Tilman Baumgartel DATA RECYCLING

Composting, recycling and sorting: Net art projects sparing the user data trash

Good news from USA - Imagex Company from Massachusetts invented 'Decopier' which turns photocopies back into white paper. The device absorbs out toner from the printed page and gives you an empty piece of paper you can use once again for typing or printing. The only shortcoming of this invention is the price, 'Decopier' costs $USA 45,000, though the company has been working on a less expensive version. Nevertheless the present price is considered to be worth in 18 months for a company recycling 1,000 pages per day.

With such sets as the 'Decopier' it might be possible to overcome a great gap at modern technologies market. Office equipment, photocopiers, faxes, computers, led not only to greater paper consumption but to an explosive data expansion as well. Beyond material space, in the world of the Internet, the digitized information spreads out with an exorbitant speed. Though no-one can give exact figures, we can suppose that web site number on 'the Net of Nets' doubles every 53 days. ⁽¹⁾ The Internet has developed from an academic archive into an endless information jungle testing powers of humid web-surfers by it's assortment. Once upon a time, information used to be deficient and precious as much as caviar, nowadays it is wide-spread and trivial as potatoes, David Shenk, an American journalist, says in his 'Data Smog' (1977). ⁽²⁾

Recently series of new Net art projects appeared operating with the online data stream in the same mode the 'Decopier' by Imagex cleans the paper - they remove trash and recycle useless and non-digestive data. We'll go on here commenting on four Net art works that might all the same serve as an ironic self-commentary to increasing number of Data Trash (the term by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker) in the age of data, a technological addition which is able to block the Internet as well as our individual perceptive channels.

'The Landfill' (1998) by Mark Napier ⁽³⁾, 'Dump Your Trash' (1998) by Karl Heinz Jeron and Joachim Blank (4), 'Multi-Cultural Recycler' (1996) by Amy Alexanders ⁽⁵⁾ and 'ArchiVirus' (1998) by Manu Luksch, Armin Medosch and Richard Steckel ⁽⁶⁾ are projects of new Net-art generation focused on the problem of data trash removing. Each of these works gives its viewer-user a chance to creatively get rid of his own digital data or, according to the authors of the 'ArchiVirus', to get rid of it 'ritely'.

'The Landfill' by New York artist Mark Napier offers a site-visiter to clean trash out of his immaterial, digital online data. Napier has programmed an assumed interface into which the user copies his own files with data taken from someone other's web-sites, thus making short work of trash. Within a few seconds these data appear on the monitor, randomly in fantastic compositions with data trash belonging to other Net users.

Despite the desire to overcome mountains of garbage one often bury himself deeper into the damned data. In the collage born by the computer, side by side with illegible texts, familiar images appear. Yahoo! Logotype, CIA home-pagers, Microsoft press-reviews and playmates from the Playboy sites chaotically vanish instead of regular self-destruction on Napier's computer server as if in the Net compost trash yard. And there's a message into the future in it: the content will continue to depreciate, and one day it will become just a graphic raw material.

Like best Net-art works, 'The Digital Landfill' utilizes, through 'visual squeeze-outs', specific media properties of the Internet as material. Napier underlines that the question of his work is scarcely liquidation of data. In fact, the data do not disappear. The data just get free of logical relationships, of 'materiality'. 'If you deprive the text of the content and it's inner order, it looks spellbound. I'd like to draw viewer-user's attention to those electronic, textual, digital materials, extract them from the context and examine them, to inspire the spectator. Left as a souvenir the data might look wonderful' ⁽⁷⁾. The Napier trash-art based on data extraction from the Net goes in step with modern traditions that drive us back to Duchamp's ready-mades that are related to collages by German dadaists as much as to assemblages made by 'Fluxus' in the 60s or appropriation art of the 80s.

'The Landfill' could be defined as a part of automized pop-art - overlaid iconography of the Internet mass culture resembles of Robert Rauschenberg's technique of stencil print, though with a rather important difference that is impossibility of focusing on one exploited motive. On the contrary, the project is composed of the 'summed users' that participate in one of collective art works. Napier says, 'I like random and unpredictable meaning of this project which develops due to it's users. Each person can take part in 'The Landfill' and each one introduces his own comprehension of this work. Some people have endowed their personal digital art works, others have added animation or simple interactive games, or just their e-mails'.⁽⁸⁾

Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron, artists from Berlin, also work on the Internet data trash recycling problem. They describe the creative field of their activity as 'information smog' or 'information recycling'. Their server's address carrying the Net projects tells for itself - sero.org. ⁽⁹⁾ 'Sero' is an abbreviation which stands for 'second-hand recycling' (Sekundarrogstoff-Verwertung). It used to be the name of a 'national enterprise' in the German Democratic Republic engaged in selecting paper, glass and other used materials to be recycled. Today 'Sero' is a private company with valuable stock and its own web-site. (On their home-pages Blank and Jeron pay attention to their 'colleagues' responsible for offline garbage as well.)

In 'Dump Your Trash' Blank and Jeron offer their services as a sort of economic company - a special program can register your web-addresses into sero.org-site, and later you'll get an e-mail confirmation on recycling of your home-pages. Clicking the utilized pages your would discover a light-gray copy of your personal site which could be, if you wish, cut out of marble or granite. For a special payment you could even transport it home and console yourself with a property immortalized in stone. Thus, a home-page which must provide its author with live connection and means for life becomes a mobile gravestone. "Dump Your Trash' transfers immaterial, digital data back into 'meat space', a real material world, into information which still requires media devices to be presented and to exist.

In their previous, works Blank and Jeron also addressed the universal data flood splashing over the user. In "Without Address' ⁽¹⁰⁾ which was created in 1977 for the Kassel Documenta, the user could insert his name into the browser, and get back the system's senseless, graphically estranged pages. By the end of the exhibition, the server contained 10,000 incomprehensive distorted web-pages - an artistic commentary to insane lust for Internet data, as well as to apparent 'interactivity' of Net-art. Though the project does not exist, accidental page remains might be discovered in the web.

In the 'ArchiVirus' joint project, Manu Luksch, Armin Medosch and R.Steckel give literal interpretation of the notion of 'recycling'. Having copied a small program from the Internet into you computer you can divide all documents into components within a short time. Your screen will show letters from the file appearing in alphabetic order accompanied with an ironic demand to use those letters as raw material for a new text. Contrary to 'The Landfill', 'recycling' together with its 'philosophic instrument' in 'Dump Your Trash' is not symbolic. Indeed, the file which has ever been recycled by 'ArchiVirus' becomes almost useless. And the authors have been working on an Internet version in Java.

As soon as Gigabyte hardware becomes as cheap as an ordinary container doubts and fears about data sorting and deleting will disappear, the artist writes in the Guidebook to his project. 'We can afford saving everything. Our principal anxiety of the future is how to find the saved data. Saving, collecting, accumulating are cultural technical methods that will always be protected by the society. Forgetting is, on the contrary, believed to be a negative phenomenon. People constructed greatest palaces and monuments, founded museums, libraries, archives, open and private collections im memorium of somebody or something. ⁽¹²⁾ Fighting the mechanisms of reminding the 'ArchiVirus' creates an automate for forgetting.

Amy Alexander in her 'Multi-Cultural Recycler' also uses digital data as raw material for immaterial collages - images on her site generated with the help of distanced web cameras might be united into a new image. These web cameras are a net invention which has been gaining increasing popularity since 1994 - they unremittingly record pictures of various places and transmit them all over the world through the Net. These might be the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, or the office of a multi-media agency in London, or just a coffee-machine in a university canteen. 'Multi-Cultural Recycler' collects pictures of desks, cars, kitchen devices, lavatory bowls and randomly generates them into new images of almost a fine art quality.

For Amy Alexander, initiator of the 'Multi-Cultural Recycler' project, this image combination is a new combination of net and national culture of various countries. 'On the one hand, web camera is indeed a Net-culture component, though on the other hand, it reflects individual, for instance, national cultures the users belong to.'⁽¹³⁾ In this intention to unite different, geographically and culturally distanced areas, the project resembles of the positive role, in the beginning of the 20 century, of earlier futurist Utopias that used to dream in 'wireless fantasies' of abolition of physical space due to new technologies

Art projects dedicated to recycling problem expose new tendency in Net-art. Early significant networks of the 90s were talking not of deleting but, on the contrary, of saving of data. By the time, the Internet enchanted both, artists and art theorists, as an 'endless archive' which was usually compared with the legendary Babel library depicted by Jorge Luis Borges. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The projects of the time grounded on data saving and examining. In the first net project by Antonio Muntadas named 'File Room' (1994) ⁽¹⁵⁾, the user could, for example in case of art censorship, put data into data bank, and could be later on archived and required online. ⁽¹⁶⁾

Eva Grubingers in 'C@C - Computer Aided Curating' project (1994) ⁽¹⁷⁾ suggested a 'self-managing' online gallery where an artist might show his works directly on the Net, and didn't need a mediator like a curator, gallery or
museum. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Participating in the project, the users were filling net infrastructures with content. Compared with three projects above, this one is targeted on quite an opposite aim - not to save the content but to delete it.

It was not by chance that these four projects operating with data trash appeared almost in the same time (first semester of 1998), by the moment when the first Internet euphoria had passed, as well as Utopian ideas and idealistic fantasies of the early 90s. The projects belong to artists having authority of 'Internet veterans'. And there's visible evolution from Internet idealism of the early years to destruction of illusions of the present, with the latter demonstrated in art activity of J.Blank and K.Jeron, creators of completed in 1998 the 'International City' net project. ⁽¹⁹⁾

Their vision of such an international city is presented in the @rs electronica 1995 catalogue as follows: 'The human being is an active participant of the international city, and not merely a consumer… He interacts with the Net as with a ready infrastructure which makes possible communication and data exchange on an international level'. ⁽²⁰⁾ In three years, 'communication and data exchange' hadn't become but data trash for Blank and Jeron. One of the vital opportunities of the International City was access to place home pages on the server of the project. Moreover, their "Dump Your Trash' project turning home pages into objects for 'virtual clean-up' might be judged as a sarcastic gesture.

In one of his famous interviews to Playboy in 1969, Marshall McLuhan reflected on new media that had been preparing our social space for violence and excitement since the invention of book-printing, to help the human nervous system endure it all. While McLuhan believed that one could turn into info-suicide with mechanic artificial limbs instead of feelings, Neil Postman and Clifford Stoll, art critics, presented the Internet as a compost of senseless data, of data with no content. 'Our networks can be frustrating, expensive, unreliable connections that get in the way of useful work, writes Stoll in the 'Silicon Snake Oil'. - It is an overpromoted hollow world, devoid of warmth and human kindness. The heavily promoted information infrastructure addresses few social needs or business concerns. At the same time, it directly threatens precious parts of our society, including schools, libraries, and social institutions.' ⁽²¹⁾

Contradicting with classical cultural pessimism the presented projects endow the user with an active position towards the Net info-enthrophy. The authors do not retrieve in the face of the Internet with its information dumps, they go on fighting the Net with its own arms an on its own territory. By suggesting the user to creatively and independently fight the info-stream they deprive the Internet archive of its power. 'Dump Your Trash', 'ArchiVirus', 'The Multi-Cultural Recycler' and 'The Landfill' draw attention to possibility of a self-determined independent communication with the boundless Net data.

When asked how did he cope with the problem of data excess the author of 'The Landfill' answered: So far I try to avoid newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. ⁽²²⁾ The artists, authors of the projects, belong to the same generation which grew up with data excess, and they learned very well how to
navigate in its streams. Their net projects show that there're other ways, apart from self-sacrifice and capitulation, to solve the 'info-killer' problem. The Net data that collapses us could also serve as raw material for our personal creations. And created with the help of these data digital collages, such as 'The Landfill' or 'Multi-Cultural Recycler', enjoy their individual idiosyncratic beauty.

Addition

This article had been finished when I came across 'Information Super-Collider', a web site by American Trevor Blackwell. His 'collider' randomly mixes information from various home pagers. The program automatically puts together data extracts from HTML-pages of different servers, thus very much resembling the four projects presented in this article. Although, Blackwell is not an artist, he is a computer center employee at elite Harvard University. His 'Super-Collider' project (which is by the way nominated at the @rs electronica in the Net-art category) has been existing in the Net since 1994, and it took the author three years to come to the idea of recycling its digital data.

This technically perfect project shows that the gap between high-art and low-culture in the Net is still not considerable. The project which is regarded as a work of art, in one particular context, might be regarded a successful program trick of a PC obsessed employee in another one. Those desiring to add these projects to the history of art, might collate them with collages and allamblages of such dadaists as John Heartfield, Hannah Hoech, Ernst Schwitters, or such 'Fluxus' participants as Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostel, Arman, as well as compare them with such different artists as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Kosuth and Haim Staimbach.

On the other hand, the projects that deal with data trash might be similarly regarded as 'happy hacks', little technical masterpieces of programming. We still distinguish the notions of the goals of art on the Internet, and technological samples of the Internet. That is why the Net-art is looks like more hacking than creating.

1. Quelle: http://www.netcraft.co.uk/Survey/
2. Shenk, David: Data Smog - Surviving the Information Glut, London 1997 (Abacus), p. 11
3. Mark Napier: The Landfill (1998), http://www.potatoland.org/landfill/
4. Blank & Jeron: Dump Your Trash (1998), http://sero.org/sero/dyt/
5. Amy Alexander: The Multi-Cultural Recycler (1997), http://shoko.calarts.edu/~alex/recycler.html. The project got 'Honorary Mention' in net-art nomination at the @rs electronica 1997.
6. Manu Luksch, Armin Medosch, Richard Steckel: ArchiVirus (1997), http://www.sil.at/m/AV/
7. E-mail of July, 10 1998 from Mark Napier to the author of the article.
8. E-mail of July, 9 1998 from Mark Napier to the author of the article.
9. http://sero.org
10. Blank & Jeron: without addresses (1997), http://www.icf.de/without_addresses/
11. From ArchiVirus, http://www.sil.at/m/AV/manual.html
12. Ibid.
13. E-mail of August, 2 1998 from Amy Alexander to the author
14. Ippolito, John: http//www, in: (Kat.) Deep Storage, Munchen/New York 1997 (Prestel), 157 - 163
15. http://www.cd.sc.ehu.es/FileRoom/documents/TofCont.html
16. Muntadas, Antoni: The File Room, in: Gerbel, Karl; Peter Weibel (Hrsg): Mythos Information - Welcome to the Wired World, @rs electronica 95, Vienna/New York 1995 (Springer), 285 - 289
17. http://www.icf.de/CAC/
18. Grubinger, Eva: C@C - computer aided curating, in: Gerbel, Karl; Peter Weibel (Hrsg): Mythos Information - Welcome to the Wired World, @rs electronica 95, Vienna/New York 1995 (Springer), 245 - 247
19. International City. http://www.icf.de
20. International City: An Ideal City on the Internet, in: Gerbel, Karl; Peter Weibel (Hrsg): Mythos Information - Welcome to the Wired World, @rs electronica 95, Vienna/New York 1995 (Springer), 254 - 257
21. Stoll, Clifford: Silicon Snake Oil, London/Basingstoke 1996 (Pan), 233
22. E-mail of July, 9 1998 from Mark Napier to the author.
23. Trevor Blackwell: The Information Super Collider (1994), http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/collider.html