At a Distance—Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet

by Annmarie Chandler & Norie Neumark
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005
496pp., illus. 50 b/w. Cloth, $ 39.95
ISBN: 0-262-03328-3.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway NSW 2007
Australia

mike.leggett@uts.edu.au

The temporal focus of At A Distance is the 1970s and 1980s, a period in the Western art world when the immaterial was made present. This collection of essays commissioned of a stellar line-up by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark illuminate from a variety of perspectives the work propelled by artists, writers, curators, and audiences that was to materialise for the coming of the Net, its emergent behaviours and discourses.

The editors introduce the book and each of its three sections with succinct and perceptive analysis, providing a context for events that many of us will find hard to realise is now a part of a formative history. More than a recollection of goings on, engaging and fascinating as this is, it helps the reader to comprehend both the development and the potential of electronic networks through the uses technological systems of the period were put. The book describes the widening use by artists of spoken and written language, expressed through the distribution affordances of the time: the mail system, the telex, and later the fax machine. These tools were used to distribute work and extend the use of language by practitioners whilst in a state of extreme physical dispersal.

Tilman Baumgartel describes the prescient work in the late 60s of the Baxters and their N.E.Thing Co Ltd with telex networks. The creation of pseudo-identities and——entities, which in the context of the French philosophers and the Les Immatériaux exhibition co-curated by Lyotard some 15 years later, helps to describe ". . . the classic problem of the unity of body and soul shifts".

Mail Art and Fluxus are the touchstones in this volume of the movement toward the modern networks. Robert Filliou’s ‘Eternal Network’ envisioned ". . . a coterie of friends and artists participating in an ongoing open exchange of art and ideas." John Held’s account of the intertwining of Fluxus members with the aspirations of the later group of Mail artists is exhaustive, (though temporally confusing), giving an account of the international scope of their pursuits. In 1986 we learn, incredibly given the premise, that ". . . Mail Artists convened over 80 international face-to-face meetings in a series of Decentralised World-Wide Mail-Art Congresses, celebrating and examining the meaning of Mail Art." The presence of flesh then as now, trumps its absence.

Fluxus gets further attention from two of its notable apologists, Owen F.Smith and Ken Friedman, who together in separate essays provide a detailed overview. Contradictions abound; Smith’s claim that Fluxus is "…a community and a philosophy rather than an art historical movement. . . ", whilst inflecting the pith of ideas in the design and publishing industries is advanced in the face of four decades of being exhibited in art houses and discussed in art journals. If Fluxus forms a part of the celebrity section of the information economy and is the test bed precursor for remote networking, does the Net also mirror the tendency for the anonymous or emergent work to be occluded by the Pantheon? Friedman’s claim that financing a network is more difficult than resourcing individual artists misses the point in the contemporary setting if not in the settings of yesteryear, and his take on global inequality is obscuration entirely. (As Sean Cubitt observes in the flourish of a concluding essay, "Nomadism is a privilege of the wealthy.")

The second section of the book is the turn of practitioners to reflect upon their earlier uses of communication technologies. Galloway and Rabinowitz reconsider in conversation the Hole in Space and the Electronic Café, ". . . a real-time improvisational creation . . . about social spaces that accommodate the physical reality and the virtual" that brought together ". . . a community of users and a community of enthusiasts. . . ". Here art and activism are tested on the streets——or the airwaves. Negativland entered the hotly contested space of IP and music copyright discovering " . . . the term recontextualised as a legally understandable defence against copyright restrictions on reuse in new art", which they carried into their collage radio show, Over the Edge.

Tetsuo Kogawa is interviewed by the editors over email distance and as experienced practitioners, (Neumark with sound and radio, Chandler with film and video); their questions extract a fascinating story from a very engaging interlocutor. It is about the mini-FM micropowered transmitters in Japan in the 80s, operating with a range of about a kilometre. Linked together, they could operate a little like the wi-fi zones of today. As in the US, parts of Europe and Australia, they provided the kind of community radio service addressing issues of culture and politics ignored by the mainstream. Of the 50 odd wonderful illustrations in the volume——pity there were not more——my favourite is of Felix Guattari slumped on the floor of Radio Home Run looking, (or more correctly listening), philosophically pensive.

The chapter helps define vividly the editors use of the term ‘activist’, where animateur, mentor, provocateur, avant-gardist or collectivist might have also applied to describing a particular kind of cultural production. Kogawa, critical of the banzai-collectivity of his corporate culture, despairing at the state of the world, describes vividly the complexities of seeking the means, as an individual and as a member of the post-War generation of the industrialised countries, to avoid contributing to the corrupted social infrastructure whilst building the basis of another. Language was part of this: the use of a word ‘otaku’——literally, your house, but also ‘you, at a slight distance’——was a form of address within emerging youth culture. Also, building the electronic devices, from mini-FM to music and ‘noise’ instruments used in performance as a means to reconsider art and body, space and time, where sound and aural space offer in embodiment a state of integration.

Activism in the USA recovers the history of the alternative media network as a forerunner of the indiemedia movement on the Net. In the context of an oppressive corporate information regime, Jesse Drew’s account of the Gulf Crisis TV project (GCTV) illustrates the difficulty public broadcasters have when it comes to criticism of the governments and corporations who fund television and radio networks and how GCTV’s most reliable network was "in effect an American electronic samizdat" where tapes were copied and passed hand to hand.

Which brought to the mind of this reader the absence from this volume of reference to the Eastern samizdat movement of the period covered. Traditional literary forms, from the first appearance of literacy to now, are as much about remote networking as about coding. The samizdat phenomena, in it various national formations, is a measure of how effective oppressive regimes can be in suppressing memory, how without the exposure to others activism, for reasons of language but overidingly for reasons of maintaining anonymity, the ‘otaku’ of activity is nullified.

Roy Ascott in quoting Barthes’ "generative idea that the text is made", (whilst also being an appropriate description of this book), journeys across the globe in various formulations, textual, physical and electronic, in the process of defining the telematic art for which he is well known, citing ‘the potential for continuity and connectivity’ as his continuing purpose.

There is one account by Andrew Garton, an Australian artist, tracing his career from the earliest electronic games machines, through community radio to the early BBS networks. Whilst the impact of the structural changes made by a radical federal government in the 70s on an individual is engaging, the changes to communication facilities and networks across Australia affected a large number of artists. The editors country of domicile being Australia may account for this singular representation, which thereby misses accounting for the internationally recognised pioneering work in the development of radio for distance learning and remote communities.

Estridentistas is the intriguing expression, (not translated anywhere but colliding the Spanish words for dentist and shrill), used by a group of Mexican artists in the 1920s. Much influenced by the Futurists, Maria Fernadez recounts this aspect of the revolutionary period, when much was written about ‘sound’, ‘electricity’, ‘the telephone’ ". . . and the social costs of that modernity" which, had they pondered more critically at that point would have prepared us better for the communication technologies in which we are immersed today. (Another aspect of the period would have been battling the ageless, ahistorical communication networks of the Catholic Church!).

Sound and noise are, like Mail Art, other touchstones in this collection. "Computer network music aims to reveal the voice of the system itself…" and Chris Brown and John Bishoff lead us through this manifestation of chamber music, populated by electronics and systems specialists with rules-based scenarios and the aleatoric to sonify and delight. Like musicians across many ages, what emerges as distinct from other network populations is a level of sociability based on physical proximity, object tuning and intense concentration——some networks function better when they are contained in the same room.

At a Distance is very much more than a listing of related activities responsible for our perceptions of the Net, if not its practice-based development. In folding and crossing the narratives, the discourse and its impact both then and now become more transparent. One of the satisfactions of hindsight is that this account may be valuable for understanding the process of recognising and assessing tendencies as they arise in the new online domains. The computer and Net were the central tools in compiling these viewpoints and the presentation of the material keeps this in mind.

For the most part, the technology of these opportunities, (in the same way as most of us use the Net today), is kept at arms length. Apart from an exotic moment of access to television network satellites, we learn little of the more mundane machines, far-reaching in their affect on artists’ networks, such as the Phillips cassette recorder, the Polaroid camera, the off-set litho printer, the film and video camera and the VCR. For an artist to prepare to work with printers of paper or of film for instance, required communities of interest to organise, plan, raise resources and engage in real-politik in order to acquire the material means with which to pursue a different kind of creative practice.

The resulting collaborative networks that spread across regional, national and international boundaries built audiences in festivals and distribution systems. Film-makers occupied the nomansland between cinema and museum, print artists the spaces between the bookshop and the museum, all depending on the assuredness of a distribution system vectored toward an audience active in creating the links with artists. Expanded Cinema, in fitting handily as performance events into museum spaces, was a worthy if small part of this activity and is a brief part of the vivid histories which Johanna Drucker and Reinhard Braun describe.

There is a useful timeline list, a feature of this Leonardo series, (from which it modestly omits itself and ISEA as founding forces in arts networks). The Index is ‘abridged’ and there is an excellent approach to design with clear text and layout and a ravishing dust-jacket. Is that J.J. Gibson’s image of a tree framed in the middle of a field on a summer’s day, an ‘affordance’ to those who seek its cool shade and an illustration of ". . . resources, which are only revealed to those who seek them"?