Vague Terrain

Translation Approaches

What I have said so far should be enough to highlight, if need be, the fact that there are no rules for translating works of Net Art into forms suited to real space, other than respecting the work and its essence (fidelity¹¹), and knowledge of the cultural contexts of origin and destination (transparency¹²). Without these two factors, the price to pay is incommunicability - in other words the death of the work. The translation must be calibrated case by case, by the artist or curator (if possible in constant contact with the artist). Based on how things have developed so far, we can identify at least three basic approaches:

1. documentation;
2. translation;
3. derivative works.

In the first case the work is not translated but recounted, documented using the remains of the production process or documentary materials created as needed. At the artist's discretion both of these kinds of artefacts can be transformed into fetish objects, namely works of art in their own right.

This is what happened with performance art, and it is no coincidence that this model fits particularly well with performative works of Net Art. The documentation approach inevitably entails a kind of "diminished" translation of the original, but this "dilution" is accepted as a necessary evil both by the translator and the public. One interesting example of documentation, a minor curatorial masterpiece, was the 2002 show net.ephemera, curated by Mark Tribe for the Moving Image Gallery in New York¹³. Invited to curate a low budget Net Art exhibition for a physical space, the curator asked the artists concerned to submit not actual works, but ephemeral material on paper, the remains of the production process (sketches, diagrams, notes) or derivative works: the net ephemera of the title.

Translation, in the proper sense, occurs when the curator selects a work of Net Art and works out how to adapt it to a real-life context, if possible together with the artist, usually in the form of an installation. The result aims not to be a "diminished" presentation, but another version of the work; if you like, another interface for the same contents, an option offered by the variability that characterises new media. In 2006, invited to curate an exhibition on the relation between the Net and the art of weaving¹⁴, I decided to present a work by Lisa Jevbratt, Infome Imager (2002-2005). This is an online application that "allows the user to create "crawlers" (software robots, which could be thought of as automated Web browsers) that gather data from the Web, and provides methods for visualizing the collected data."¹⁵ I contacted the artist, who told me that the work could be presented using prints (derivative works) or as a "workshop", with the artist's high quality prints displayed alongside a user-accessible installation, with a worktable, a computer connected to the Net, a printer and drawing pins for pinning up the images produced by visitors. As I believed that the participation component was essential to understanding the project, I decided to go for the second option. This obviously meant bringing an unsightly computer into the exhibition space (in this case, a deconsecrated church), a defect remedied by the conceptual framework of the workshop, which prevented viewers from limiting the work to what appeared on the screen, and which recalled the familiar aesthetics of DIY. The result, also in view of the space (believe it or not, a deconsecrated church is not exactly the ideal venue for a workshop), was not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of the design of the installation, but nonetheless the work was appreciated, and more importantly, understood.

As we have seen, the same work could have been presented using derivative works, in this case a series of prints. Derivative works are not the same thing as the work itself, but are objects that recall, wholly or in part, the conceptual nucleus of the work, and transfer its meaning onto items that unlike the former (and thanks to it) may also acquire financial value. In the New Media Art world, it is rather fashionable to dismiss derivative works, often created in traditional media (prints, video, sculptures) as mere "concessions to the market". And this is true: they are concessions to the market. But these concessions, in turn, are translation stratagems for a context, the art world, where cultural value has to translate into economic value to ensure the success, circulation and museification of the work.

[Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG) / Biennale.py source code - Computer virus, 12 x 11 cm / 2001]

In many cases these solutions coexist, and are adopted in relation to the context in which the work is presented. A case in point, in this regard, is the work Biennale.py which was created in 2001, by the partnership between [epidemiC] and 0100101110101101.ORG. The original work was a virus written in Python which was circulated on the Net on occasion of the two groups' appearance at the 49th Venice Biennale. From the outset the work had a double edge, both formal and performative. The performance consisted in the dissemination of the virus by email but also in the form of t-shirts distributed at the Slovenian pavilion of the Biennale, and its detection by the main antivirus software in circulation. Formally-speaking, if read by a computer the code is a virus, while to the eyes of a human reader it resembles a love poem. Now, obviously, the work can no longer be presented in its original form. Like all performances, it was a one-off event. Both [epidemiC] and 0100101110101101.ORG widely documented the initiative on the Net, on their respective sites.¹⁶ In a real exhibition space "documenting" the work would mean displaying the original t-shirts, presenting a video of the virus "spreading" through the Biennale on the bodies of visitors, along with a print-out of the virus, press response, and a diagram of its dissemination on the Net. 0100101110101101.ORG actually did create a panel of this kind for the show Connessioni leggendarie, which we will return to later. On that occasion the panel was accompanied with a framed, "annotated" version of the virus, an item of ephemera that documents the production process and easily becomes a work of art in its own right.

0100101110101101.ORG even went one step further, at the end of the project, producing a series of sculptures in the form of computers infected by the virus, entitled Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine (2001-2003). These works, which can be considered as derivative works, are also independent works of art in their own right. The computer, reassembled and placed inside a plexiglass case, has its own aesthetic and presents as a work to be observed and pondered, with its eternal process of infection and disinfection. It does more than just document the work Biennale.py, offering further original reflections on the virus that generated the former. At the same time it allowed a virus, the most intangible entity imaginable, to be brought into exhibition space. And, why not, sold.

[Connessioni Leggendarie: the panels in the "Media Actionism" section / Photo: Helga Franza.]

Connessioni leggendarie and Holy Fire

Among the projects I have worked on myself, Connessioni leggendarie and Holy Fire could be seen as metaprojects on the significance that curatorial practice acquires when tackling a Net Art problem. Connessioni leggendarie. Net.art 1995-2005¹⁷, a joint project with Luca Lampo, 0100101110101101.ORG and Marco Deseriis, was, overall, a documentation exhibition, though it did include a few "originals" (in the Software Art section) and a number of "derivative works" (like Alexei Shulgin's 386dx and the Management Leisure Suit by the Yesmen). The idea was to tell the story of net.art as a movement, to draw out its relational, experimental nature, its ability to generate stories and make History, and, if need be, Legend. The first thing we realized was that to tell the story of net.art, computers were not needed, except in a few rare instances. Although we contacted the artists, we gave ourselves free rein when it came to presenting the projects: telling a story is different from exhibiting works, and we wanted to exploit the freedom of interpretation and subjectivity that the narrative angle afforded. The section dedicated to plagiarism, for example, was largely composed of graphic panels presenting images of the various projects (from the splash page of Documenta Done to that of Hell.com copied by 0100101110101101.ORG), accompanied with lengthy explanatory notes. In the code poetry section the panels – designed to "copy" the visual poetry aesthetic – were accompanied with videos of various recitals. The most "narrative" section – the section dedicated to media hacktivism – featured a combination of documentary videos and illustrative panels, with the idea of using images to portray hallmark projects such as Digital Hijack and Toywar, Female Extension, Vote Auction and Nikeground.

[Holy Fire: the Electroboutique corner / Photo: Yves Bernard]

Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age¹⁸ could be viewed as the cynical alter ego of Connessioni leggendarie, and in a way it is. The concept was intentionally simple: to present the recent history of New Media Art as it is filtered by the market and enters private collections. As for Connessioni leggendarie, the stance was both affirmative and provocative. In the first case we wanted to affirm the avant-garde nature of net.art, and its significance in the history of contemporary art, taking a stand against those with a tendency to belittle its importance. In the second case it was about asserting that, despite the scepticism on both sides (both the contemporary art world and the new media world), in the context of New Media Art collecting is not only possible, but also necessary, if we want new media culture to make its mark on contemporary art, and gain some of the recognition that is still denied it; and pointing out that many of the leading artists are indeed working in this direction.

From the curatorial point of view, Holy Fire did not present particular problems: there was nothing to translate, as everything had already been translated by the artists. The main task lay in identifying the most effective translation approaches, those that gallerists and collectors had opted for. Two basic strands emerged: the translation of projects into "traditional" artefacts (prints, video/ video installations, sculptures and installations), a strategy favoured for content-based works; and the development of "art appliances", "screen-based" artefacts customized in such a way as to personalize, display or conceal the technological infrastructure. This approach was favoured for software and generative works, or works where processual or interactive aspects were prominent.¹⁹

In this essay I have tried to analyse the work of the curator by adopting an operative model based on "translation": a time-honoured craft, but one which many curators tend to adopt in its most simplistic, naïve version. The translation model lends itself very well to illustrating the issues that the curator interested in Net Art must tackle. Net Art, but not only that: digital data is just one of the components of a babel of old and new languages that need to be translated into the esperanto of contemporary art. Which means that the contemporary art world will increasingly be in need of multilingual operators, and above all, good translators.

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