act. The very fact that nobody will employ you today on the basis of being a GIF virtuoso, a great Assembly coder or a passionate manipulator of your old Commodore 64 is meaningful in itself. Working with obsolete technologies is necessarily an amateurish practice. And, as the Critical Art Ensemble wrote in Digital Resistance, «[…] tactical media practitioners support and value amateur practice - both their own and that of others. Amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations. Most important, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestige capital.»[1]
Moreover, dealing with obsolete media is political because it often entails a refusal to work with proprietary software and hardware. Writing about the current use of animated GIFs, Sally McCay explains that «their use is also somewhat political and can indicate a commitment to the long-standing open source, anti-copyright activism of online producers»[2]. Finally, we have to consider that the more complicated a computer is, the more we are delegating to those who are responsible for the software; and, as the collective I/O/D taught us, “software is mind control”: a cultural artifact which brings with it the culture and ideas of those who built it. Thus, working with older machines that can only be programmed in machine language enables you to dialogue directly with the machine itself, bypassing any attempt to take control of what you are doing. In this regard, Seb Franklin quotes Cory Arcangel, who wrote: «I tend to prefer assembly because it gives me control over the machine and assures me that the aesthetic choices are based on the hardware of the machine, and not, say, some dupe at Macromedia.»[3]

V

Furthermore, if we start viewing media obsolescence as a phase in the life of a medium and a vibrant stage in our cultural history, rather than the unhappy ending of the same story, we discover that we can make stunningly new things with obsolete media. Working with a medium that can’t evolve any further has tremendous potential: you can delve deeply into it, and gain increasing awareness of what you can and you can't do; you can use it in ways that were never envisioned by those who created it, and lastly, being a child of your time (and not of the past, when the medium in question was new) you can use it in a pretty contemporary way. Both Chuck Close in his daguerreotypes and William Kentridge in his hand-drawing based animations are using old means in unprecedented ways, and doing so to effectively talk about their own time. Close uses the daguerrotype in a way that contains an awareness of the whole history of photography, of the digital shift of the last decade and the contemporary attitude toward the large format; but the precision, depth and energy of these images could never be achieved with a digital camera. When using a 386dx or playing with a Gameboy, nobody would ever have thought about turning the former into a rockstar, and the latter into a musical instrument; but this is exactly what happened to these devices at the end of the Nineties, with Alexei Shulgin and the chiptune community.
What’s more, working within a defined set of constraints can, paradoxically, be more exciting than working with a tool that seems to grant an apparently total freedom. The fathers of contemporary culture, such as Raymond Russell and Marcel Duchamp, knew this well, even though they did not manage to convey it to their descendents, who often got drunk on total freedom. When you work with a limited tool, such as an animated GIF, you know that there are some things you can do and some things you can't; the idea of using these to get results that you would only think possible with later technologies is one of the reasons that drives many artists to use these instead of Shockwave or Flash.

VI

Lastly, the decision to use obsolete media reveals a complex attitude toward the past, which cannot be described only in terms of nostalgia. In some cases, it is the juicy fruit of a steampunk imagination, which attempts to rewrite the past according to a different evolution of its premises. In these terms Vinylvideo described its activity, based on the storage of video (moving image plus sound) on analog long-play records, as a “fake archeology of media”.[4] And, after talking about the era of the birth of the computer, this is how Tom Jennings talks about his project World Power Systems: «World Power Systems is an entity that produces artifacts and written ideas to create a sort of portal between the early Cold War era and today; to illuminate the beauty and horror, at once alien and familiar, and thereby reflect today's beauty and horror back into visibility. […] Sleek futuristic technologies of the past; entire branches of science and industry utterly forgotten, whose once-experts are now cranks; solutions to problems impossible to recall; the solutions now problems themselves.»[5]
In other cases, looking back to the history of the media goes hand in hand with looking back to your own personal history. This is almost obvious, but it became clear to me when I discovered the project Childhood Games, by Eugenio Tisselli. In 1984, when he was 12 years old, Tisselli created some computer games without access to a computer, writing the code in a notebook. In 2008, the artist finally released these games on the Net. Yet the futuristic dream of a child did not translate into the nostalgic reminiscences of an adult white male: «I wanted to re-connect with the mind of my childhood, and try to understand its creative processes. This work is not about nostalgia; it is about remembering that imagination (that is, the act of creating images) can also be a central element of game play. Thus, the graphics are simple on purpose, to the point of being primitive. I didn't want to re-create the then-current state of technology, but to dream again of other worlds, armed only with a handful of basic symbols.»[6]

VII

In the end, Once Upon a Time in the West, the title chosen for this Pixxelpoint festival, is not that bad. Indeed in spaghetti westerns, as in this show, nostalgia is just a minimal part of the whole thing. Firstly, Sergio Leone's movies were one of the best things to come out of an age of political conflicts, which are often addressed in his work. Secondly, the spaghetti western was the unexpected development of a dead medium (western movies), which introduced some extraordinary variations into a highly codified genre, and enabled it to survive to the present day. And lastly, it turned that past into a literary place, breathing new life into it and giving it a bright future.


NOTES:

[1] Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, Autonomedia, New York 2001, pp. 8 - 9. Available online at the URL http://www.critical-art.net/books/digital/ (last retrieved 19.11.2009).
[2] Sally McCay, “The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)”, in Art and Education, 2009, available online at the URL http://www.artandeducation.net/papers/view/14 (last retrieved 19.11.2009).
[3] Seb Franklin, “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: 'Hard' and 'Soft' Nonexistence”, in Ctheory, June 2009, available online at the URL http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609 (last retrieved 19.11.2009).
[4] [About Vinylvideo], available online at the URL http://www.vinylvideo.com/press/02\_text/02\_vv\_about.html (last retrieved 19.11.2009).
[5] Tom Jennings, “World Power Systems”, available online at the URL http://wps.com/about-WPS/WPS/index.html (last retrieved 19.11.2009).
[6] Eugenio Tisselli, “Childhood Games”, available online at the URL http://www.motorhueso.net/childhoodgames/english/index.htm (last retrieved 19.11.2009).