[Ron Kuivila is a sound artist and a teacher at Weslyan
University. During the Rotterdam Film Festival he appeared on
a panel at the V2 organization.]

Josephine Bosma: Why were you asked to speak at V2 in the context of
storyboards in interactive media?

Ron Kuivila: It arose out of an email exchange I had with Andreas
Broeckman where I proposed the following line of reasoning: The
acceleration of development in digital media has also increased their
ephemerality. This becomes a fundamental creative problem for artists
trying to engage the possibilities of a particular technology as a
"medium." By the time you have mastered it, it has gone away. For
example, you may put enormous amounts of energy, creativity and
invention (as many did) into making a cd-rom, and then discover a year
later, that it is close to unviewable because the technical performance
is not at the next achieved level - it has slipped behind. What I am
interested in is raising the possibility and asking the question: what
if we look at that seriously and begin to think of the creation of media
work along the relationship of notation/realisation.

Individuals simply cannot keep up with the enormous investments being
made to speed things up, make them slicker, and in various other ways
make the next media form sufficiently attractive to make it difficult to
even look at its predecessor. In this context making artworks with these
media becomes a bit like a performance. What happens if we take this
observation seriously and imagine all art-making with media as having
the ephemerality of performance?

At the moment, the best alternative I can imagine arises from the
artistic and social relationships that grow out of notation and
realisation. I mean notation in a "prescriptive" sense that sets ground
rules for a complementary activity - realisation - rather than in a
"descriptive" sense that specifies a work fixed in every detail.

In the last year there has been a lot of interest in "open source"
software. The basic model evolved from the communication possibilities
of the net, and the tradition of agonistic adolescent male display
associated with computer programming. People discovered that you can
create much better software by allowing the source code to be freely
distributed and inviting people to improve it. Only half ironically I
want to claim that prescriptive notation is the original open source.
Or, at least, that I am using the term notation in a way closely related
to the ideas of open source software.

And to some extent, new media are themselves notations. Consider: one
works with a new tool such as html or whatever. It constitutes a
meta-score of some sort, because it creates a field of play. We are very
comfortable saying: "No, it is just enabling technology. We can
distinguish that very clearly from the work." Perhaps we shouldn't. We
could imagine the passage between a particular set of technical
possibilities to a particular piece as a more fluid situation. Or, we
can take the opposite tack and imagine works as problems of
specification. Making a work then becomes a matter of making a notation
that exists independent of any specific technical possibility and that
can be re-constituted by adding the water of a current technology. So,
you see I am raising the possibilities to the notation/realisation
almost in self-defense against the boundless energy and invention of
these technical forms.

JB: You bring art in networks close to performance, even if the initial
idea behind a work is not performance like we have come to understand
the term "performance." Is any recording or archiving (which recording
in "databanks" like the net becomes) by an artist a performance in this
respect?

RK: Not quite. What I was saying was that any time you go about trying
to make a work, the media used are morphing under your very fingertips.
This can make it seem like any work you make is really a performance
because it only has a momentary existence. The databanks themselves
ephemeral. They will enjoy a continued existence only if someone
maintains them. There is a disciplinary element to that. Maintaining is
not making. Eventually you start to loose the race, and you get more
tightly leashed to the "common wisdom" because you don't have time to
explore the alternatives.

And then you think, "oh my god, I've been left behind." Part of my
initial search of individual websites was that they are a little bit
like cave drawings. They are a way of marking your own presence in a
site that one was not completely familiar with and a little bit afraid
of.

The notation/realisation axis can exist a little bit independent from
that. Not totally independent, but it offers some resistance that
provides an alternative channel for imagining yourself and what you do,
while at the same time making it possible to be engaged directly with
the media.

JB: If you put the emphasis on practice instead of object, isn't it much
more likely to get out of your hands though? Isn't it much more likely
that especially then you loose your individual mark on the work as its
creator?

RK: It is a very complicated question. In a way what you have to do is
go and ask yourself about different kinds of work that existed as
notations. We can look at two opposite extremes: Sol LeWitt's
walldrawings, where it does not matter who draws them. It is very
strongly controlled and closed. There it is. You know it is a Sol
LeWitt. They can either be drawings described in terms of some kind of
geometric configuration or in terms of some kind of athletic thing: as
many vertical lines or pencil strokes as you can make in a minute or
three minutes and ten seconds. It doesn't matter. The whole point of
the piece is that it is entirely encoded in the instructions.

Take on the other extreme a much more open notation: David Tutor's
Rainforest. In that piece the basic concept is the transformation of a
found object into a loudspeaker. The realizer's job is to find an
interesting object and then provide it with sounds that bring out its
interesting sonic characteristics. It is a project that confuses
sculpture and music in a nice way, and very naturally creates a large
scale group activity that can be developed separately and then brought
together, like a potluck. Here is complete room for individual invention
in arriving at an appropriate object, arriving at the sound material for
the object. But invention is constrained by a premise that is simple
enough and strong enough to unify many separate realisations. This is a
piece that has a continuum of authorship from Tudor to the performers to
the objects.

I don't think the possibilities of notation/realisation should be seen
as a replacement for current work, but as a useful supplement.

As a practical possibility, I imagine a festival in two stages. The
first stage would be an open call for notations. These would be made
publicly available on the WWW, a library of "open sources." Then
individual wishing to get a "gig" in the festival would need to propose
to realise somebody else's notation. the festival would create a kind of
market, not for media artworks, but for ideas and projects that could
and should be constituted or re-constituted by others.

JB: What do we do in the future with describing these works? Are we
going to just keep describing the notations, or will we describe the
realisations, or will the works of artists that make actions without
notations be the utter form of originality? Do we still need to mention
those that initiate the notation, or do we only mention those that made
these specific notations famous with their actions?

RK: What happens there is that you get a kind of accretion of a cultural
outlet. For example Nam June Paik's 'Zen for head' has been written up
many times. Sometimes it is not entirely clear that it was a realisation
of a Lamonte Young's composition no 10 for Robert Morris. Sometimes that
is made very clear. I think the point is: the minute you maintain a
strict author model as opposed to a more flexible sense of shared
authorship you end up getting into issues around intellectual property
and back catalogue. The most effective means of resistance to any kind
of set piece in cultural practice is to proliferate: to create many
possibilities where before there were only a few imagined. This comes
right out of the book of resistant practices in terms of sexuality or in
terms of politics. I am just suggesting that we should actively embrace
the variety of modes of authorship that are possible and incorporate
them into our conception of art making.