Peter Luining lives and works in Amsterdam. His net art is rather
"stylish," in the sense that compared to most net art it does not that
clearly reflect on net culture and information. His work is more
aesthetic. A few years ago he was called "the next generation Superbad,"
because of his particular use of imagery in combination with sound.
Peter Luining was asked to curate an exhibition for a Dutch gallery
called Planet Art, on the alternative artfair Kunstvlaai. He has
gathered an interesting collection there. This interview concentrates
mostly on his own work.

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Josephine Bosma: Can you tell me a bit about your early work?

Peter Luining: My first project was an HTML-battle between two virtual
opponents, at different locations, different servers. People could
access the work and change it, alter it, recreate it. It got a lot of
attention afterwards, even in Brasil. Funny detail is that many people
that wrote about it had not seen it themselves. It is as if this work
happened mostly in people's imagination: it was appearantly something
extremely beautiful, yet no one had actually visited it or taken part in
it. These kinds of effects one sees a lot in net art journalism it
seems.

JB: What on earth is an HTML-battle?

PL: You have to think of it like those dance battles which happened
mostly in the early eighties, from where breakdance emerged. One party
creates a work, another creates a work as well, and people that stand
around can intervene in the works as well. In the case of HTML-battles
this meant work was put in at different locations, all free website
hosts: Japan, Saudi Arabia, a lot of US of course.

After these events my work became more unpredictable. The type of work
where you enter a webpage and you don't know what will happen at the
next page. A lunapark-like experience.

I sometimes tend to go into events again. I also regard the remixes that
I made in December '99 as one sidetrack. I don't like to be pinned down
to one style. I not only remixed sounds, I also remix code. For those re-
mixes, for instance, I took something from Jodi, put sound under it and
changed the colour to purple. These are the FF00FF remixes. FF00FF of
course being the html code for purple.

JB: How do you feel about the discussions which happen from time to time
about the kind of work you do, the shockwave animation and so forth. You
know: is it web specific, yes or no? is it net art, yes or no?

PL: This I find such nonsense, because they are net specific. I know
what they mean by net specific though. In that sense it is of course
very easy to put my toys on a CD, if it weren't for the fact that most
of the things I made are dependent on the net. They are linked to things
on the server site. I have toys that change colour or sound every week.
This happens automatically on the server. Is that net specific? If you
put it on a CD, you loose this aspect. Talking about net specific: I
have also made a work in which I use hijacked webcam signals. I put some
frames in a row, with webcams underneath. You can make your own
composition. There is a refresh button next to it so you can update it.
All signals are on different servers.

JB: When I saw your toys at your place, they seemed a bit ..err..
lonely. They looked like abstract paintings, which you can move or
change, which also contain sound. Compared to other net art it looked
isolated and abstract. In the site however they give a completely
different picture, because of the way they are then ordered or
presented.

PL: I don't think it is exciting always to present my work in the same
way. By often presenting the work anew, by adding variety, one gets a
different experience. When you visit my site in two weeks, you see the
work presented completely differently, so to speak. I think it is
important to not always present work in the same way, even if the work
is the same. This is something specific of the net you can use. One
thing I did for instance was take someone else's web page, take a piece
of code out, and add some of my material, which gives an all together
different experience of the work as well. It is so easy to take work and
drag it somewhere else on the net. You don't have to choose for the same
fashion every time. You can present your work in hundreds of ways, and I
use the net to do so.

JB: What do you think of large art institutions working with net art
now?

PL: On the one hand it is good, this extra attention for net art (or
whatever you want to call it). I find it slightly problematic though
that a lot of curators know so little about what is actually going on.
You see many calls for participation on lists. When you visit the sites
that go with the calls you see the organisers reaching for artists that
are in their direct vicinity, without really knowing what or how.

I am organising an exhibition myself right at the moment, called Net
Affects. It is partly for an Amsterdam alternative art fair, and the
online part is hosted by pavu.com. For Net Affects I wanted to show the
variety within net art. One so easily gets stuck in a few styles in a
lot of net art exhibitions.