[Alan Dunning is one half of the ambitious Einstein's Brain
Project along with Paul Woodrow. He has been teaching at the
Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Canada for over
twenty years and has shown extensively internationally. The
Einstein project has received wide critical attention and has
been showcased in such venues as Russia's St. Petersburg
Biennale and the School of Visual Arts in N.Y. He is currently
the head of Digital Media Arts at the ACAD. This interview was
done by Brad Todd and was published in MobileGaze
(http://www.mobilegaze.com).]

Brad Todd- You have been making works that are either directly or
indirectly digital for many years now. From your perspective, have art
and cultural production progressed as you thought or hoped they would in
terms of digital media? If so, how has the Internet impacted on this
change?

Allan Dunning- I began making digital work in the mid 1980s to produce a
number of installations and bookworks that had become so labour
intensive that it was no longer viable to even think about producing.
These works were constructed from huge quantities of found texts that I
sorted by hand into strange serendipitous poetic skeins which were then
printed out as books or applied to the entire surface of galleries and
interiors rooms. I was very interested in how easily texts and images in
the electronic world recombined to form hybrids and radical unreadable
forms. I was interested in how one might negotiate a world in which
nothing could be trusted to remain the same, in which the normal
signposts were unreliable and even misleading. I began to use the
computer as a means of producing concrete texts but found that digital
space was a manifestation of the space that I was trying to build within
my texts and installations. Slowly as I began to build databases that
could be sieved and mined for appropriately poetic and meaningful
glosolallia, the conceptual and physical spaces that were inside my
studio, my books and my installations were replaced by the radicalizing
spaces inside the computer. Gradually the computer became the author of
these texts as more and more of the work of constructing the texts was
assigned to software. This software was developed for specific tasks and
took hold more and more completely of the primary constructions I had
hitherto seen as the domain of the artist/producer. These early computer
works really formed my ideas about cyberspace and continue to inform my
most recent projects centering on augmented reality and consciousness.

I expected everyone and everything to be linked to my nervous system
I expected everything to happen at once I expected everything to happen
faster
I expected the end of history
I expected everybody to become a nobody
I expected the net to provide everything
I expected the networked computer to bring social change
I expected increased communication and access to communication
I hoped for democratic access to the net
I hoped for new forms of art and poetry
I hoped for the obsolescence of traditional art
I hoped for a Museum without Walls I hoped for the super-distribution of
everything
I expected people's work patterns to change I hoped for the development
of human centered interfaces

In 1969, there were 4 hosts, no domains and no Websites. 30 years later
it is estimated that there are more than 150 million hosts connected to
the Internet, through 3.5 million networks. Currently there are an
estimated 300 million worldwide Internet users. By 2002 the number of
Internet users will equal the population of the planet. The *networked*
computer has had an enormous impact on all aspects of society including
art.

Art and cultural production doesn't seem to have changed much, to my
mind. It all looks surprisingly familiar. I guess there are some new
ways of packaging and distribution, and, perhaps, the beginnings of some
new forms and languages, but we are in a period of old bodies in new
clothes, mutton dressed up as lamb. The WWW really is a new medium and
has tremendous potential, but it is a half-formed medium with little
history and comparatively little critical theory. I think this is why we
see a lot of very familiar looking work from mid-career artists, but,
surprisingly, (given the huge demographic of the net.genners) little new
work from young artists. Older artists bring their traditions and
experience into the new media and, whether it fits exactly or not, it
provides an expressive and conceptual framework that allows them to
continue producing. Compare new media to painting or sculpture or even
to video practices. The kinds of permissions that are given to young
practitioners through these disciplines are extensive. For artists using
the WWW (and I mean using it as a medium not just a carrier) the
situation is different - there are no permissions (or prohibitions to
kick against) and the development of a critical practice for a young
artist becomes quite difficult. I am not talking about looking to a
canon here, but, the idea of a criticality which has developed out of
the frictions that are generated when experienced and engaged practices
rub up against each other.

The net is an expanding and thankfully, still, in spite of increasingly
frequent attempts to monitor its use and its users, a largely ungoverned
place that provides all kinds of room for underground and alternative
practice. Whether this is visible to any meaningful extent is another
matter. The number of cultural producers using the net has obviously
increased, but, there is a surprising dearth of good sites and good work
is extremely difficult to find. The number of rigorous institutional
sites can be counted on the fingers of one hand and much practice is
simply lost in the streams of information flickering across the surface
of the planet. The early, romantic use of the net as an uncontested,
largely because it was scarcely inhabited, site of resistance has passed
and artists are and must continue to be wiser and more critically aware
in their use and access of the communication networks. They cannot rely
on institutions to represent them, as they have in the past. By and
large the institutional museums and galleries promote certain kinds of
media art to the exclusion of others and seem more interested in
establishing their own preeminence as taste-makers and connoisseurs in
an area that they were slow to acknowledge. Almost all of these museum
initiatives are old models and we should be booting them out of the door
as soon as we can. For artist and producers interested in developing new
practices based on super-distribution and democratic access to art we
need a new network of producers operating on the margins. While we see
the inevitable institutional controls and desires for control
everywhere, it is the growth of corporate interest in the net and its
manifestations - increased bandwidth and access to cheaper and more
powerful technology - which will provide the means for alternative
artistic and political expression.

BT- Are you more hopeful (or less) that artists do/will have more of
a hand in the digital revolution, or has industry/business completely
eclipsed the artists' community's initial euphoria of collective
feelings of empowerment and community building? Also, what are your
thoughts on artists, theorists etc. being co-opted for purely commercial
and business aims. (i.e. in either the development or implementation of
these interests).