Commission Control >>
Andy Deck
A juxtaposition of divergent representations of present warfare.
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Culture Map >>
Andy Deck
A visualization of proportion, disproportion, direction, and indirection in the
content and no content of the World Wide Web.
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||| HIAFF 3.0 | university of colorado | department of art and art history | digital arts area | in conjunction with alt-x | atlas | blurr
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Silvia Razgova: What is the most attractive aspect of net.art and cyber space
for you?
Andy Deck: It has always been the immediacy of the audience. In other words,
the work I'm making for the Internet is easily accessible via browsers. The
filter-like editorial apparatus of mass media and gallery art can be
circumvented by sending email announcements. Other people find my work through
search engines. This immediacy has deteriorated some since the early days of
the Web, when it seemed that people began viewing my work simply because I
submitted my URL to AltaVista. There's much more competition now. But I still
have a sense of independence that feels healthy. I don't need to cater my work
to a particular curator or editor in order to publish.
SR : Do you get many e-mails reacting to your activism pages? What are some of
the reactions?
AD : I would say that relatively few people initiate a direct political
dialogue concerning the content of my site. That is not to say that it doesn't
happen now and again, but the incidence of that kind of response is roughly the
same as the number of people who seek interviews or who want to show my
projects as part of group Net.art shows. This may mean that people do not sense
my personal identity the various issue-oriented pages I write. I don't put my
name and email address on each page that I create, and more often than not, it
would require research for someone to ascertain who wrote content of the pages
on Artcontext.
In other situations, as in the context of Commission Control, the feedback is
structured by the work itself. In other words, the project solicits feedback.
In that case, the feedback has been consistent with the overall tone of the
work -- deriding the hypocrisy and violence of the NATO "solution" to the
Kosovo situation. So I would say that the amount and kind of feedback is
largely a function of the interface design. If the interface effectively
encourages and solicits feedback, and provides thematic context, the response
has been strong and insightful. Otherwise, it has been limited and erratic.
SR : What is the best alternative title for "U.S. News and World Report" that
has been submitted to your site?
AD : With respect to this page, I don't think anyone has ever suggested an
alternative. The gesture of calling for alternative titles was more satirical
than sincere. The document to which you are referring is an example of a kind
of activist work that I do to vent my spleen. My assumption is that, if I jot
these thoughts down, they will likely attract a certain amount of attention via
search engines. And in any event, the act of writing down my thoughts may prove
cathartic.
SR : Do you (and if so till which level) differentiate your writings and
reports from the field and art work? Can you talk a little about informative
art?
AD : (That's a good question, in part because I can't give a simple answer.)
Sometimes, I am direct about criticizing the policies of my government, either
using essays or artworks that embody politically charged themes. Other times
the 'activist' component of a piece of Net.art is built into the codes so that
it is perceptible only through meditation on the conceptual nature of the
communication that it enables. There is a danger, I think, that people might
interpret this plastic research into interactive systems (Open Studio,
Icontext, Glyphiti, etc.) as following only from traditions of Minimalism and
Conceptualism. On the contrary, I see these two modes of activity as
complementary in the sense that they each approach the problem inherent in our
contemporary mass media. Whereas the collaborative interactive works
demonstrate unused potential for public creativity (authorship, intellectual
productivity, expression); the more thematic, "political" pieces are exercising
a kind of freedom of expression that is available to citizens in the West.
Regarding Informative Art, the term is intended to describe an art form that
has as part of it's intent the dissemination of information. In the case of
Commission Control, most of the informative content comes from articles and
authors who have been associated with the piece via hyper-links. The purpose of
Informative Art is to create a form of activity that opens onto aesthetic and
political reflection in equal measures. The prevailing systems of communication
(think culture as well as information) are propagating dominant, mostly
mercenary, messages. At times I feel an ethical responsibility, based on
ongoing research into politics, foreign policy, and such, to take a position
that is public. I do this with art activism. While some people criticize this
type of work as propaganda, I feel much more comfortable producing activist art
than I would remaining silent in order to conform to their supposedly
apolitical aesthetic ideals.
SR : How did the collaboration with Joe Dellinger first occur? Did you know him
in the real world before or was this only a cyber space encounter?
AD : No, I have known Joe for years, and in talking to him I knew that he
shared my distaste for militaristic bent of American foreign policy in
Yugoslavia.
SR : You discuss "Linux evangelism" - do you view Linux as a sort of activism?
If Linux is the future of operating systems, what steps do you think Microsoft
will take to prevent its widespread acceptance?
AD : Yes. Transparency and open standards are much better bases for developing
the communication infrastructure. Linux is just a well known example of these
values in action. It's not a question of which steps Microsoft *will* take.
They've been actively squelching competition for years. To give one prominent
and disturbing example of their ongoing scheming, I direct your attention to
the Palladium project. With it, Microsoft seeks to continue its assault on Open
Source software by using provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In
a nutshell, Microsoft allies itself with the entertainment industry, and ties
its copyright protection schemes to decoder chips in the computer's hardware.
In order to feature commercial media content, the Linux operating system would
then have to use commercially licensed decoder software that could not be
distributed freely under the GNU Public License. The intent is to force Linux
to incorporate more and more software components that are not Open Source, at
which point, the whole Linux initiative would cease to be free ($$) and
transparent -- just like Microsoft's systems.
SR : When discussing the U.S.'s "Plan Columbia" on your site, you discuss
DynCorp's use of Monsanto's "Round-Up Ultra" pesticide to fumigate cocoa
fields, and you compare this pesticide to Agent Orange used in Vietnam. Are
there documented cases of harm to humans in surrounding areas?
AD : I don't think it's particularly clear what the long term health impact
will be, because adequate studies have not been conducted. But more obvious are
the effects on crops other than cocoa, which have a definite consequence on the
lives of poor people living in these huge regions. Since Glysophate is a
defoliant that kills legal crops, the whole spraying campaign is a very drastic
ecological shock to the food chain as well as the drug industry, which,
incidently, has shown little sign of slowing down since the U.S. began pouring
money into Colombia in the 1990s. |
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