A report from Electrohype
Malmo, Sweden
October 23-27 (exhibtion)
October 24-25 (conference)

Although one of the most advanced regions in the world in terms of digital
infrastructure, providing its 23 million inhabitants unprecedented access to
digital services, Scandinavia is also characterized by a significant lack of
conferences, festivals, and exhibitions dealing with digital technology in
explicitly artistic terms. Being both conference and exhibition,
"Electrohype" is a welcome exception to this rule. Based in the Swedish city
of Malmo, the first Electrohype took place in 2000, and the organizers are
now upgrading Electrohype to a regular Scandinavian biennale for digital
art.

The exhibition provided the opportunity for Scandinavians to visit Marek
Walczak and Martin Wattenberg's Apartment
(http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment), observe John Simon's
algorithmic art up close in his Every Icon and Color Panel v1.0
(http://www.numeral.com), and get a sense of Lisa Jevbratt's data
package-measuring work Out of the Ordinary
(http://dma.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/ooo).

Of work and artists perhaps less familiar to rhizomers, it is worth
mentioning Spanish artist Federico Muelas' installation "Dripping Sounds",
experimenting with a translation of the flow of ink in water into sound
(http://www.sva.edu/mfacad/featuredstudents/fede.html). Quoting J.W. Goethe,
and comprising an old-fashioned water container and ink dripping device,
lighting and lenses for projection, a flushing system, photosensitive
modules, and a loudspeaker system, Muelas' installation attempted to link
digital technology to the technology of centuries past in both
philosophical, technological and stylistic ways. Although the installation
was beautifully executed, the visual side of Muelas' "Dripping Sounds"
unfortunately did not translate into a very interesting audio experience. In
itself leaving a lot up to the synaesthetic imagination, I suppose.

Swedish artist Thomas Broome presented his AI and biosensor-based projects
at the conference, many of which appropriate medical, surveillance and
military technology for creative or playful purposes, although maintaining a
sense of edgyness (http://www.interactiveinstitute.se). In the Electrohype
exhibition, Broome displayed his tongue-in-cheek "HellHunt" project
(http://www.lordsoflegacy.com/hellhunt), searching the web for any occurence
in pictures of a diabolic symbol (the reversed pentagram). Finding evil axes
in even the most innocent corners of the web, Broome's algorithm combines
the absurd with disturbing perspectives.

Among the projects involving the spectator in a more direct way, "Rekyl" by
Danish collaborators Oncotype, Subsilo, Dinesen and Christiansen
(http://www.oncotype.dk/noodlefilm.phtml), exemplified the give-and-get
condition of interaction. By speaking into a microphone in front of a video
image projecting statistical information about the Danish population you
could break through to the other side of this monotonous surface, to a place
where individuals told stories about personal experiences. At the same time,
however, your voice was distorted by the system, an interesting if highly
frustrating "recoil" making listening and speaking at the same time very
difficult. For every word spoken, more seemed lost to the ear.

C. Anders Wallen's video installation "jour et nuit" was another example of
interaction where a "meeting" is made difficult (http://www.vis.se/caw) As
you entered the installation, a man in the video would leave his room.
Leave, and he would re-enter. You could subject your own body to digital
displacement in Norwegian Ellen Roed's installation "Feedback", employing
delayed video projections of visitors' shadows on the walls mixed with the
actual shadows of their presence…

The two-day long Electrohype conference tried to follow up on the recent
trend of "software art", as evidenced in recent festivals like Transmediale
2001 (http://www.transmediale.de/01/en/software.htm) and Readme 2002. As one
of the organizers and jury members of the latter event, Olga Guriunova
mainly argued for the critical possibilities (even responsibilities) of
alternative software production. By contrast, John F. Simon Jr. aligned his
creative programming with modernist icons like Mondrian and Stuart Davis
rather than revolutionary forces opposing software giants.

Taking the example of artist Graham Harwood's modification of a poem by
William Blake (http://www.scotoma.org/lungs), Josephine Bosma argued for the
relevance of looking at code and programming on several levels. Code as
perhaps the vehicle of some sort of artistic "style", as investigated by the
Whitney Artport's CODeDOC project
(http://whitney.org/artport/commissions/codedoc/index.shtml), coding as a
way of "thinking" (as John F. Simon Jr. also talked about), but first of all
code as a processor of cultural and poetic content and form as in the work
of Graham Harwood. Bosma also expressed a skepticism towards the trendiness
of the term "Software Art" (as in: the next big thing after net.art), but
also an interest in the more narrow term "code art" (as promoted by Florian
Cramer).

In a flashback to curator Jack Burnham's show "Software" at the Jewish
Museum in New York in 1970, I gave a talk comparing today's software art to
the art and technology projects of an age where they did not speak of
"software art" in literal terms, but rather metaphorically of art as a kind
of "software". Many questions remain to be answered in relation to the idea
of software art, and perhaps some answers can be found by looking back to
Burnham's views in 1970, and his later disillusion with a fusion of art and
technology.

One question is definitely how to bridge the gap between an allegedly
revolutionary, critical software practice, and the mainstream usage of
software (that is, if you really take the idea of "revolutionary" or
"critical" seriously). Or how to bridge the gap between artists creating
with software and the art world which has long since forgotten about
exhibits like Burnham's from 1970.

In this respect, software artists and software art curators have not yet
moved from their own little ivory tower to the control tower of society, to
quote McLuhan. Certainly, Scandinavia could be the ideal region for
implementing software changes on a larger cultural, aesthetic and economical
scale, with the Scandinavian governments traditionally emphasizing
"functional design for every citizen". For that, however, we will need more
electrohype.


Andreas Brogger

Copenhagen, Denmark
——————-
broegger@hum.ku.dk