Public
Key: an encrypted art in a transparent society
The transparent
society that is emerging doesn't seem to be the one that
the cybernetic intended, a rational democracy where feedback
protocols would have assured an optimal regulation of common
behavior. In fact, with the development of information
technologies, instances of power do not become transparent
to citizens, but rather citizens become transparent to
instances of power. In addition to the transparency claimed
by governments (nothing that citizens do should escape
the authorities) is the transparency as understood by the
transparent data processing the user takes no notice of.
The world of art is also organized
according to this asymmetrical reciprocity. The processes
of legitimization escape artists to a large extent and
nothing they do eludes the control of a media system that
instantaneously records and recycles all attempts at subversion
into entertainment. In this context, it becomes increasingly
uncertain that the form of an exhibition is viable as a
critical measure. In a transparent society artists should
devise secretive forms and cryptic art.
Cryptography is the art of rendering
a message unintelligible to those who are not on its receiving
end. Art has always had a cryptic dimension, one that is
more or less involuntary and acknowledged. But at a moment
when art no longer seems like a micro-culture among others,
elitist strategies are evolving toward more communal strategies.
Encoding has become a condition of survival in the face
of domination by the mass media and its related industry
and products. Escaping to the protected space of an artistic
institution at the very moment this space risks losing
all legitimacy by continuously adapting itself to the demands
of the neo-liberal set, art only retains its independent
nature at the expense of an encoding process that renders
it compatible with other social practices while allowing
it to maintain its autonomy.
When speaking of cryptic works,
one refers to artistic projects that are not commercial,
not media driven, not spectacular, not decorative, not
institutional.They are projects that risk being situated
outside of the artistic institution and risk not explicitly
proclaiming their status as artworks. The works presented
in this show cannot conform to these criteria since they
are actually shown. But because they are declarations of
intention or illustration, they could indeed indicate a
new perspective, one that reconsiders artistic practice
at the center of the informational paradigm.(1)
Philippe Blanc>
Philippe Blanc finished his artistic training
as a developer, and doesn't claim any artistic activity.
He is also the developer of the "bot" engine which
was presented by the Cercle Ramo Nash at the Guggenheim
Museum (Premisse 1998). The project presented in Public Key
centers on the default naming of images recorded by digital
cameras. Users of these cameras often put their photos on-line
without making an effort to change their names. Result: millions
of images on the Internet carry the same name. For example,
all the original photos taken with a Nikon camera will be
named DSCN001. Blanc has programmed a search engine that
scans the network and creates a slide show conjoining all
images it finds by methodically following its digital classification.
All of this yields a complete record of all that is photographable.
Dr. Brady
The insurance of anonymity and respect for private
life is often achieved through the use of a pseudonym. In
the art world, the use of pseudonyms and heteronyms have
essentially reflected criticism of bourgeois ideology on
the part of the artist, a concept founded upon the myth of
the genius. On the Net, the use of a pseudonym hints at an
obviousness of sorts. Everyone can own as many identities
as he wants, according to his activities. In each forum a
specific personality is determined by a set of themes and
communities. The use of a fantasy name constitutes a sort
of encoding of identity that protects the user and guarantees
his or her freedom of expression. But if the fictitious personality
in question engages in a more radical discussion, he or she
does not bear any less the responsibility of the one who
takes on that personality in a given community. One must
not lose sight of the fact that these communities of metamorphosis
exchange and produce actual ideas. Peter Brady's work situates
itself essentially in the conversational realm. Between two
showings of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) (2) he loosens up by
devoting himself to the art of ASCII (3), but with a singular
constraint: he uses only the four letters of the genetic
code.
Cercle Ramo
Nash
Two rules have been progressively imposed since the inaugural shock of the
ready-made. The first is to find an idea, a gesture, an object sufficiently
foreign to those already identified as potentially artistic, so as to produce
a variation whose legitimacy can only be resolved by its author. The second
is to remain amused and distracted. The combination of these two rules has
defined the dominant trait of the prevailing aesthetic in recent years: exoticism.
Something exotic, or foreign to the art world (4) is at once interesting and
faraway. It commands attention by its difference and it creates a tension as
far as its artistic appreciation is concerned. The more something seems debatable
(as far as its status as art is concerned) the more its chances are big for
its promoters to augment their authority in case of success in its negotiation.
The Cercle Ramo Nash tries to escape from this power scheme by paying more
attention to the critical significance rather than on the statutory definition.
Florian Faelbel
One sometimes has the impression that art exists as a means for professionals
to exchange lists of names with one another. These lists, from one to another,
creates variables that seem to make sense. Each one's worth measures up
to an art dealer's skill in manipulation. The work of Florian Faelbel questions
this uninterrupted circulation of proper names in the micro-milieu of art.
By displaying one inordinately long list of names at the entry of an exhibition
it implies that every artistic attempt is necessarily inscribed in a social
collective and cooperative work so that it becomes impossible to define
the beginning and end, all of which renders problematic the notion of authorship.
Thus the majority of works shown in galleries today owe a debt to data
entry tools (word processors) and Photoshop-like software. The list of
Photoshop developers indicates a list of artists in the same way a group
show temporarily scrambles the play of recognition. It’s a sort of homage
to anonymous heroes who profoundly transform the culture by inventing the
tools on which we are all now dependent.
Richard Kongrosian
Technical choices are often unconfessed political choices. Since "9/11",
new security laws have been adopted in numerous countries in the wake of our
collective emotional shock. Most of these provisions undermine individual liberties
and were voted into law with haste, and without any public debate. We are all
potentially under surveillance. Global positioning satellites have the power
to locate us and identify us through our mobile phones; the Echelon system
intercepts our e-mails; Carnivore invites itself into our home computers. By
modifying a standard roof case to suggest a radar antenna of an AWAC airplane,
Richard Kongrosian transforms the gallery's minivan into something equivalent
to a surveillance vehicle. It's a question of making sensitive the accelerated
emergence of a controlled society from which it will become more and more difficult
to escape.
Alexandre Lenoir
Alexandre Lenoir systematically documents his own idea about sculpture. It's
an investigation he's undertaken since 1980 and his focus is on contemporary
forms of the picturesque. The complete catalog of works can today be considered
like an obsessional hermeneutic, susceptible to the deciphering of potential
works everywhere. It shows that by arriving at a certain level of elaboration
the micro-culture of contemporary art can emancipate itself of all institutional
support to become a manner of seeing autonomously. The aesthetic criteria
derived in the context of exhibitions find themselves reactivated in inappropriate
situations but nevertheless conserve their relevance outside of power structures
that inevitably constitute all negotiation on the statute of displayed
works.
Martin Tupper
For Martin Tupper, a press release is the real site of the exhibition. Occupation
of a particular space with various artifacts during a given period is no
longer a pretext for the dissemination of a statement. With Compatible
ASCII Martin Tupper confronts the material character of a work that must
still occupy a space to assure its legitimacy and the fluidity of its values,
which must be able to be negotiated in the conversation of the community
on the basis of certain arguments enunciated in a text. In one way, in
the network era, the work has gone into text mode. It is coded in ASCII
like little fantasy drawings of "ASCII art," which can be integrated
into e-mails without weighing them down.
David Vincent
Ideas circulate better than objects. The theme of teleportation, introduced
by the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, saw no obstacle to the idea
of sending a human body through a telephone line (a concept popularized
by the TV series Star Trek). This is at the center of David Vincent's project.
His work takes off from transfers crossed with multiple references between
two cultural parallel universes, contemporary art and science fiction.
With a vocabulary that approximates decoration and bricolage more than
it does sculpture, Vincent puts into place a platform from which art and
artists can be de-materialized and teleported into social spaces other
than the gallery.
Angeline Scherf ©2002
(1) The sociologist
Manuel Castell offers to speak of informational paradigms
in order to designate the entire complex of ideas, values,
technologies, practices and behaviors, which characterize
network society. (2) Internet Relay Chat: on-line discussion
or "chat" rooms. (3) American Standard Code for Information
Interchange: the information code that defines the display
of the letters of the alphabet in seven bits. ASCII art
was the first graphic form in the history of information.
It produces a schematic or design by using only characters
available on a common printer. (4) Exoticism in the traditional
sense, in the rapport of different cultures, is only one
particular case in the generalization of import-export
operations of contemporary art. The most common everyday
use is the most banal, and perhaps completely exotic, in
an exhibition.
Ms. Scherf is a curator at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la
Ville de Paris, France <br>
Press Release
Public Key, an
encrypted art in a transparent society Cryptography has
become one of the major stakes of our networked societies.
Today, two conceptions of freedom compete with each over
its control. One is hegemony, the freedom to do business
everywhere in the world, without moral or ecological consideration,
and beyond democratic monitoring. The other freedom belongs
to the citizen; it is the freedom to think, despite the
systematic misinformation. The first stands firm in front
of all forms of manipulation and pretends to represent
the common good in order to impose its universal claims.
It seeks through all means to limit the citizen's use of
cryptography. The second defends the right to difference,
and does not attempt to create a media consensus. Its force
lies in its contradictions. Cryptography has become a condition
of survival and it proclaims the right to confidentiality
in communication for each citizen.
This confrontation
is as essential in the art world as it is elsewhere. Artistic
institutions could be dominated by the international market
system. Design and publicity are everywhere on the brink
of integrating and emptying out the last non-spectacular
zones of experimentation. If, in the micro-milieu of art,
cryptography does not rely on digital means, or on sophisticated
algorithms, it is nonetheless the final recourse imagined
by the artists in this exhibition. Here, it is a question
of encouraging a breaking away from spaces of institutional,
market, and media visibility, before strategically and
wilfully vanishing, or before involuntarily disappearing
through exhaustion. An ambiguous invitation in the framework
of an exhibition, and a paradoxical one in a press release,
but today, perhaps only artists are capable of openly inventing
new, free and undetectable behaviors, of recognizing each
other without distinctive signs, and of forging, throughout
the planet, an alternative community, which does not require
the media in order to establish its legitimacy or its power
to act. |