PRESS

Net art with a conscience

Translated from the Dutch
By Pieter Van Bogaert for De Tijd (Belgium)
August 28 2002 (Archived)

Eryk Salvaggio is the Lars von Trier among net artists. Just as the Danish film director wanted to replace the special effects in cinema with pure sounds and images filmed from the wrist, Salvaggio wants to save net art by reducing it to its original essence.

Von Trier's Dogma 95 grew from the observation that the accessibility of new technologies has resulted in a democratization in cinema, allowing everyone to make their own film. But, the saying goes, the more accessible the media become, the more important is the avant-garde. Thus Dogma 95 became an artistic vanguard, marked by an almost military discipline, with each member having to take the pledge of chastity.

Salvaggio's manual for pure art is not called Dogma, but simply 6 Rules Compliant Net-Art (6RC). Earlier this year, he published the six rules that pure internet art must comply with on the net-art site rhizome.org. With his new rules, Salvaggio goes against the ease with which internet artists produce their digital work today.

Do away with the art of errors. Net-art should speak for itself (and that is why long introductions to the work are also excluded.) Flash, the popular animation program that makes all websites look alike, is taboo. The internet artist must work with original images and not always recycle the same images plucked from the web. Net-art must be independent of the technology with which it was produced. And the artist should not put himself on a pedestal by linking his resume to the work.

Bold language from this digital artist who, at the age of twenty-three, already shows so much nostalgia for the early days of the worldwide web. Five or ten years ago everything was still primitive and anonymous. The internet was something of a magical conspiracy. The first net art was characterized by the limitations of software and hardware, while Internet users now enjoy an abundance of bandwidth and easy-to-download plug-ins more than ever before.

In interviews and articles, this Harry Potter of the digital avant-garde does not fail to point out the vibrant culture that existed in the early 1990s. Back then you had something like a really independent and small-scale culture, spread through homemade fanzines. Desktop Publishing was the magic word that would make printers obsolete.

Until the internet threw a spanner in the works. With the breakthrough of the web, people began to take the possibilities offered for granted and that made them lazy. Salvaggio looks back with nostalgia on the few years that existed between the arrival of Pagemaker, a now antiquated program for preparing texts for printing, and the advent of the internet. Those were the best years for the growing teenager he was then.

Zines were personal experiments, made for and distributed among their own circle of friends. Now, with the internet, work of the same quality (and therefore worthless outside the circle of friends) is immediately sent out into the world. It's so easy that we don't really think about it.

Are this young man's ideas serious or ironic? It's not really clear. A combination of both probably. Just like fellow internet artists like Jodi or Vuk Cosic and their primitive ASCII art, using the letters and characters from ASCII as pigment. Or, as in the work of illustrious predecessor Andy Warhol, Salvaggio recently made a wonderful internet portrait of Warhol's fetish actress Edie Sedgwick. This is work that, like no other, is contained in the reality in which it is produced and therefore completely transcends it.

The art of Eryk Salvaggio, even more than that of Warhol, Jodi or Cosic, has something contemplative: the zen feeling in the ASCII code. Much of his work can be read as a haiku: contained in and rising above the reality in which it is created.

Salvaggio's most recent work is an internet memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks. When the part-time artist returned to the television shop where he works on September 12, 2001 — after a day off, he was overwhelmed by the images of the attack. Every few minutes he saw the same images of the planes crashing into the WTC towers on the television screens in the store (126 in total, we read in The New York Times).

The constant repetition of the images made him almost insensitive to their impact: a horrific event was reduced to a video clip by the media. Too much is never good, such as too much technique in net art or too many repetitions on television. To counteract the sedation, Eryk Salvaggio decided six months later to re-fish the images of the crash for his tribute to the victims. On a website of a European television channel, he found the material he had seen hundreds of times. He reworked a sequence of twenty images from that clip by replacing the pixels from the original with the letters of the names of the victims of the attack.

Twenty times again we see the plane (in ASCII images it's more like a bullet from a gun) heading for its target. Twenty times again we see the explosion, marked by its immediate consequences. A flashback in slow motion. September 11th, 2001 is contemplative art, the way Salvaggio likes it. No visual bombardment like on television, but art to the rhythm of the internet. Depending on the speed of your connection, your modem, your computer and the internet traffic at that time, the images appear on your screen.

Zen art that makes things more abstract and more concrete at the same time. If you look now, you may still see the introduction that precedes the work, against all the principles of 6RC-net-art. But there is a good chance that it will soon disappear and let this piece of net art speak for itself, with a conscience.

A monument that, like all net art, constantly multiplies, refreshes and lives on on your and my computer. A monument that, a year after the facts, replaces anesthesia with contemplation.

— Pieter VAN BOGAERT