[DissemiNET by Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker was first commissioned by
the Wexner Center for the Arts in May 1998. In the fall of 1999,
DissemiNET began to be hosted as part of the Walker Art Center's Digital
Arts Study Collection. Below is an interview with Beth and Sawad
conducted via email in the summer and fall of 1999. It was first
published by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center in December 1999.]

Steve Dietz: Tell me about the genesis of DissemiNET and specifically
about the content–the stories.

Sawad Brooks: It is difficult for me to think of this project as having
a single origin. One could say that the project grew out of earlier
projects Beth and I made together and with others. These projects had in
common a desire to inscribe or record the presence and/or absence of
those who in some way played or touched them. Aporia: Doubt in Forms,
for example, attempted back in 1995 (with Gong Szeto, in the first
minutes of the Web's Big Bang) to discover and disclose various senses
of co-location and physicality possible when working with/in the Web.
Later, some of these elements were brought into other works we created
together, such as the Bowling Alley website (1995, Walker Art Center; in
collaboration with Christa Erickson to interface with an installation by
Shu Lea Cheang) and the Radarweb site (1996).

Beth Stryker: DissemiNET evolved out of our ongoing collaboration. In
creating DissemiNET, one of our concerns was how to articulate what is
missing. While there has been a lot of talk about online "communities,"
surfing the Web has often been a very solitary experience. This piece
attempts to comment on or mark the accumulation of people passing
through the site, and to create some sort of intertextuality that
evolves through the participation of viewers so that users are not just
passing along set routes. We were also interested in the ways in which
communities are constituted in this distributed environment; we
sometimes speak of having conceived DissemiNET to try to elaborate a
diasporic community on the Web. We envisioned the stories which would be
deposited in this space as tales of errancy, recollections of being
lost, searching for others, experiencing displacement. The core texts
are testimonies of children who were disappeared during the civil war in
El Salvador. These testimonies were contributed by a group called Pro
Busqueda de los Ninos, which is based in San Salvador and with whom I've
had previous involvement.

SD: How does the gallery installation function in terms of the overall
project? Is it simply a different interface? Was it specific to the
Wexner context somehow? Is DissemiNET a different project with the
installation?

SB: The physical component was integral to the project from the
beginning. One of the ideas around which we conceptualized the project
is that something that you can do on the Web, such as search for
people's names, can have a profound effect in the world we usually
regard as "outside" the Web. The physical installation sort of
concretizes this idea by displacing mechanisms (such as off-the-shelf
computer equipment) we take for granted when we work with electronic
information, thus framing the physical aspects of our contact with such
information. The physical installation was important all along in that
we conceived DissemiNET as a system to disseminate data. For this to
happen, we planned to have physical instruments we could send out into
the world, and serve as stations where people could collect as well as
view stories and images. Unfortunately, we have not yet fulfilled these
plans, mostly because of a lack of funding. However, the current
installation is a prototype, or lab/gallery model, for what might still
be.

BS: The gallery installation presents two networked instruments as
interfaces to the DissemiNET storyspace. These instruments occupy the
public, transient space of the gallery and create a multiple viewing
environment for the public, cumulative space of DissemiNET. They were
not specific to the Wexner space, since all along we'd hoped to be able
to transplant these instruments to other environments. Later, we came
across the term furNETure, coined by Jan Abrahms (editor of If/Then),
which I think aptly describes these instruments, the input table and
output table. The input (collection) table allows viewers to browse the
same interface that is available to the net public; they can read and
add stories. The output (recollection) table creates a playful interface
for multiple users; this interface is mapped onto the table surface and
can be manipulated by users interrupting the flow of data along an axis
of images and texts. While we aimed to create a piece that reflects on a
distributed, diasporic community constituted across a digital space, the
physical tables are somewhat staid and in some ways domestic. They are a
different take on familiar objects. I like how the term furNETture
speaks to the way these physical objects become part of the distributed
space of the network. It also touches on the way we see the home being
opened up and reconfigured through the influence of distributed
computing.

SD: Talk a bit about how you have constructed DissemiNET as a kind of
curatorial infrastructure. Do you have plans for creating new content–
either yourselves or with others?

BS: We've constructed DissemiNET so that stories may be uploaded from
the public interface and from a private editorial interface. The site's
write-in space allows the public to participate in the work, to add
stories that are automatically indexed according to a set of underlying
concepts which we may change over time, using the editorial/curatorial
interface. The system exerts a certain amount of "automatic" curation by
finding key themes and similar words throughout the texts. As one
browses, the system finds connections among texts that may not have been
constituted through conscious direction (by reader, author, or us as
artists). We also utilize this curatorial/editorial interface to
influence the images that appear in the shutter as viewers surf the
storyspaces. These images are grouped and tagged thematically so they
form reconfigurable video vignettes that play out beneath the texts,
shifting as the content of the stories shifts among narrative passages.
We also created a back-end curatorial/editorial system for adding "core"
texts. We used this interface to curate and upload the first set of
texts from Pro Busqueda de los Ninos. We would like in the future to
open this interface up to guest curators/editors, especially now that
the site has an ongoing "home" at Gallery 9.

SB: At a conference panel on the subject of online curation, a curator
in the audience suggested that what we were doing through this work was
perhaps not curating. We had not conceived of the work as a curatorial
system per se, but given that we were participating on this panel, the
subject was open to interpretation. Thus it seemed to me that some of
our concerns in choosing work for DissemiNET were of aesthetic
derivation. Furthermore, our choice was modified via our "themes" table,
through which the database engine connects and groups stories and
images. If a curator can be said to impose a diegetic voice when she
presents a group of works, I can't see why our choices do not also
reflect a curatorial concern. At the same time, it is important to note
how we are playing with the notions of choice and voice when we
introduce programming code into the process. But I think that these
procedures, rather than distinguishing what we do from what classical
curatorial practices have been, shed light on how such practices have
been developing, and are perhaps expected to change in the coming
decades.

SD: If part of the aim of DissemiNET is to provoke community–that which
is missing in solitary surfing–how do you evaluate your success?

SB: I don't know that I am ready yet to evaluate this. But I would begin
by looking at what has been done: DissemiNET assembles and presents via
Internet and visual technologies a set of "testimonies." But our
presentation of these textual (stories) and visual (video vignettes)
documents is different from what a newspaper or even most websites might
do, thereby seeming to change what the texts represent as well. I focus
on this because Beth and I spent some time recently talking about what
Walter Benjamin [1892-1940] said information was doing to communication
in his time and, of course, reflecting on what his insights (and
blindnesses) might mean from our perspectives. Benjamin identified the
ubiquity of information, exemplified by newspapers, as an important
factor in what he called the atrophy of experience. He speculated that
because everyone had access to the same information through newspapers
there was increasingly less need to ask someone else to share their
experiences.

For Benjamin, information was also marked by timeliness, meaning that it
held its value (and even meaning) temporarily, until the next news day.
This condition was part of a process characterized by the decline of
storytelling. While Benjamin was aware of the modern novel's importance
in the 19th century and in his own time, he insisted that storytelling
was an oral–"mouth to mouth"–tradition. And while this distinction may
appear a bit nostalgic, it is clear from Benjamin's essays "The
Storyteller" and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" that he was not seeking
to regain a lost intimacy, but to articulate an absence made palpable in
the wake of transforming communication technologies. An important
feature of Benjamin's theory of storytelling is that when a storyteller
tells his story, the listener is immediately involved in listening. The
intimacy of this mode of communication is based on the necessity of both
the storyteller and the listener being present. Based on this condition,
Benjamin asserts that in his time "the storyteller in his living
immediacy is by no means a present force." He says that storytelling is
coming to an end. The mouth-to-mouth image is puzzling when compared
with a mouth-to-ear relation. Relating mouth to mouth, as in a kiss or
sharing breath, draws continuity and symmetry through the process of
telling. Beth notes that the passing of a story from one mouth to
another involves a sender and a receiver, but that this relation can be
inverted as the receiving mouth becomes a sender and the sender becomes
a receiver; one can imagine a chain forming as one mouth receives then
turns to send to another receiver-mouth. On the other hand, the ear,
though it too is a container or receiver, seems curiously mute. The ear
has no voice, but it's an important conduit in relating oral experience.

BS: Benjamin's assessment, based on the changing technical modes of
communication, is important in our consideration of the effects of
network and information technologies on present-day storytelling and
communication in general. These networks are built upon a system of
telephony–of senders and receivers, earphones and mouthpieces–that
connects mouth to ear, that "connects" people who are not present in the
same space (or perhaps in the same time) in spoken moments of immediacy.
The chains between people evidenced through the Internet allow for a
sense of distributed, or decoupled, time and presence; that is, neither
classically mechanical nor "present force." Internet communication seems
neither exactly like classical publishing, nor exactly like Benjaminian
storytelling. Yet it relies heavily on many of the tropes of printing
and graphic layout. But, as has been pointed out by many, the Internet
"author" can also be considered a publisher, suggesting a renewed
intimacy between writer and reader. Nonetheless, it feels to us that the
predominant understanding of the Internet is as a vehicle for delivery,
in several senses: delivery of information and delivery from the
limitations of mediation and institution through the instantaneity of
digital networks.

Through DissemiNET we posed a question to ourselves and others regarding
the relation between so-called content and the form of its delivery, the
interface and the network. If the infrastructure of the Internet is
built figuratively upon earphones and mouthpieces, it is important to
note the role interfaces play in interrupting and conditioning these
networks. It is fair to say that today all of our access to networked
information is mediated by interfaces designed to engage our eyes and
hands as well as our ears. In DissemiNET we created a technology that is
both database- and interface-driven to put in play connections among
texts, which are themselves about (broken) connections: not only
strictly textual, but also familial, political, and visual. Although
these texts are testimonial, giving accounts of disappearances, what I
think we tried to do was let the connections among the texts suggest
alternative texts that are not limited by the logic of an account, but
that run from one account to another via words which exhibit syntactic
(different from semantic) similarity. In these ways we wished to disturb
the informative aspects of the texts, ideally displacing them into a
more playful, perhaps contemplative space while all the time respecting
and being responsive to the loss they represent.

SD: What is a specific example of how you collaborate?

SB/BS: As we mentioned, we've been collaborating for a number of years,
so the process itself is ongoing. It is not so much production oriented
as it is experimental. In the case of DissemiNET, we conceptualized the
piece and worked through it on paper long before we began any digital
production.

SD: If I recall correctly, Sawad has commented before that
coding/programming is the "medium" and in particular that Java is not
"elitist" compared with "low tech" HTML. Can you tell me what you really
said/meant? Is this a net version of the high-low art debate?

SB: The remarks to which you refer were made on the shock of the view
list as part of a thread about low-tech vs. high-tech net art. As far as
the question of whether using Java is elitist or not, it would seem
important to first ask where and how such lines are drawn? Is all
programming elitist, or only Java programming? Is HTML coding
programming? Are the products of programming elitist? Spreadsheets?
Editors? Browsers? Is working on a spreadsheet programming? Is word
processing programming? I think you have to look at what is made [by
programmers] in relation to other practices and artifacts within the
field of cultural production. If one is talking about employing a team
of 100 programmers to produce an online banking system, then perhaps
there is reason to connect this practice with elitist culture. But if
what is being advanced is that if one has the knowledge to deconstruct
software and, more important, build new software, then one is elitist
(even elite), then either we've given in to the worst cynicism or we're
a bunch of hypocrites. Here is the relevant passage:

"[T]his distinction [between high and low tech] resembles another one
familiar to those aware of the rhetoric of spontaneity which runs
through modernist discourse of the past 150 years. Looking back to
arguments advanced in late-19th-century France by 'independents' against
their 'academic' counterparts, we find (academic) technical proficiency
(mediation) cast in opposition to (anti-academic) artistic originality
(immediacy). The critic Castagnary, a contemporary of Zola, wrote of the
landscapist Jongkind:

'[C]raft hardly concerns him, and this results in the fact that, before
his canvases, it does not concern you either. The sketch finished, the
picture completed, you do not trouble yourself with the execution; it
disappears before the power or the charm of the effect.'"

Art critic Richard Shiff in his study of Impressionism (Cezanne and the
End of Impressionism) notes how Zola made similar claims about Manet's
work (as well as Jongkind's). Shiff says that despite these critics'
enthusiastic responses to self-effacing procedures, "one must suspect"
that such critics "knew well that specific identifiable, visible
techniques had been employed. Indeed, Shiff ironically points out that
at issue for these critics and artists, rather than the absence of
technique, was the difficult definition of the "technique of
originality."

Likewise, in the current high/low distinction, works utilizing such
technologies as Java and Shockwave are characterized as high tech and
placed in opposition to "early" work by artists such as jodi.org. High
tech is to be "rejected," "broken down." The relation is set up as a
techno-ideological choice: "Mac over PC." Thus, Alex Galloway writes:

"I think lo-tech is a crucial characteristic among many: the interest in
text, low bandwidth; … the rejection of Java and Shockwave; being
forced to extend the limits of the browser; the art of the breakdown;
Mac over PC. These are the things that characterized jodi from the very
beginning (only with 404.jodi.org did we see them expanding beyond what
simple HTML could do)."

While I like to break down technology (and rhetoric) as much as anyone,
the above pattern of argumentation seems to me founded more on a
resistance to acknowledging the ubiquity and multiplicity of technology,
rather than on a critical approach to the problems posed by technology
in/as (our) culture. I don't know that dividing technology into high and
low serves critical and historical approaches to understanding its
effects on us. This distinction can be shown to be relative and shifty,
even within the context of the art world. I don't know that writing a
small Java applet is more difficult or requires a higher level of skill
than making a desired thing in "simple" HTML, especially using those
earlier versions of HTML. I acknowledge that it requires a different set
of skills. But my feeling has always been that it is much easier to make
the things I want to make in Java than in HTML. HTML lacked precision.
This is not to say that Java doesn't provide opportunities for
discovering "happy accidents." Java can surprise you, as can any
language (for programming computers or otherwise). If making a work with
Java (or Shockwave) requires a more robust system to view the work than
simple HTML, this requirement is due more to choices made by the
computer and operating system makers than to the relative techno-
artistic skill or ideological biases of artists. Just as critiques of
literatures must be undertaken carefully and systematically, with regard
for histories and the pressure of presents, critiquing technology can
take on various strategies, all requiring technique: rhetoric, HTML,
knowledge of programming, DOS, Unix, etc.

SD: What is Utensil?

SB/BS: It is a place from which we work. The name focuses on the notion
of tool, but from a perspective that interrogates the utilitarianism of
"tool." Around Utensil we have tried to launch a number of "toys." These
toys are deconstructed tools, prototypes, or after-types. They engage
existing software and information systems by miming them technically,
technologically, but simultaneously, offering divergent uses and forms
of appearance; it is our studio.

SD: Are you working on any other furNETure? What are you working on now?

BS: In our work we continue to explore the ways in which network
technologies can interface with various objects, appliances, and
architectures. These studies sometimes blur the boundaries between art
practice and commercial design concerns. We consider these experiments
"failed products by design."

SB: Well, we are looking for investors (dare we say patrons?) to fund
some of our toys, which we hope to grow into big tools.