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interview with netochka nezvanova
A dialogue with programmer "Netochka Nezvanova" (a cyberage mystery character, named after the epynomous Dostoyevsky personnage)--the name translates as a "nameless nobody". An "enfant terrible" amongst the digerati for her so-called hostile behavior and liberal spamming of lists, she was subsequently ousted from several internet discussion groups. Nonetheless, she is praised by those "in the know" for her programming skills in creating software, especially the nato.+55+3d multimedia authoring software, which is used by artists around the world. Nezvanova has recently been cited as one of "Top 25 Women on the Web"--joining past honorees such as Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and Judith Estrin, former chief technology officer for Cisco Systems. However, her true identity remains a mystery as to whether she is a she, a he, or a collective of artists/programmers, or simply a project gone haywire...She appeared first in the 1990’s on various email listservs which were discussion groups focused on electronic music and art, and her at times poetic, at other times excessive postings were written in her own form of language, a combination of english, french, german, and ASCII art (an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English as numbers, with each letter assigned a number; most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another). Nezvanova’s postings can be considered similar to a digitally dadaist version of stream of consciousness writing; she has made "email" into a form of artwork. The advent of emerging technologies such as the development of the personal computer (or PC); the internet (from earlier versions such as Arpanet); to the development of web browsers (from earlier versions such as Mosaic); and finally to --email, the simplest form of human communications can now also be considered a viable artistic medium (not unlike the mail art of Ray Johnson, or the performative/conceptual framework of Fluxus art). Nato.+55+3d is a graphic programming environment similar to the popular MAX; it is a powerful graphic software toolkit, that allows users to manipulate streaming video and audio-- allowing one to transform color into sound, sound into color, transform motion into color, sound, text. Below is a transcript of an email exchange with the mysterious entity sometimes known as integer, nn, antiorp, d2b, aka Netochka Nezvanova:
cristine wang, ny arts magazine 58, october 2001 | |
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