Brad Todd: When you first started making work for the web did you find
that the language of representation (like gifs, flash, audio,
interactivity etc.) was immediately applicable to your way of working
and making art or did you find that it needed a whole new approach in
terms of content. (ie. was your work enhanced by this new language or
made seemingly irrelevant by it?)

Teo Spiller: The time I started doing web pieces (I am a painter and did
a virtual gallery of computer graphics before - in '95) just the frames
arrived in HTML (no flash, shockwave, mp3, etc. yet) and my first work
"Capriccess for Netscape" ( http://www.teo-spiller.org/netart/ ) and
"Esmeralda" http://www.teo-spiller.org/esmeralda/ ) and "Cyberbride"
http://www.teo-spiller.org/bride/ ) later, were full of frames.

At the time as I was still painting (with brushes on canvas). I was
dreaming about doing multimedia performances as a kind of extended
sound-painting-sculpture. I had in mind laser holograms in space
together with quadrophonic backgrounds. It was (and still is)
technological impossible, so I found the net (or so to say interactive
computer art) a good substitute for it.

Actually, I understood the "net.art" most as the interactive art at the
beginning, later I begun using the possibilities of linking,
communicating with servers around the world, exploring the structure of
cyber-space, with works like "Megatronix"
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/megatronix/ ) , "Poem"
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/poem/ ) and my latest works like "Trash can"
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/trash_can/ ) , "Poem2"
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/poem2/ ) and others.

BT: What sort of work did you make before the advent of net.art?

TS: Drawing, painting, digital graphic arts.

BT: You work in Slovenia, what sort of community exists there for
net.art? Do you have access to high-speed connections for more intensive
multimedia authoring, or do you find yourself limited by bandwidth?

TS: There is the well-known Ljudmila Digital Media Lab
(http://www.ljudmila.org/ ) and the net.zine Kimoto Timora
(http://www.kimototimora.org/ ). There are actually only four real
net.artists living and working in Slovenia now: Vuk Cosic (he says, he's
already retired), Igor Stromajer (Intima virtual base), Jaka Zeleznikar
and myself. Not many, but you must also have in minds two things: a)
Slovenia has only 2 million inhabitants b) in almost every net.art
festival in the world there is at least one of us presenting his work

BT: What are your favourite "tools"? ie. what are your favourite
softwares, browser and hardware?

TS: They're all such bullshit. If you have in mind, I work (an office
job) for 500 US$ / month, you can understand, that the price is the most
important for me. I use a PC, I was doing HTML in an ASCII editor for a
long time, I still do DHTML and Javascript that way, but for designing
pages, I use MS Frontpage. No good reason for that, but I work with it
in my office and I don't want to waste my time learning to use some
other software (they're all alike).

I think, the best software is always the one your friend knows very
well. So you can ask him things, as you don't know how to go on. All
softwares are more or less bad, the point is to spend as less as
possible of your time for learning, installing, upgrading, maintaining,
etc. it. I think, computers and softwares are ruling our lives, we are
more and more slaves to it. It's the most aggressive way of the
consuming society. You just have to have the newest software and
hardware, otherwise you are not compatible with others anymore. I always
laugh how are people enthusiastic about every new effect (graphics, web
or any other), without doing any content - just the visual effects.

Browsers are another story (see Calin Man: The last man standing) -
Netscape lost the fight against MS and now Explorer can do more things
than Netscape. For the most interesting things, you have to write two
different codes: one for Explorer and one for Netscape. It's stupid,
awful and extremely time consuming.

The monopolistic status of Microsoft is a big handicap for us users. I
think, now is the time for software industry to spend next 5 years just
to correct all their bugs…

BT: So, in your opinion are we sitting on the biggest revolution in the
history of representation/communication as we know it, empowering
viewers and authors the world over, or is the internet and interactive
work just another form of simulacra and shadow theatre, incapable of
providing anything more than entertainment?

TS: It is definitely increasing the difference between rich and poor
more than any other thing before.

Is it revolution or evolution? It is definitely changing man's
perception.

I wouldn't say "anything more than entertainment" - I think, the
entertainment is the army of the future, the force of power, how to rule
people. The material needs are quite well covered (in the west of
course) and I think, the "bait" for masses is today's no more the
"social equality" and other so-to-call communistic ideologies, but the
entertainment, the way, how they spend their free time. The
entertainment becomes the essence of today's human.

BT: What are your feelings about artists having their own domain names
and basically having an online archive of their projects (like
yourself)? Do you find that it is a dream come true for the artist or is
it contributing to the further isolation of art production as more and
more artist take to the net and not to the street so to speak?

TS: Some my works have over 10.000 hits. Who "on the street" has it?

I think, "common people" won't have interest for art, neither on the
street, neither on the web. I organized a workshop for art teachers
about net and interactive art for INFOS 99. After 3 hours of explaining
[(with many, many examples), what is interactive art, that now instead
of going to theatre, opera, concert, gallery or reading a book or
watching a good movie, you can "consume" art also with the mouse and
keyboard, siting beside your computer's screen, etc.], a lady says: "I
was thinking, we would learn, how to do nice homepages for our schools".

As I surf the homepages of young people, I feel, they want to express
themselves, they know the technology well and I wish to show them, how
to express themselves on the web, to do an interactive work instead
doing Pamela Anderson fan pages. I am sure, many of them write poems,
draw, and play instruments. They are expressing themselves, as they
still have time for it (later, they will spend all their time for the
job, family, shopping, etc.) and I want to show them, the web is a
perfect media for them. It's multimedia, it's cheap, worldwide,
interactive.

net.art is the only thing, that originates on the web and is represented
(consumed) on the web. But people understand web as something, where
they should represent things from the physical reality. If they would
"connect" art and web, they would do interactive galleries or they would
"put" their poems on the web. They can't understand net as the media for
doing (not just representing) "art" or constructive expressing
themselves.

But I still haven't given up. This year, they'll get a CD-ROM with
interactive art works on INFOS 2000 !!!!!!

BT: Can you share any amazing sites or projects with us that have made a
difference in your worldview or art

TS: The most favorite project is usually the last one.

I think, the best thing I ever did in my life is my son Ian (he's 3
months old now). I put a few of his pictures on the Web and called it
"the best thing I ever did" ( http://www.teo-spiller.org/ian/ ). It
might sound most stupid and obscure, but maybe this is the best concept
on my web page. It's like "the living sculpture". Pure reality, which is
recognized as art, if it's announced as art (is it?). Why doing green
(Carlos Basualdo - GFP BUNNY by Eduardo Kac) rabbits with genetic
engineering, if you can produce much more "advanced" living being the
most natural way? It's definitely the most "on the edge" of the field of
art.

Otherwise, from my newer works, "trash_can"
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/trash_can/ ) is funny and people like it,
"poem2" http://www.teo-spiller.org/poem2/ ) is conceptual very
interesting, "Empty" (http://www.teo-spiller.org/empty/ ) is a citation
to Cage's music composition "2,53" (the silence), empty canvases, empty
galleries, empty sheets of paper as literature. In net.art it is the
empty web directory….

best

teo

P.S. What I would still like to accent is "selling net.art". I am one of
first net.artists on the world, which sold a net.art piece (to Ljubljana
Municipal Gallery). The "negotiations" about buying-selling were
organized as an international web forum
(http://www.teo-spiller.org/forum/ ). You can find a nice article about
it in "Artslarge" (Matthew Mirapaul in New York Times on-line).