net.sauna log file September 9th, 1997, 1 pm-3.30 pm, Ars Electronica, Linz.   Adrianne Wortzel & Tapio Mäkelä on Memory, media, space: dioramic presence in past tense

HHeater: Welcome to the first Wendnesday morning net.sauna session. Adrianne Wortzel and Tapio Mäkelä engage in a dialogue about media, space and memory. Hello Adrianne, welcome to the net.sauna - how does it feel to be here? bather: Thanks Tapio, I am so happy to be here in such a warm environment so conducive to good discourse. HHeater: This is the warmest place in Ars Electronica... bather: well, it may be the ONLY place in Ars that can support warmth. HHeater: Heater throws a bit of water on the dialogic stove. bather: ok, I have been thinking a lot since our last good talk in the Museum of Natural History in Helsinki.we had a great talk about diorama and new media. HHeater: As the steam lingers through the fragments of our performative artist/media/activist selves, we start to go into the topic of todays discussion. Which Adrianne is describing here. bather: amplified by BEING in a dioramic environment... bather: there is an importance I think to both simultaneously BEING and PORTRAYING. HHeater: Let´s go back to that discussion a bit; about how moments are frozen in time and marooned to another cultural context. bather: Tapio and I had a good discussion about dioramic moments in performative work, maybe even dioramic moments in life. That is to say, we talked about memory being possible only in frozen moments, and history being written down in bits - also frozen moments. HHeater: Yes, and the staging of frozen memory, which leads us to an anlogue to net environments and how we are showing our work and ourselves in medioramas. bather: why is so much nostalgia attached to the still image, more than to the moving image? HHeater: And, nostalgia for the still moment, not the process, ie., the finished work, not the work in progress... Even net.artists here are presenting lots of finished sites, or faces. bather: yes, I wonder if you have seen museleanor's article in Intelligent Agent on 'Venues of Process, the Changing Form of Exhibition' where she talks about the artist's process continuing in exhibition... HHeater: In your Electronic Chronicles, Museleanor and her colleagues excavated contemporary life as an archeologist from the future. If Eleanor was to find the Internet frozen at this moment, 500 years from now, what would she think? bather: She would feel deeply saddened by the depth of narcissistic aura in our society. HHeater: Would Museleanor blame the art and media scene for not looking around their own spheres? Would she be happy to see the changes taking place within net.art environment? bather: I cant speak for her really, but I can tell you how I would feel... I would be dismayed at the perpetuation of the cyclopian paradigm -- only ONE moment is RIGHT or the BEST, or functions, as you said earlier, as the FACE of something... only one moment, one god, one way, the cyclopian or biploar paradigm -- yes or no, right or wrong, black or white, but hurry, we must always have the conclusion, the END. HHeater: I also feel that there is quite a bit of linear thinking on the cultural level of how this media &art environment works; how things are seen as parts of technical and innovative continuums. Linearity is only broken on the level of the technical arrangement itself... bather: yes, thank god we are living in a time when the technology is so precarious for us... unless of course, we are funded by huge corporations --but lets not go there.... HHeater: In a way, we are a wunder kammer at the very moment, sitting in this sauna, typing this dialogue and being watched. But instead of being frozen, we are active. I like that: we cannot stop this moment, since we are human, in a dialogue. On a visual level, though, we are in a dioramic standstill... and an oddity, since in a techno space we are surrounded by wood. Very simple, but true, what do you think? The sauna temperature is heating up... we are entering terrains where humidity and air temperature are ideal for two bodies to relax, stop the surrounding time and engage in thoughts... emerging. bather: You have expressed this so well, we have given ourselves the gift of halting philosophically inactive frenzy in order to experience a REAL activity - communication in a philosophical realm, which brings me to a question - in cyberspace are we OUT THERE? or IN THERE? Here we are, IN here, but really also OUT THERE..... where are we_ ? Are we? HHeater: The temperature is now rising fast... 60 Celsius. I think we actually are never anywhere. What I mean is that our subjectivities are fragmentarily constructed and expressed in several locations and discourses. No location can contain us, only fragments. Hence, on the net, a message or a textual fragment is from "I", about "me" but not = I. But the same goes for any space. What is different, in terms of us communicating, is rather the lack of body gestures in net space. But to say that we were NOT there, is to stick with the Cartesian division of mind and body; as if the other was there, one here. Flesh Factor, I think, is deeply problematic since it has Cartesian outsets... Sauna has now steam, there is a scent of pine, two bodies processing air, burning energy to fill the space with warmth. If the discussion heats up more, we have to go for a cool media swim... bather: what you say above about fragmentarily constructed subjectivities ... the inability of artists, people, whatever, to experience that and work from that 'un'place is what is dampening the good development of wonderful work... I really believe it is a problem because it places us right in the face of our mortality, and that is too much for most to bear.... Therefore they not only cling to the linear for dear life, they entirely miss its value. HHeater: In a way contemporary art scene is one big frozen diorama, since it is based on an idea of subjectivity alien to contemporary conditions. Artists have not abandonded the mythical, heroic creator selves. The careers are constructed on an individual as an archive. A retrospective is like a frozen life of an artist, sadly enough, not reflecting its complexity. Fragments are mirrored as whole images, ready for museum archives. bather: Its because their work is INCLUSIVE of 'making history'. It reminds me of the Memory Palaces... huge constructs in the minds of medieval scholars where they would store all their memories, not unlike disc storage, --the difference is, there was a PLACE for everything without the necessity of prioritizing memories for hierarchical retrieval. HHeater: It is very interesting to think about the net in relation to such a non-hierarchical mode of storing memories, how the fragmentation of selves is a condition in how information, memory bits are scattered in different memory palaces, organized with varying metaphors of space. Interestingly enough, the current culture of Enlightment is criticizing the net for being "so messy and fragmentary". bather: Somewhere along the line (pun intended), the nature of linearity commanded specialization, not in the form of 'I am a palpable fragment of my own design' but in the form of 'I am all there is' -- this glorifying of the 'special' as opposed to the ordinary made prejudice necessary for survival.... prejudice towards the importance of the right conclusion, being in the right space at the right time, being in the right altogether. HHeater: The exclusion of everyday life from the art and science is part of this cult of the special. Actually, the stardom cult, present in art, entertainment, fashion, politics is a kind of a new media aristocracy that lives in its own right... That´s another discussion. But what is really interesting, is how the commodification of the difference, the special has been invented and how it works... For instance, to separate a painting into a singular object (instead of a room full of stuff) was invented by an American department store, The Wanamakers. Hence the specialization was the condition for becoming a new commodity, to be purchased as a singular item. Now... this links very well to the cult of the "new" and the avantguardism of new hi technology. As if you should have Netscape 4.0 instead of Mosaic, Photoshop 4.01 instead of 2.0... and, furthermore, act special. In the marketplace of theory or art, as if you should be special and go for the stardom to survive... bather: I want to comment on the wonderful idea of documenting the INVENTION of the special... Shall we document it in frozen moments? Create dioramas? Picasso for instance.. did the fact that he was a mass media star change how his work should be perceived by artists. I saw Stelarc on the news here the night he performed, and actually the documentation of his performance (it was interview and performance video), was wonderful, a gift to spread around of what he does, with no pretensions to representing the REAL appearance in flesh....i.e., nothing could match actually being present for a live performance, Stelarc in the flesh..... HHeater: The media as a diorama is interesting; I have referred to media culture as a Cabinet of Curiosities, since it indeed pays attention to the special, the curious. Like we are being filmed at the moment, by a probing camera that seeks our intimate space and bodies. What is happening? The medialization of a dialogue becomes a spectacle in the representational media. The dialogue itself disappears. Acts, through stardom, become icons. Every day life is no longer present. History has become only an excuse to practice museums... the dioramic package-freeze-recycle process. This is getting too grand; the sauna is too hot for dialogue. We need to cool down and continue later on this week. You had a great title for our next session... bather: Do you mean "Sayonara Diorama? HHeater: Oui! bather: ok, I would like to continue another time with SAYONARA DIORAMA! HHeater: So... in the next discussion we shall explore ways in which dioramic presence can be turned into an dynamic presence.... bather: Are you talking resurrection, revival, resuscitation? HHeater: No. There is no original to be excavated. This is new, or... not new, but another turn. bather: then why begin with frozen moments? I am quite partial to them myself by the way. And to incremental narrative. I think the myth of Sisyphus is something to bring into this.... Sisyphus was performing similarly to how we are performing in new media and at Ars Electronica, and his daily efforts were not left to be ordinary, but rendered heroic and iconic. bather: Why? HHeater: We have analyzed genealogy of how we have ended up in this sauna, in this space, being observed by people. Next step is to look how we can reduce our metaphoric body armor to enable what we are doing right now. Without the sauna walls, this intense text would not have been possible. bather: Indeed, our sauna diorama has somehow been incredibly dynamic at root level... perhaps we should examine that phenomenon too... HHeater: Sauna heat is turned off for 7 minutes. The steam lingers slowly from the sauna door to Ars Electronica space, it dissolves.