HIAFF
Ceci n'est pas un nike >>
Giselle Beiguelman

Have your way with the Nike.
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the book after the book >>
Giselle Beiguelman

A hypertextual and visual essay about cyberliterature and the net_reading/writing condition
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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
Rick Silva: Firstly, how is the net art scene in Brasil currently?

Giselle Beiguelman: I think that the Brazilian scene is more a "multimedia scene". So, we have a lot of people doing video-instalations, perfomances, and even projects that deal with a web interface but are not web art works. There is, as everywhere, a lot of good web design and it also does not mean that it is web art. Few works are really comitted to Internet issues. The digital field or the new media field is growing and the Internet business is very interisting here. Some projects _like a cd rom ("enter", by rafael lain and angela damico) and an independent festival (FILE_ festival internacional de linguagem eletr™nica) moreover some robotic researchs I think were the most important things that happened last year.

RS: What past writers and artists have influenced your work and studies?

GB: Fiction (including style, ideas etc): Borges, Virginia Woolf, Ricardo Piglia, Cort‡zar and Hemingway (short stories)

Poetry: Augusto de Campos, Paulo Leminski, Edgar Braga (all Brazilian)

Non ficition: Derrida, Michel Foucault and Roger Chartier

Artists: Nam Jum Paik, Peter Greenaway and many Brazilian musicians and singers who are great sources of inspiration

RS: The Book After the Book has such an elegant interface and navigation, part of the experience is to organically go from intro to footnote to text to links fluidly...

GB: Tks a lot : )

RS: Does it upset you that someone can hit the back button on their browser and see the path not taken on the previous page instead of forging ahead?

GB: I tried to do something inspired by "The Book of Sand" by Borges. A movement that is very interisting because it is the reading movement and not the navigator path. So, when the reader go back _in some areas it is impossible, btw he loses the the opportunity to get into (or to dive) in the Babel Library (also by Borges) experience, maybe because he can not stand the reading challenge, that is: the unknown.

RS: When you link out of The Book, instead of opening a new window, the link replaces your site, how does that affect the overall aesthetic and theory of your site?

GB: Following the ideas of the Book of Sand and its placement in the Babel Library, I think that it stresses the aesthetic of te book after the book.

RS: Do you update The Book, and if so how often?

GB: I updated it last year, and have plenty of new things to put in this. I made a kind of lay out update, dealing with new monitors patterns, but it is not a real update. In fact all my tentatives of updating led me to new works (like content=no cache, that is about on line writing, and recycled, about reading contexts) and those new works pointed to new questions (like wopart, which is for mobile phones and poetrica, that I will be launching soon, and it is for palms). I am now really involved with reflections about reading and seeing in nomadic devices, on the move, while doing other things.

RS: What do you think about the inclusion of net art by older institutions, like The Whitney?

GB: In some ways it means the possibility of the emergence of a net art market (with all its advantages_ budgets, visibility, sponsors_ and problems_ trendism above all and sponsors priorities...) But I think that the "Variable Media Initiative" (by Jon Ippolito) is something more important now, than the discussion about net art inside or outside institutions, because it discusses the need of thinking about ways of dealing with this inclusion. It puts deep questions not only about storage, but about recycling processes, updates and emulation. It points to new politics of institutionalization.

RS: Read any good books/sites lately?

GB: Books: La ciudad ausente (by ricardo piglia). It has an amazing structure. I never had read before such a non-linear narrative... The Language of New Media by lev manovich and "Introduction to the Letter T" by Barrett Watten (amazing... I am using a lot this poem in order to develop and conceptualize "Poetrica", my new piece)

Sites: Everyday I have some new favorites... So, I will try not to be unfair. This week is Asteroids 1.0 by Jim Andrews (hosted by the remedy project). I always have a look at what Mark Napier is doing (I like everything he does), as well as what Martin Wattenberg is developing. Brian Stephens, Mark Amerika, Alex Galloway, Olia Lialina, Jodi, Desk.org and Intima virtual base are always around my desktop.

Listening: The Best of 386 DX, by Alex Shulgin & Acœstico (by Cassia Eller, Brazilian also)