Syndicate: Russian Net-art: towards a space of privacy and self-expression

["TANIA MOGUILEVSKAYA, CLAUDE RAVANT" <tanusha@aha.ru>]

Dear Syndicalists,
You will find here the text was written for vol. 4, issue 2 of Convergence
(Summer 1998), curated by Inke Arns.
Finnally, maybe for the reason of time It won't be published , but i would
happy to have a possibility to publish it on Syndicate list and eventually
to have after
some opinions from some of  you.
All the best
Tania


TANIA MOGUILEVSKAYA
CLAUDE RAVANT

Russian Net-art: towards a space of privacy and self-expression

The Net has a particular importance in Russia since physical distances, and
the bad state of roads made other means of communication rather difficult.
Russia remains a strongly centralised country, in which Moscow, as far as
it is a country in the country, conserves an exclusive situation concerning
access to information, speed of economic liberalisation, and consequently.
But Russia has been experimenting democracy for only ten years, which is
not long enough to allow the development of an individualist consciousness.

Internet in Russia. Statistics and dynamism
Reliable Internet user statistics for Russia do not yet exist, but the
Russian Public Centre for Internet Technology ROCIT <http://www.rocit.ru>
reported in April 1997, that there are at least 600,000 users of electronic
mail across Russia, of which as many as 100,000 have access to a full range
of on-line services, including the Web. These figures, ROCIT estimates,
grow respectively at a rate of 200 percent and 400 percent per year. 
According to the director of the Russian Public Internet Centre, noticeable
changes have occurred in the structure of  the Internet users in Russia.
If, earlier, it consisted essentially in people who had a professional
knowledge of data processing, nowadays more and more users are not
specialised in this field. The number of information resources in Russian
(that is Web-sites or large independent resources) is now of approximately
11 000. Compared to August 1996, their number has increased around 18
times. Who uses Internet in Russia? If you except academic sites and
company's advertising sites, it appears that 20% of the users are private
individuals, who are not working in the field of data processing; 10% of
them are working in the cultural field; the last 10% are students and high
school pupils.
In June 1997, 75% of Internet users were Muscovites, and 85% of them lived
in a big city. But as early as January 1998, the amount of inhabitants of
big cities fell down to 75%, and those of Moscow, to approximately 60%.
Today, we can witness an obvious increase of the provincial sector of
Internet.
Searching on the international network, one can notice that 20% of the
Russian international network (according to the analysis lead by the
Russian firm Interrussia <http://www.interrussia.com> using the 'Russian
research system' <http://search.interrussia.com>) deals with culture and
knowledge.

Soros and Internet in Russia
The Soros Foundation1 played a great role in the development of Internet in
Russia, and especially in its decentralisation. The Soros Internet program
in Russia covers a territory stretching from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad.
Soros invested 100 millions dollars to create Internet centres in 33
universities. At the moment, 18 of them have already opened. The first
Internet centres2 were opened simultaneously at the universities of
Novosibirsk and Yaroslavl in June 1996. Besides this program, Soros created
a grant competition for the creation of information systems, called
'Internet resources for education, research and culture', that recompenses
between 130 and 170  projects provided by local University Internet centres
(this competition has already occurred 2 times). In February 98, Institute
for an Open Society (OSI) in Moscow, the coordinator of the project,
announced the results from the competition projects 'Internet resources for
education, culture, public heath, and civic society' in 9 towns :
Vladivostok, Rostov-na-Donu, Novgorod, Petrazavodsk, Tver, Barnaul, Samara,
Ekaterinburg, and Nizhni Novgorod. 
The Internet centre of the Yaroslavlski3 national university was created in
June 1996 <http://www.yars.free.net/>. In three years, the Soros foundation
invested in it 1,6 million dollars, from which more than 85% were used for
buying computers and set equipment. Today, more than 200 organisations have
been connected to the Internet, 103 regional secondary schools and
colleges, and 7 public non-profitmaking organisations.
Many service centres contain, among other things, information about art,
but they usually display ancient art, or artists working with traditional
materials. In fact, no alternative culture appeared on the Internet through
the support politics of Soros Foundations, exept through the Soros centres
for contemporary art. Let us explain : the idea of the Soros foundation is
to give official structures the bases starting from which they will
continue their evolution by themselves.  This is the reason why the
achievement of such projects depends very much on the orientations of the
concerned official structures. Only Soros Centres for contemporary art do
not rely on official russian structures, and this brings 2 consequences :
on the one hand, it allows these Centres to be the only refuges for an
alternative culture, on the other hand, it gives these centres a certain
fragility, since the Soros program is to quit its financial support in
approximatively 2 years, and at the time, there will probably not be any
official structure to take over. Actually, contemporary art has until now
gained no recognation  from russian state.

Individualism and home page
Russia, as a country from the former socialist block, has suffered for a
long time from strict content control on the one hand, and anonymous
slanders and charges on the other.
The Russian artist Ilya Kabakov writes in one of his texts that in Russia
"(...) there is a sort of corporation in judgements, that does not allow
individual point of views. This is the reason why our body doesn't posses
the specific organ able to elaborate a judgement on itself, and this
explains that we remain at the level of collective unconsciousness."4
In the home pages of the Yaroslavl university students, authors speak about
themselves and their friends, but also of beer, vodka and music. The
student Ivan Kakurin's page, named "senile depression"
(http://www.uniyar.ac.ru/~kakurin/)5, is one of the most lively and
welcoming pages. It is a diary, in which the author tells the events of his
life he wants to share with the visitors. Right away in the first page,
visitors meet a screen wide text where spelling rules and punctuation are
not respected. "Don't stay in the doorway, come in and feel at home." In
fact, the home pages of Yaroslavl's students are the first hesitating
attempts to speak of oneself and of one's environment. Student's home pages
show an obvious will of self-expression, but the content is very poor and
repetitive and there are rather few examples of authors trying to establish
links with others through their site, by proposing exciting information or
net projects.6

Dadanet
Nevertheless, most of the interesting sites are located in Saint Petersburg
and in Moscow, and are not necessarily linked to any institution. Until
now, there is no systematic researches on the Russian Net, that is there is
no coordination between local initiatives. In order to reveal the state of
things and the creative potential of the Russian Net7, Moscow's Soros
Centre for Contemporary Arts has organised an art web resource festival
called Dadanet8 (the festival and the site (http://da-da-net.ru) opened in
july 1997; the results were published in february 1998). Since it is the
first  Internet festival, that is the first coordinated project at the
scale of the country (and for once not only inter-regional at a limited
scale), we will use Dadanet as a prism to evaluate the present state of
things.
One of the participants in Dadanet, Dimitri Shubin (Saint Petersburg), with
his project 'identified' <http://www.neva.spb.ru/dsh/ident.htm>, presenting
himself as "something like an artist", explains his project: "I've always
been interested in the possibility of physical identification of
individuality. Criminologists use fingerprints for identification, and for
chiromancy, it is impossible to find twice the same configuration of the
lines of the hand. But how far can consciousness perceive its 'I' as a
physical object? How far can one speak of physical individuality when
surfing on the net (if you except of course the typing on the keyboard)?"9
Shubin's work, as several others, was evaluated by the jury10 more like the
announcement of a project than as a project in itself. "It seems to me that
the 'identified' part of the site is only the beginning of its approach.
The 'identified' site has high potential. The movement through the site
adds an element of mystery. The pictures clearly provide an identified
word, but the circumscribed context of the pictures work against any clear
identification. Nice play on the concept." (Stephen Wilson, Festival's Jury
Member)
Today, the meeting between artistic expression and Internet in Russia
generates the necessity of a redefinition of the artist, of his origins and
functions. Analysing the origins of the nominated candidates, we can
observe that a great proportion of them are computer scientists and
physicians11. The participation of scientists in artistic projects already
has a long tradition in Russian culture of the XXth century. It is even
possible to speak about a link between art and techics and science if we
remember the constructivist experiment. Besides, in the 60s, endless
discussions went on about physics and lyrics. Professions dealing with
physics were very fashionable, in so far as they lead to a positivist
approach of the world, but physicians felt they were nevertheless artists.
The so called 'engineero-technico-intelligentsia' gave birth to a culture
of its own, made of romantic songs accompanied by guitars, walks in the
mountains, paintings in a surrealist manner. It should be mentioned here
that this culture was strongly despised by the authentic art circles.
Nevertheless, this very tradition can maybe explain the disposition of
computer scientists and physicians to elaborate nets, and that in their
pages, one can find funny propositions that have this particular friendly
tone.
Anton Nazarov's (Petersburg) home page <http://www.admiral.ru/~Anton/> is a
good illustration of this tradition. The author presents himself as a
dentist and not only offers his services, but also proposes files
containing his favourite songs in order to let the visitor guess the title
of the song. He explains his approach to the Internet: "Pages must be
visited. You should tell everyone what you saw, and what you could pull out
of it." Stephen Wilson comments the site in the following terms: "This site
is about dentistry and crio-surgery: it was interesting to know how to take
the site. Was it a serious site for academic and professional interests or
some kind of commentary? The site moved into that unsure space."
David Mseourelian (Moscow), who received the first price in the home pages
category with his 'Page of travel, graphomania and friends'
<http://www.chat.ru/~daethear/>, is located in the same ambivalent space.
"Rigorously speaking, it is not a magazine but an outline. I could have
published the magazine itself at the time when the MIFI (Moscow Institute
of Physics) still published the Poetitchevsky Stand 12(an original
phenomena that requires an independent study). At the time, the idea of a
magazine occurred to me, but it remained an idea until now. The stuff that
you can find on this page is only illustrations of several fundamental
states of the soul, that I called for myself '1000 steps sideways'."
This increasing proportion  of computer scientists and physicians in the
Internet art world, and the high artistic quality of their production might
not be exclusively Russian, since, for example, Steve Wilson writes: "Some
of the most innovative works I see here in US are not done by artists".
Most of the participants to the art-project seem to be quite allergic to
the word artist, and rather ironical towards such a profession. For
instance, in the work 'Life without spectacles' by Tolya Pustovit and Igor
Lapshin, we meet an ironical position toward conceptual artists. They
refuse reflection and analysis. "He never wore glasses. But the very nature
of the artist requires new impressions, and he asked himself the fateful
question: What does the one who doesn't see without glasses see without
glasses?" ('First April Booth'
<http://palitra.infoart.ru/archive/joint/1apr97/>). This work is an
ironical point of view on the absurd position of the artist, trying to give
contemporary world fundamental questions, and taking his activity very
seriously. 'Fateful' question leads him to a cul-de-sac, and he utters
absurdities.

The tradition of Moscow conceptualism in net-art
This distanced position of the artist towards his status, seems to be a
specificity of Russian art projects on the Internet. In this sense, it is
very useful to refer to the fundaments of Russian tradition of non-official
art: the 'Moscow conceptual school', which can be considered the first
original tendency in Russian art since the Russian avant-garde from the
1910s and 1920s. We can notice a certain similarity in the organisation of
the conceptualist reflection process and the hypermedia structure in so far
as for conceptual ontology, everything can be linked to everything. The
'Moscow conceptual school' created and formulated such concepts as the
interaction between the author and his personage, the role of mythology,
the role of texts in the work of art.
"Moscow conceptualists often work with myths [...] building their private
myths and observing their return in cultural space"13. In Moscow itself,
where the conceptual school became less and less active these last years,
its ideas and means of influence have extended, which earlier was
absolutely not the case for the alternative circle. In the last 5 years,
conceptualism gained a certain influence on art, including contemporary art
in the Russian provinces, thanks to the media.
The Saint Petersburg group Factory of Found Clothing14
<http://www.dux.ru/guest/fno>, presented a project tightly linked with the
tradition of private mythologies. Their project is the illustration of the
dream of a high-school girl. The project is devoted to her intimate world.
Angelic little girl dresses and pieces of paper covered with mysterious
annotations fly across the site.
This project, with its series of brief messages, and its little
water-colour drawings, as well as Russian home pages genre in general,
reminds the tradition of the Russian album genre, with its specific
stylistics (chronicles and historical testimony of privacy, intimate
expression, nevertheless pretending to some kind of universalism), and its
orientation towards domestic art and an intimate tone15. In the 60s and
70s, this genre was appropriated by Kabakov16, one of the founders of
Moscow conceptualism.
Another project linked to individual mythology, was proposed by Jenia Gorny
<http://www.zhurnal.ru/gallery/mirza/>, a linguist who studied at the
university of Tartu (Estonia), famous for its semiotics department. It is a
project of rotation of simulacra, whose presumed author is a certain Mirza
Babaev. The project is located on the site of the electronico-intellectual
magazine published by Gorny. Looking closer, what we see in the site is a
whole system meant to prove the existence of the virtual personage of Mirza
Babaev, including her biography, the texts she wrote, the name of her
friends...
Many historians of Russian culture noticed that litteratury orientation
(that is a way of leading the spectator to perceive the word with his
spectator's eye, and not with a reading eye) is a fundamental
characteristic of Russian art. Tetsuo Kogawa is absolutely right to note
that "apart from the sites of Cultural and Educational Resources, even the
Art Project sites use many texts. In the situation of web-technology, texts
tend to justify a pipe-line/content model of communication". Russian
conceptual artists, especially from the first generation (at the beginning
of the 70's), often consider the word as a pure visual sign, in which the
semantic component is reduced to a promise of meaning. Moscow artists often
added hand-written texts to their pictures, creating a unification of the
visual and written discourse of the picture, mixing narrative and
illustration. Between the conceptual artist and his work, always stands a
distance that excludes any possibility of coincidence between the author's
and his personage's identity. The Conceptualists created a method based on
a mythological creativity. They often work in the name of an
'artist-personage' (expression invented by Ilya Kabakov), that is the hero
of the myth they invented (Gorny and Mirza Babaev, Andreц╡ Velikanov and
Andreц╡ Gagarine). The founders of Soc'art, Komar and Melamid - now living
in the US - payed great attention to the problem of the reciprocity in the
relations between author and personage, and the Moscow conceptual school
immediately took over this problem. Komar and Melamid painted pictures in
the name of fictive artists, like Ziablov, an avant-garde artist from the
18th century, or the first abstractionist and realist painter Boutchoumov.
Ilya Kabakov made up a whole series of personages... Virtual personages can
be anonymous, like Mirza Babaev, in the works of the virtual poet and
thinker Andres Hammarstadt in Epiphodor Boutilkin's site (from Petersburg).
Similarly, the famous Moscow artist Andreц╡ Velikanov in his project
"Herbarium for Goethe"17 Andreц╡ Gagarin
<http://www.da-da-net.ru/Works/Goethe/Goethe.htm>) devoted a great number
of texts and performances to the demonstration of the Mafia-like structure
of artistic life, and of the lost importance of contemporary art for
society. In the text of his project, he hides himself behind several
personages at once: "The author of this project is an artist whom complete
name consists in 17 words: Andreц╡ Velikanov has refused to participate in
the project. The project was introduced by Andreц╡ Gagarin (alias Julia
Shipilova) instead. The project includes a composition, presented to Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe by Andreц╡ Gagarin, who represents Andreц╡ Velikanov and
is in fact Julia Shipilova... Andreц╡ Velikanov, whose refusal initiated
such a wonderful project, would probably be forgiven." He adds
commentaries; interpretations slipped in the very body of the work of
art18. Here, typical Russian conceptualism finds a powerful expression for
the Net medium.

For years, Russian conceptualism turned its back to the public. The idea of
the opposition between official and non-official culture was very powerful.
The transposition of art in the Internet suppresses this opposition between
official and non official, but recreates another field of marginality in
art circles, in so far as Internet artists are artists who ran away from
what they estimated to be a kind of art Mafia (unhealthy organisation of
art life) to find refuge in the Internet, where no kind of authority is
being exerted19. But through the Internet, as we could observe it, artistic
type of expression is not linked to the artistic profession anymore, but is
accessible just through a certain level of technical knowledge. This is the
reason why the creative circle has widened, and through this process,
Internet artistic expression becomes a alternative to institutional art. 
As we mentioned it earlier on, the album genre was at the same time an
intimate object devoted to a narrow circle of relatives, and a universal
testimony. Quite similarly, it seems that russian sites have the same
aspirations, and this is the reason why we can speak of a space of privacy
and of self expression when speaking about Russian Net, even though  WWW is
usually associated to universallity. As the album genre proved it, there is
in Russia a long tradition of amateur creativity, which probably played its
role in the involvement of technicians in artistic creativity on Internet,
and in the development of the Russian Net in general.
__________________________________________________

1George Soros is an American financier who founded many charitable
organizations. Today the Soros Foundations are a network of foundations,
programs and institutes operating in 24 countries , and especially  in
Eastern and Central Europe.
 In fact, in Russia, like in all the other post-socialist countries of
Eastern Europe, the Soros Foundation runs many different types of
institutions. The Open Society Institutes (OSI), consisting in official
regional structures, concerning academic science, public health, ancient
and traditional culture and art (including the university Internet
centres), includes also the Soros Centres for Contemporary Arts (SCCA).
The telecommunication program of the Open Society Institute was opened in
1992, and is one of the main supporters of Internet projects at the scale
of the country, working with regional and govermental organisations.   
2 All university Internet centres work on the same sketch. The
configuration of a typical university centre is the following: an open
access classroom (on the bases of one computer for every 100 registered
students); a modern telecommunication node providing connections to other
regional organisations; and the latest multimedia equipment. In sum, it is
the very equipment used by regional and municipal administrations, high or
ordinary education structures, research institutes, medical organisations,
museums and libraries, religious organisations and a reduced amount of
social organisations.
3 Yaroslavl, a typical provincial city with 670 000 inhabitants, located in
the centre of the country, was one of the first centres for the development
of information projects supported by Soros, and is in its way a kind of
laboratory.
4 In Kabakov, "The fly with wimgs", quotated in K. Bobrinskaia,
Conceptualism, 1994, Moscow, Galart, p 56
5 last access to this site as well as to all the mentionned sites bellow:
middle of february
6 In the Yaroslavl Internet centre, nobody ever heard of the web designer
and music expert Roman Ovtchinikov, who lives just beside. His site,
'Russian extreme music' <http://ovan.Yaroslavll.su/> is "a place for not
ordinary, not traditional, not commercial, heavy, noisy, and avant-gardist
music". Roman sent 1000 invitations through Russian regions asking for
extracts (or links) of original local music in order to put them on his
site. His web site already contains a link to 'extracts of contemporary
music from the south of Russia' <http://www.dez.donpac.ru/>. The site
includes a quotation from Moscow's fashionable music magazine Ptiouch:
"Rostov-na-Donu (south of Russia) was considered as an uninteresting deep
provincial city lacking of any kind of rock and roll culture." The site
also contains a link to Kaliningrad's (a small region near the Baltic sea)
musical magazine, Ekaterinburg and Krasnodar's alternative musical
magazines.
7 We mean by Russian Net the whole Russian language web sites, and all the
sites created by Russians, whether they now live in Russia or not.
8 Moscow's Soros Center for Contemporary Art has been organising a
non-commercial art resource festival on Internet. The name "Dadanet" is a
pun on "da" (yes in Russian ; reference to the dadaiste movement, as one of
the first artistic movements that widdened the boarders of art) and "net"
(no in Russian ; reference to the Net). The project was curated by Olga
Shishco and Tania Moguilevskaia. 87 projects were presented for the
competition, one third coming from Moscow, 9 from Saint Petersburg, another
third from Russian provincial cities (including 4 projects from Yaroslavl),
and 8 projects coming from Russian authors living abroad (in USA, France
and Germany). (Let us mention that among participants, there were only 3
women who presented themselves as such. But it is difficult to evaluate the
real number of women since several sites were anomymous.) The competition
was divided into several categories: art projects, artistic and cultural
resources, home pages, and educational projects. The 3 first categories
welcomed more or less the same amount of projects, whereas the last one
welcomed three times less projects, and the jury was unable to select a
winner. The winners are:
for Art-project:
First Price -
Andrei Gagarin (Andrei Velikanov) (Moscow) "Herbarium for Goethe"
< http://da-da-net.ru/Works/Home/Velikanov.htm>
Mirza Babaev  (Evgeni Gorny)(Moscow) "Procession of Simulacre "
<http://www.zhurnal.ru/gallery/mirza/>

Second Price -
Roman Zolotariov (Kazan)) "Roman's Home"
<http://www.tol.ru/romanz/index.html>
Dmitri Shubin (Saint Peterburg) "Identified"
<http://www.neva.spb.ru/dsh/ident.htm>
Yuri Kirillov (Moscow) " First April Booth"
 <http://palitra.infoart.ru/archive/joint/1apr97/>

For Art and Culture Resource
First Price - 
Kostya Mitenev  "Digital Body" < http://www.dux.ru/digibody/body.htm>

Second Price -
Gleb Pavlovski (Moscow) "Russian Magazine" <http://www.russ.ru/>
Andrei Smirnov (Moscow) "Termen-Center"
<http://www.postman.ru/~fyodor/theremin/>

For Education resource: No Choice

For Home page
David Mzereulyan (Moscow) "The page of trips and  friends"
<http://www.chat.ru/~daethar/>


9 All participants fullfiled an inquiryin which they presented themselves
and their project. This is a quotation from Shubin's inquiry.
10 The jury was composed of international specialists of new technologies
and Net art, among which the most famous were Tetsuo Kogawa (Japan), Pierre
Bonjovanni (France), Alexei Shulgin (Russia), Stephen Wilson (USA), Lev
Manovich (USA) and Stephen Wilson (USA).
11 Almost one third of participants were computer scientists or physicians,
who became web masters.
12 Poetitchevsky Stand was an inner publication from the Moscow Institute
of Physics, shown on a bulletin board in the Institute.
13 E. Bobrinskaya, Conceptualism, Moscow, Galart, 1994, p 41
14 The group, founded in 1995, includes Natalia Perchina, Olga Egorova and
Mikhaц╡l Blaiser. FFC works with clothes, hair, text, sound, trying to
transform both space and people.
15 The album genre developed in Russian aristocratic circles in the second
half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century. Yuri Lotman15
explains that at its origins, the album had an important role in
aristocratic famillies and in cercles (which later became the Salons), as a
cultural factor of social organisation. The albums always associated texts
and their illustration. Their construction were very codified (the first
page was to remain white, the first written pages were reserved to the
elderly members of the familly, than came pages written by the friends... ;
albums usually contained herbariums) Later, the album genre became
fashionnable in high society. Their authors were usually ladies, who either
asked great poets and famous artistes to make drawings or to write poems,
or did it themselves.
16 For the Kabakov's Albums see Claude Ravant  "Researches on Moscow Art
Scene", unpublished, Paris, 1995. University  Paris X - Nanterre, pp. 23-26
17 See footnote 15
18 A. Velikanov explains the content of his project as follows: "The act of
sending out presents, or, to be more precise, their virtual entities, into
the Web space, is essentially a sacramental sacrifice. All offerings are
divided into seven groups, of thirteen objects each: flowers, maidens,
emotions, fast food, various positions used during the coitus, pet insects
and aeroplanes of the civil airlines fleet such as the
AEROFLOT-INTERNATIONAL AIRLINES. In the moment of the formal electronic
mailing of the presents on 18 October 1997, they become Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, or, to be more precise, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe becomes a
91-pieces composition. (...) In case the ritual communication sphere
develops successfully, the project can expand, the interactivity turns into
mass hysteria."
19 see Tania Moguilevskaia, Russian artists on Internet, in Khoudojestviny
Journal (Art Magazine) n 10, Moscow, 1996, pp 48-52. 4 artists answer the
question : what is new and interesting in Internet, compared to the
artistic sphere they come from ?
_____________________________
Biographies 

Tatyana MOGUILEVSKAYA
Russian, lives in Moscow. Has  Master of Art  History and Theory ("The Myth
of the Machine:  Mecanist Thema in 10s-20s  International  Avant-garde
Art") from the Moscow University. Since 1993 she worked about new
technologies as curator ( Russian Ministry of Culture, Institut of Art and
Technology, New Media Art Laboratory (SCCA Moscow), video gallery Ptyuch.
Autor of numerous texts about Eastern new media art 
(http://services.worldnet.net/~coronado/)

Claude RAVANT
French, has a master of literature , and a Master of History of Art from
the University Paris X - Nanterre.
She lives in Moscow, where she works as an art critic and is finishing her
doctorate in History of Art about Russian contemporary art ("From USSR to
Russia: Russian non-official art from 1953 until nowadays")











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