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interview with jodi You got known because of your experiments on the WorldWideWeb, and many think of you as "the" net artists. Why did you leap into software in your newer projects, like "OSS" and "SOD"? We never choose to be net.artists or not. It happened that we started to make things on the computer, about things inside the computer. And where is the internet anyway? Is it out there or just here in front of your cursor? Your browser's cache is filling up with stuff that is stored on your harddisk all the time, you can browse in and out with the same programs.. to disconnect net.art from the %local computersystem would be simplifying. Could one say that "OSS" is "CD-rom specific", while your pieces on the internet were "net specific"? Yes, OSS/**** was conceived for CD-Rom. That medium has specific possibilities, for example: if you insert our disk in your computer, on Mac it immediately overwrites with a grid of 317 files what you have on your desktop. CD-Roms have this capacity to remember and repeat the exact locations of how files and folders are placed.The user can %delete and %rearrange this whole file structure while the CD is in, but the next time, the CD will restart with its full original setup again. "OSS" seems to be directed against the Graphical User Interface (GUI). What's wrong with this interface? It seems to work very well for a lot of peopleÖ OSS/**** builds on the personal relation you have with your computer, through the smooth GUI, the disk introduces an uncertain element. Even the %downloads on the web (oss.jodi.org) got us into trouble; the webhost threw us out after customer complaints. But would I be right in saying that this piece is a critique of or an assault against the GUI? What is always surprizing to us is that there are many other ways to present things visually inside the computer, with a website, on the desktop, or with a browser, with disrespect to the norm. So the intention is not to make the computer as dysfunctional as possible? No, OSS/**** manipulates the surface of your system. An interface is a translation of code and your understanding is what you believe and that's all there is to a computer, it's a language. On the desktop the lid of the trashcan is open, and you believe there is something inside, then you have to place your garbage out, so goes the story. There is one section or "programm" within "OSS", that is called "WIN" which ironically changes the surface of my Windows-Machine into a Macintosh interface. There everything is just opposite to what "normally" happens on a desktop: if you don't press the mouse, you draw a line; if you click you hear a sound instead of activating an icon; the drop-down menues have no text, while the windows are full of text gibberish. Can you say something about this piece Text windows overlap and can be dragged, sometimes speak, your mouse leaves trails showing the path of what you were doing, the interface is the subject. We learned from our first web mistakes, that an error can be most interesting. If you forget a little HTML code tag, for example; the bracket " > " then the text surface mixes with code and becomes liquid, it flows all over the screen. This type of dynamic, tactile text is different from hard copy. We can't accept that print design rules define also the layout on a computer screen. Most websites still look like print. The possibilities of code and text exchange are not used, because its confusing , it is not readable. But these are the medium specific, digital material, new things. There is no good visual interface for Linux right now, that's why it the program is so hard to use. Would it be a challenge for you to make a GUI for Linux? Or would you rather use existing desktops and mess around with them? Yes, why not, but we would need a lot of help from other people, and then we would spend half a year to see what is possible. I have to say that the few times we were depending on so-called help from an institution or from a programmer we failed. They didn't have enough obsession for the most horrible little details and problems that we must have. We get always distracted into anything and in any direction. For instance? In our black and white versions of Quake, suddenly appeared %live Moire, this interference movement of patterns, that is something uncalculated. It happens because some 1 pixel white, 1 pixel black graphics were sliding over each other , but which way it starts, and what kind of patterns it produces is accidental. So we concentrated on this phenomenon and started to draw the environment modelsizes, in function of this detail, trying to trigger it as many times possible. Such deviations keep us busy for months. Back to "OSS": can you explain to a technical layman how this piece functions? OSS' and also the Wrong Browsers are made in Director. There are all these plug-ins, the so called Xtras, that are developed by other users and small companies, which add all different functions to the original program, like making pop-up windows etc,,we used those alot. All the time these scripts are posted on websites, now this activity has switched more to Flash. But Flash and Director are, as you said, tools to make information visually clear and accessible, while OSS does exactly the oppositeÖ Two weeks ago we were in Amsterdam, someone there told us that some kids in offices are secretly putting the OSS/disk into other computers as a prank to watch the confusion But is the idea behind OSS/ to turn the person in front of the computer into a helpless person? It is a side-effect of the way we structured the interface. Because it layers itself on top of your desktop, the first reaction of a lot of people is how to get this thing out, without even looking at what is further on the disk. It just looks like a serious type of error, and there are no signs telling you if it is intended or not. There is no About or Read.me file, just this grid of folders. It is a stress situation, some people try to deal with it, others want to get the CD out as fast as possible but then realize there is no CD icon and it gets even worse. It's a transgression into your personal space, it does not work on public computers. But the understanding of the piece is limited to people who deal with computers at all. No, everyone knows how a crashing computer looks like, and everyone deals with computers nowadays.You must be strong this century not to have anything to do with them. But we are not cyber-supremacists, our work is not about making fun of people who don't know how to use computers. It is the opposite, we are clumsy, and we disrupt the slick surface of the information systems. We get a lot of ideas from making errors ourselves at our computer, when the system locks, gets frozen, shaking and flipping while crashing.. that is OSS/blue panic .. we want to share these rare moments. After "OSS" you started to work with the ego-shooter game "Wolfenstein" and developed your own version of it. You also did a number of versions of the game "Quake". Please tell me how you got to work on this We chose games that create a 3-d space and can be edited. I think we were tired of desktop flatland- you know, folder-file reliefs, i guess that was also the reason why the original games were so successful. They were an eye-opener, a shock when suddenly you start mousing down corridors and halls, while hitting your keyboard. Games are supposed to be the opposite of work, so is art. Did this parallel play a role, when you developed your game versions? Well, what is art, if not that pretentious thing that tries to take the fun out of working with the net, imposing its standards. Forget about it! That was not what I meant. The point was that games and art share some characteristics. For example, that they are not work, that there should be an element of fun to themÖ Whenever we start a project and have our first results, for us it is fun, because we see the first time what we can do, as in beta versions. Then of course we always underestimate the amount of work to finish and the problems that have to be solved and we end up hating the things we loved But we always start out of fun and curiosity. There is a whole internet subculture that creates and distributes so-calles "mods", short for "modifications". These are little plug-ins that change the surface of computer games. You can make a Quake hero look like Ronald McDonald, and the castle, where the game takes place into a museum space for instance. How do you think does this popular art relate to what you are doing? We make abstractions of existing popular code, and we dress/ undress this code with graphics we believe express the underlying code better. A formalist exploration of reduction, opening up a view to the underlying codes to better understand our own user/player behaviour. Graphics are important but should not become a repetitive style, we're working now on more explicit figurative versions anyway. With games patches or with Skins programms you have the possibility to change the surface of the software you look at Yes, there are a lot of modifications on the net, we played some of them. but none focussed on the game as a vision machine and how it creates the illusions of depth, with movement codes etc. We undress this pre-coded world in different stages by making versions of the same game over and over. The strange thing is that "SOD" works as a game. It is still fun to play, despite the absence of images. Yeah, the SOD.1 version of Wolfenstein is very icon-based. The original elements, the bricks, the guards, the animations are just replaced by basic geometrics, squares, triangles, and it ends up that you can still read the game dynamic and even attach meaning to it. But for longer pleasure it helps if you know the -godmode cheat, it's in the FAQ. Why did you pick Wolfenstein to create versions of it? We looked into some other games, but there was the best editing software for Wolfenstein and the first results were promising. Does it play a role that "Wolfenstein" is antiquated by todays game standards and is considered to be "abandonware"? Yeah, the older the software, the more free it gets, usually. and there is more documentation and examples of other modifications. There are also a lot of modidification possiblities build-in in the new games but these are much more standard and stay within the general framework and the overall visual values of the game. With the older games, we can get deeper inside and make real contradictory changes or at least undress the rules, the visuals and the code as bare as we want. It seems that there is no final version of your modifications of "Quake". No, and we don't make an attempt anymore to make one final version. Its comparable with an endless set of dub-versions from v0.1 to v99.0 We keep making versions, and after, we prefer to return to older versions, from six months before, problematic... But it seems a more digital way of working, saving versions while in the process and then presenting all the saved copies equally. Then you see all the steps of the process, not in a particular order. Some of the Quake versions seemed more figurative, while "SOD" is emptied of any visual meaning and other things that you recognize if you know the original Wolfenstein game Except for the soundtrack everything is erased or replaced. Then the sound gets in an absurd relation, like screaming triangles or barking rotating squares. Both "Quake" and Wolfenstein are very violent games and there is a lot of discussion what effect these games have on children. How do you feel about this? "Wolfenstein" has set the -Forbidden "parental-warning" -stuff in motion. That first provocation made it an underground success, and then the follow up games "Doom" and "Quake" became big commercial hits for the ID company. The ID games relies on a strange contrast between bloody, gore scenery and advanced coding that pushes mathematical limits.Now situated on the net as Deathmatch Arenas for hundreds of players. There are a lot of games like it, but Wolfenstein and Quake set the standards. The violence issue is a graphical, commercial drawing style, and that is exactly the part we changed first. What you see and believe is only how the code is dressed. We put 2bit black and white pixels on top of the "dying dog" code, complete black erasure of the gothic castle environments etc. and after that everything in between becomes possible. You latest work consits of three browsers. Can you explain why you took on that subject after you worked for so long within the browser? After we were messing with HTML, we found there's only so many things that we could do with it and it became repetitive. At one point even the chrome of Explorer becomes more interesting.Well, anyway.. the three wrongbrowsers untill now are: (.NL), (.COM) and (CO.KR), They are shortnamed "closed domain browsers", because they all connect automatically only to short letter-combinations inside these domains(for example to a random http://www.XZ9.COM). Most of the time they display a site, because the short names are sold out. Many have been bought by domain name investors who resell the names as virtual real estate. The browser cycles inside its domain category, and inbetween you can also redirect it to any addres you want, but when the cycle is full, the browser will continue with its limited domain presets. It can be like jumping on a turning carousel, or just Hi-lite text while dragging your cursor around.. Are these programs based on a browser that we know - such as Netscape? No, programmed in Director, there is a standard script that connects to the net and displays HTML as text. We should include the 10 lines of lingo code on the website, or not..
global gOperation1, They are also very abstract, to the extent that it is hard to tell that they are browsers and what they do exactly. The ".com"-browser looks almost like painting, like color dripping down from the monitor. We are trying out different looks of the browser screendisplay and the syntax of the URL, because we'd like to show that the 'wrong' browser is stronger as the 'real' browser. Are these different "styles" or "looks" depending on the different geographical areas - like Korea or the Netherlands? oh well.. do'nt know, but i can tell you that the website (www.wrongbrowser.com) is allready very confusing to people, and one of the commissioning bodies is highly disappointed by its -warning and that there is no code mess. Why was the browser so interesting for you in this regard? The browser is the first program that has the "View source"-function, so you can look under the screen surface and the code layer becomes readable It comes from the times the web was fighting for popularity and the first Mosaic. browser spread an "How-to-do-this" button with every page.html. It is still here and we put it to foreground; for example with our %location/viewsource.html All these three browsers look so different from browsers as we know them, that it almost impossible to understand that it is HTML-data that these images on my monitor are based on. It doesn't really look like an "internet experience" anymore That is because you are conditioned by the "real" browser.You are used to watch "comets-falling-over-the-small-upper-right-corporate-Logo", and looking at "the-lower-left-side-of-you- frame", to read and believe how you are %Connected and %Downloading.When trying the wrong browsers out, we tested them inside a real browser, with a shockwave plug-in. First it felt OK, more on-line as you said, but then we realized it was a gigantic capitulation to the standard conventions and we realized we must keep fighting that..
tilman baumgärtel, rhizome, may 2001 | |
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