Michael Joyce
On Internet Collaboration
An internet collaboration might seem a mere matter of logistics, an
extension of the increasingly complex and commodified process of creating
contemporary artwork . Even solitary artwork increasingly demands from its
inception that one range outward through a network, not merely for vision,
ideas and materials, but also for exhibition, publication, performance or
distribution, including making provision for one’s own marketing, publicity,
notice, review, critical reception, and so on. Artwork is increasingly a
process of intramediation, an organization of the scope, dissemination,
reproduction and representation of one’s own work among several
interlinked media– a process akin to what commercial interests call
branding.
The internet so considered acts as a circuit board connecting what my friend
the sociologist Howard S. Becker describes as art worlds, “that is, all the
people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic
works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.” The joint
purpose of collaborative work under such circumstances is a kind of
semiosis wherein what is produced is a negotiation of shared difference.
Says Becker, “Members of the art world co-ordinate the activities by which
work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings
embodied in common practice and in …artifacts.”
2
Another perhaps more interesting kind of collaboration is not so much
enabled by the internet as it is experienced there as presence. It is a variety
of what Jean-Luc Nancy means when he characterizes historia as “a
collection or recollection of occurrences…past and… yet to come,
subtracted from memory and expectation.” Our networked history, this
historia, becomes a place of sorts, an instantiation within time conducted by
those who, as Nancy suggests
open space-time each time, those who from within nature
distance nature, the technicians of presence: makers of
steles, stanzas and instants. They are there grasped in their
formidable absence, indistinguishable and unfigurable,
artists, artisans, artificers.
As technicians of presence-in-absence we might indeed make works together
but their production is not a negotiation of difference, not semiosis, but
rather autopoesis, the experience of emergence. Mitchell Resnick from MIT
Media Lab once defined emergence rather elegantly as “how objects and
patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and
counter-intuitive.” Emergent collaborations involve working together
through, not working together on. Art objects– Nancy’s “steles, stanzas and
instants”– move into, and dissipate in, space-time. Collaborative networked
artworks become a kind of joint consultancy, to use Gregory Ulmer’s term.
Ulmer describes his emerAgency consultancy as using “the prosthesis of
digital technologies to help us grasp [the] new location of thinking as our
civilization moves into a new apparatus (the social machine of electracy).”
3
Operating from a position that if “a law could be generalized from a
composite of statements made by artists about creativity, it might come
down to a saying … the outside is inside,” Ulmer describes these
collaborative consultancies as a way of “confronting an intractable problem”
by “bring[ing] to bear irrelevant criteria.” While this might seem at first
glance to constitute a critique of the kinds of art worlds Howie Becker
locates in a communal “referring to a body of conventional understandings,”
I think Ulmer instead suggests an advancement upon Becker’s notion.
Irrelevant criteria trouble our sense of conventional understandings, common
practice, and artifact alike.
I am currently involved in three networked collaborations besides the one we
have presented here. In the past two years I have begun working with Los
Angeles visual artist, Alexandra Grant in creating a series of collaborative
text-image artworks called, in a somewhat Cixousian turn, ” indécritions.”
These collaborative works are meant to examine the flow from image to text
and vice-versa, looking at ideas of coding, correspondences, and mediation.
The portmanteau word indécritions plays upon the notions of unwriting and
undrawing alike, which in our work emerge through investigations of
translation not only from language to language, but also from text to image,
spoken language to written word, and representations in two dimensions to
three dimensional objects. Calling our work indécritions also casts a sly look
at how any collaboration between a man and a woman, especially one
conducted over generations, almost despite them seems indiscrete.
4
Our collaboration began after Alexandra Googled the word “domesticity”
and came up with a text bearing that title from a hyperfiction of mine
published in the Iowa Review Online. That hypertext, “Reach,” the only of
my electronic works since my 1987 electronic novel afternoon not
collaboratively authored, thus now coincidentally and recursively has
likewise become so.
In an LA gallery show dedicated to new drawing, Alexandra showed a large
scale (ten foot by four foot) drawing based upon a complex process of
intramediation from text to twisted wire textual sculpture to a reinscription
and tracing of the sculpture’s cast shadows upon the drawing paper.
Thereafter we began collaborating more explicitly, exchanging work,
designs, and ideas as well as exhibition and publication strategies over the
internet. One such work, “Nimbus,” a large, kinetic wire sculpture based on
a text of mine involves a network of twisted wire words woven backwards
into a spinning globular form about seven feet tall. Its shifting shadows
projected against the gallery walls made ethereal filaments glimmer when
seen from the street. The text has disappeared into its form, in Alexandra’s
phrase “held in confidence rather than revealed.” Just recently I’ve written
texts for – and contributed minimal drawing and underpainting to– a four
panel series of 10×4 foot paintings on paper which take their inspiration
from Hélène Cixous’ Three Steps on a Ladder of Writing. A young feminist
web artist, author and publisher of zines and hand-made books, Roxanne
Carter has just joined this collaboration as we document and adapt our work
for a special online issue of the Notre Dame Review regarding image-text
issues.
5
Speaking of Cixous, another collaboration has involved me with Cixous’
current research assistant and former student, the Serbian philosopher and
writer, Sanja Milutinoviç. We recently contributed a collaborative
essay/essay meditation on networked artwork in English and Serbian, “One
More Trap, Instead of the Performance, Code of Performance,” to the special
“Walking Theory” issue of the Journal for performing arts theory in
Belgrade. The “essay” is an electronic collage of email fragments, network
postings, screenshots, Photoshop files and the like, part of which meditates
upon Gregory Chatonsky’s Se toucher toi: installation pour trois espaces a
distance.
The newest, and still most fragile, networked collaboration is with Linda
Walker, an Australian writer, artist and curator who teaches in the Louis
Laybourne Smith School of Architecture & Design in Adelaide. Walker
describes herself as “interested in the banal and the ordinary, and the writing
of that. And in some way the sadness and loss and abandonment of all that
that means in terms of the ’search’ for the meaningful - whatever that is.”
We found ourselves collaborating after I emailed her seeking an essay of de
Certeau’s which she had cited but I was unable to find elsewhere. She sent
along an off-print of the essay, “Tools for Body Writing,” and without
warning asked, “Do you want to collaborate?” We do not yet know what
form that collaboration will take but are currently discussing (online of
course) creating miniature rafts constructed of biodegradable texts and
image as well as various organic building materials which we will set sail
toward each other– me from the Hudson River, she from the Indian Ocean–
6
as simultaneously hopeless and yet hopeful gestures of sanctuary and shelter
set forth upon the oldest network, the waters of the earth.
In each of these collaborative projects my interest as a writer is increasingly
in the dissolution of my texts which for me seems not unlike the kind of flow
and dissolution which hypertext borrowed from a century of literary and
visual experimentation. I have come to love the word in its lack and loss
which the surface of any text represents and which collaboration
commemorates.
Linda Walker’s investigation of “an archaeology of surfaces” brings us back
to Jean-Luc Nancy’s historia of occurrences, and will bring these remarks of
mine to a close as well. In an online essay Walker describes the surfaces of
everyday places in a way that informs my sense of networked collaboration.
For her these surfaces “have no special or particular quality, and are as much
about juxtaposition, or in-company, as they are about themselves… a
remembrance of neglect, disrepair, isolation, forgetfulness, destruction; and
yet … also of care, repair, remembering, constructing, hoping, loving. ” In
reflecting more recently upon our particular collaboration Walker proposes
work which comes together, not work that is worked-together -
that is, [where] each worker works to give toward the other
‘their’ work - but [where] each worker works in their own voice
and when the voices come together they are not ‘in tune’ - they
are together in their dis-harmony, their difference and their
strangeness … a form of corruption, infection … a drifting
away ‘with’ oneself, surface to surface, by
provocation…creating a new truly weird and absorbing and
7
thrilling space…forced to texts and music and artists unheard of
…[but which] retain ‘breakability’ [and] ‘uncertainity’ moment
to moment -.
8
Works Cited
Chatonsky, Gregory Se toucher toi: installation pour trois espaces a
distance. http://www.incident.net/works/touch/
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997) The Technique of the Present,
http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/nancy.html
“Lecture given in January 1997 at the Nouveau Musée during the exposition
of On Kawara’s works, ‘Whole and Parts – 1964-1995′. The text was read in
the exhibition halls, and the speaker moved his way through it, along with
the audience.”
Walker, Linda Marie (2003) The Archaeology Of Surfaces, or What Is Left
Moment To Moment, or I Can’t Get Over It
http://ensemble.va.com.au/lmw/surface/surfacenotes.html
Weishaus, Joel (1998) IMAGING EmerAgency: A Conversation with
Gregory Ulmer, Postmodern Culture, 9, 9 (1998),
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.998/9.1contents.html also
at http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/Interv/ulmer.htm