Syndicate: UK interactive media

[lisa haskel <lisa@lisa.demon.co.uk>]

[This text was written for Magazyn Sztuki, published in Gdansk, and will
appear in their special "British" issue, forthcoming.]


Lisa Haskel

Independent/Co-dependent/Interdependent
New Media Art in the UK


Emerging communication technologies: multimedia, the
internet, possibilities for the use of broadband networks:
all are providing new opportunities for artists to make
and show work. But the issues, possibilities and implications
extend far wider than that. In the UK, new technological platforms are
being used in a huge diversity of ways, by a wide range of
practitioners with backgrounds ranging from music to sculpture, to
independent and underground radio, video and publishing.  Only one
thing is for certain: artistic practice with new media stands on a
number of cusps and boundaries that challenge conventional notions of
art, art production, sites for art and traditional notions of public
and audience.  Most importantly, though, artistic projects are also
challenging the uses, claims and trajectories of technological
development in the wider culture and economy.  It is this diversity of
approach, refusal of categorisation and critical edge that gives new
media work its particular vibrancy.

The UK does not have large-scale institutional centres of
activity and development, such as ZKM or GMD in Germany, or
CICV in France.  Instead, work seems to emerge from ad-hoc
and small-scale alliances of individuals, small organisations
and groups.  Research, development and production takes place
in semi-commercial studios, peoples' own homes, in public
access facilities related to arts or vocational training,
and by individuals working in art and design colleges and
universities.

The UK, and London in particular, is well known for its
lively contribution to music and graphic design. Of course
there's always been a connection between the two: witness the
enduring originality and energy of record-sleeve design
throughout the late 1970's and 1980's. Likewise, the ground-
breaking genre of "style" magazines - most famously "The Face"-
that appeared in the 1980's. In the 1990's we've seen the bold,
eclectic graphics of rave fliers.

With multimedia, this conjunction has grown closer and more
intimate.  AudioRom and Anti-ROM are examples of groups which
both produce work that sits on the boundary between art and
design, problematising both definitions.

Anti-ROM produced their first piece, the eponymous "Anti-ROM 1"
in 1994, straight from finishing their studies in design and
media at the University of Westminster. This CD-ROM consists
of 70 different interactive devices or games, which allow
different ways for the user to manipulate sound, the visual image, or
the relationship between the two.   If not challenged outright, the
devices certainly teased the then developing conventions of commercial
CD-ROM productions.  Paradoxically perhaps, or perhaps indicating
something of the sophistication of the relationship between artistic
and commercial activity in a fast-growing industry, the group have
since progressed to become one of London's leading interactive design
practices in the youth and leisure field. They have made  special
promotional products and displays for companies, notably Levis jeans,
and some public-sector organisations such as Londons' science museum.
 They have collaborated with top UK design team, Tomato, whose
strongly visual work has also wavered between graphic design and art
production.  In the meantime, AntiR-ROM have participated in
exhibitions, including the "Jam" at London's Barbican Art Gallery that
sought to showcase the high level of creativity among British
designers, and argue for its recognition within for art audiences, and
have produced special events for international electronic art
festivals such as DEAF in 1996.

AudioRom is a lose grouping of around 10 musicians, graphic
designers, engineers, programmers and artists.  The focus of
their work is an in depth investigation of the relationships
between sound and image in interactive media. AudioRom beta
was a self-produced, self-financed collection of eight
different "toys" for making music by the manipulation of
graphic devices.  Examples include: the text generator, in which
musical phrases are allocated to letters of the alphabet, allowing the
user to "play" words and sentances, or a "paint" palette that allows
the user to compose sounds by splashing colours across the screen
using the mouse.  This prototype has been developed into a product by
AudioRom - ShiftControl - which is being distributed by a new
small-scale CD-ROM distribution outfit, "Research Publishing",  part
of a company set up by 1980's  print graphic design guru and original
designer of "The Face" magazine, Neville Brody.  In the meantime, the
group's new project,  AudioRom 0 is being developed with support of
public subsidy from the Arts Council of England, and their
installation work has recently been shown at Londons' ICA.

It is easy to make optimistic claims for this position, between
art and design, and between commercial and non-commercial work
as a fertile site and an independent means for innovative art
production. However, it is also necessary to point out the
difficulties.  Commercial work invariably needs to be prioritised,
eating into the time available for independent projects.  Subsidised
art work does not usually fully cover the costs of running a studio in
which individuals engage in the necessary experimentation and
collabortation through which new and original ideas develop.

Likewise, it would be a great error to characterise all UK
new media practice as having this close relationship with
commerce, and profit-making potential.  In keeping with both
the underground hacker ethos that characterises a great deal
of the media arts scene internationally, and also in some
continuity with the past 20 years of independent film, video
and photography practice informed by critical theory, a number
of the most interesting and successful projects of
recent years have come from groups and individuals whose
aims are expressly to intervene and critique the corporately-
driven conventions of new communication technologies.  These
are projects that delve deep into the architecture of software
and the internet, and the taken-for-granted structures that
shape the information there.

Released in December 1997, the Webstalker is the latest edition
of self-published electronic zine, I/O/D.  Produced by the
writer/programmer/designer team of Matthew Fuller, Colin Green
and Simon Pope, the Webstalker is a piece of software that offers a
radical new paradign for looking at the World Wide Web.  Instead of
"browsing" surfaces, this software tool maps connections: plotting
links and associations while stripping out high-bandwidth elements
such as images, sounds and corporate logos.  This piece of software
reveals structure as opposed to surface, and in so doing so it
questions the imperitives and agendas behind corporate design. As
artist-produced software, it posits the argument that critical
engagement with new technologies demands radical re-working of its
basic assumptions and principles.

A second project that makes a strong intervention into the
taken-for granted functions and interfaces of the net is
Natural Selection, a project from Mongrel Media.  Mongrel is
a group of artists whose core members, Matsuko Yokokoji,
Graham Harwood and Richard Pierre Davies together make up
an ethnically and racially diverse collective.  This group is
interested in exploring the ways in which biologically
determinist ideas about race are embedded in aspects of culture
and impact on everyday life. Natural Selection looks at
how racial difference is represented on the web, on the levels
of both surface and structure. To do this, Mongrel have created
their own "search engine". When a keyword is entered that refers in
some way to race, however indirectly,  the engine diverts the user to
a number of tampered-with or pages that challenge and lay bare the
categorisation and appearance of race on the net. These "fake" sites
may resemble those from far-right political organisations, or porn
sites which trade on the desire produced by racial difference and the
power- relationships in post-colonial europe.  Mongrel are also
working on an installation piece: National Heritage, in which skin
samples are scanned from the gallery-going audience and compared with
the mean skin colour of the population of the locality in which the
work is sited.  The bigger the difference, the greater the racial
abuse heaped on the installations' visitors by projections of
characters on the walls. The work aims to  challenge the claims of
"official" culture - the  art world and gallery system - that it
provides a fair and relevant service to the full diversity of the
British population.

Since 1995, artist/activist Heath Bunting has been running
a domain on the internet called Irational.  This is home to
a number of quirky, ironic, small scale projects produced
by himself or his associates.  Most of the projects are
thoroughly independent, sometimes they have been made in
collaboration with organisations either within the arts funding
system - such as the internet arts agency Channel - or which
operate independently of public support, such as Backspace.
For instance, his work CCTV, produced in collaboration with C
hannel, and also an installation at Folly Gallery in Lancaster,
enables visitors to the site to view images from surveillance
cameras in four different cities in the UK, Spain, the USA and
Germany. The aim of the project is to "improve self-policing
with further absented police force". Should any browser witness
a crime, they are invited to help out by faxing the nearest police
station directly from the web site.    In Irational (TM) Clubcard,
Rachel Baker has taken a swipe at the intense competition and market
domination of the handful of powerful supermarket chains in the UK.
One of the shops' strategies has been to issue electronic "loyalty"
cards, offering discounts on points accumulated, but of course the
hidden purpose is the collection of data about the buying habits of
its customers which helps plan marketing and discount schemes. Rachel
Baker devised her own reward card scheme for visitors' to hers and her
colleagues' web sites, used the supermarkets' own logos and also
created a junk snail-mail list, so that her subscribers could be
bombarded with her own version of corporate detritus.

In the UK, it could never be said that new media practice
is dominated by boy-toy techno-fetishism.  A number of the most
exhibited new media artists are women: their work often refers to
gender, tending towards a sophisticated and elliptical approach which
enriches the whole range of media practice.  The division between
public and private, and how this is reproduced and sustained through
new technologies and the more subtle nuances of mediated communication
are recurring themes.

Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie have worked collaboratively for over 4
years, undertaking projects that investigate the relationships between
virtual space, location and mediation and which also continually
interrogates their own working relationship.  Their work tends to
occurr across several locations: galleries, the net and various forms
of public or semi-public space.  Their most recent work: "Homespun"
consists of video diaries of trips "home", Nina to stay with her
parents in Norfolk, Karen to visit hers in the seaside town of Largs
in Scotland.  Each day the video recordings were sent to two gallery
sites: in Cambridge and Glasgow, and at particular times, telephone
conversations between the two were also relayed live into the space.
The result was an uncanny juxtaposition of private life and public
space, and of geographical distance and mediated communication.  In an
earlier project (1996) "A Hypertext Journal", the pair toured the
Highlands of Scotland , re-tracing the steps of 18th Century scottish
writer,  James Boswell. Throughout the journey they maintained email
contact with a number of colleagues in the UK and internationally.
They responded to special requests for images, information and even
allowed themselves to be guided toward particular meetings and detours
along their way.  The project has resulted in a huge web-site that
documents the real journey, with sounds, images, correspondence and
diary entries.  This project pioneered the use of the net as a
time-based, trans- locational and multi-layered communications medium.

Julie Myers has made a number of pieces that also explore location,
public and private space, and mediation.  In "Peepingtom", Myers went
against the grain of the net - which is to veil "real" identity and
"real" location, deciding instead to distribute her most intimate life
by reproducing her own home on a web site.  Through using plans and
diagrams, with low resolution images of private and household objects,
Myers made a click-through version of her own home. Visitors were
offered the opportunity to rifle through her kitchen cupboards,
clothers drawers and bathroom cabinet.  Thoroughly revealed, she
invited her virtual guests to leave contributions: cocktail recipies
(she assures me she has tried them all!), suggestions for nights out
and comments on her underwear.

Susan Collins' work also brings the visceral to the virtual.
Her most recent piece, "In Conversation", encapsulates many of the
concerns she has dealt with in earlier works, in particular the
distenciated, fetishistic appeal of technology in collision with the
fleshy, viscous reality of embodied desire.  "In conversation" invited
visitors to a web site using streaming audio to converse, via a series
of animated clips, with passers-by on a Brighton street. The overall
effect was an extraordinary and captivating mix of intimate and
technological sounds, images and interaction.  Visitors, both local
and remote, returned again and again to make new acquaintances, or in
some cases, to use the installation as a tool to communicate with
friends and family.

Collins is fascinated with the possibilites of technology and
mediated  communication, but likes most of all to play on their
potential for dysfunctionality.  Hers, in common with Myers, Pope's
and Guthrie's work take the traditionally "female" sites of domestic
space, intimate communication and the body, and uploads them into the
virtual domain to test, transgress and challenge notions of public and
private.

In common with issues of gender, race and the post-colonial legacy has
provided a focus for challenging and radical critical and practical
work on media and representation throughout the past 20 years. Much
has been explored through photography, film and video practice,  and
this has been expanded into the virtual and digital domains through a
number of significant projects.

Kieth Piper is perhaps the UK's best know black media artist.
His work has moved through collage, video and computer animation to
fully interactive works. His primary interest is in the construction
of black male identity through representation, both in history and
contemporary mass media, and linking this to other practices of social
regulation such as surveillance and policing.  The title of his
retrospective exhibition, publication and interactive work:
"Re-locating the Remains" suggests the link between the images,
representations and practices longitudinally through time.  Multimedia
and hypertext, with their ability to continually re-montage and re-
juxtapose images to create new meanings is therefore a particularly
appropriate medium for his project.  His approach has some measure of
irony too. For instance in his interactive work "Caught Like A Nigger
in Cyberspace", he playfully extends to the virtual domain, the
experiences and structures of inclusion and exclusion that
characterise everyday life in a world divided by visible, embodied
difference such as skin colour.

Internationlism and the meanings of living within a diaspora have been
also been a source of inspiration and investigation by Black artists'
in the UK, and a number of live events have been produced that have
involved DJ's, VJ's, internet chat links and video conferencing.
These events, Digital Slam one and two, and Club 21st Century, aim to
extend audiences and debates by mixing music, poetry and visual media
in a club setting.

It has often been said that multimedia is a creative practice that few
undertake in isolation.  As such, the medium has been of great
potential to practitioners whose primary concern has been to work with
groups of non-artists to produce work that enables a broad range of
people to express themselves and communicate social and political
issues that concern them.  Pioneering in this field has been the work
of the "Collaboration Programme", that has run in conjunction with the
international video festival, "Video Positive" since 1989.  This
project teams experienced, professional artists with a wide range of
non-artist groups, from youth groups, to single-issue campaigns, to
groups of non-professional but practising artists. The whole group
collaborates to create projects that not only develop skills and
competencies in visual language, but also reflect the concerns of the
groups.  In each Video Positive festival, a number of works made in
this way, either for the gallery or public locations have been
exhibited. Rehearsal of Memory; an interactive installation made by
artist Harwood in collaboration with patients fom Ashworth Hospital; a
secure psychiatric prison institution for people who had committed
serious crimes such as murder and rape has been widely shown
internationally and is now available as a CD-ROM.

In this paper I have mainly discussed the work of a small selection of
artists making mainly screen-based and in some form distributable
pieces of work using new technologies.  This is just a partial
snapshot.  There are a huge range of other practices and other artists
also working in various ways with live performance, installation, and
in research and development areas such as virtual environments.
Artists such as Alison Craighead and Jon Thompson, Simon Poulter,
Clive Gillman, Jane Prophet, Simon Biggs, Simon Robertshaw and Tracey
Mattison. are making significant pieces of work and contributions to
the field. Additionally, groups such as Soda, and individuals
including Simon Lewandowska - both of whom have shown recently at the
brand new London Electronic Arts Gallery at the Lux centre in London -
are adopting a more sculptural approach, that harks back to the 1960's
days of groups such as EAT in New York, with their fascination with
the aesthetics of mechanical and electronic objects.

>From the design and music context of AudioRom and Anti-ROM, the
"software as culture" interventions of Mongrel Media and the
Webstalker, and on to the process-based collaborative
work in which the outcome is perhaps less important than the
methodology by which the piece came about and was made, contexts of
production, distribution and practice in new media is varied and
diverse.  All are making some contribution and challenge to an
increasingly  technologically and corporately driven culture.  Taken
as a whole, this area of practice asks whether the "art world" should
expand to encompass the contribution of new media artists, or should
there be a more radical move towards broader definitions of cultural
production and circulation, demanding a framework less encumbered by
divisions between artforms, between art and design, and between art
and "street" or "popular" culture, between audiences and producers,
artists and technologiests.  It is this questioning and critical
position that makes for such an exciting field of activity that is
constantly relevant, and constantly challenging to the country's art
institutions.

Lisa Haskel
March 1998




Projects and more information can be found at the following sites:

Anti-ROM
http://www.antirom.com/antirom01/index.html

AudioRom
http://www.audiorom.com/

Webstalker
http://www.backspace.org/iod

CCTV
http://www.irational.org/cctv/

Irational TM Clubcard
http://www.irational.org/tm/clubcard/

Mongrel
http://www.mongrel.org.uk/

Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie
http://www.somewhere.org.uk/

Julie Myers: Peepingtom:
http://www.backspace.org/peepingtom/

Susan Collins: In Conversation archive
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/inconversation/

Keith Piper: on-line studio project with InIVA (International
Institute for Visual Arts)
http://www.iniva.org/piper/index1.html

Digital Diaspora:
http://www.cerbernet.co.uk/diaspora/intro/

Backspace
http://www.backspace.org/

Channel
http://www.channel.org.uk/