frAme Journal

SM: Between 1992–1998 you worked as a performance artist but gave this up to concentrate on making Internet based work. That's quite a substantial change. Could you say a little about why you made this transition and how this change in your practice has affected you as a writer? MA: For me it's the same practice. There is no change in direction, my work is just a line - - - - that extends into the future and I can't say where it will go. But in 1998 I was ready to deal with a different kind of aesthetic that was quieter, slower, more contained. The computer environment allowed me to explore this new landscape. My online work has always been about audience (user) and presence (performance). This hasn't necessarily manifested as live, however, it's always contained these elements. Though my computer works are specifically located in 3-D digital space, their narratives are performances that could occur in other rooms, other places, if I choose that. SM: People read on the Internet in many different ways and situations and this can often totally change the experience of the work, plus the potential audience is also very broad. How do you deal with issues such as these relating to the environmental reception of your web work? Have you had any interesting reactions from people who have just stumbled across your work? MA: I think very early on, working with the www, I had to give up my sense of control. Things crash, monitors are different and so change colours, browsers don't display correctly; it's a very challenging environment in which to make art practice. However, in some ways, these things that splinter off from the work are also the work itself, or part of it, in the same way that every cash dispenser screen in the UK, although always a little different from each other, is actually part of the same art installation about the colour blue. I also love defaults. I love the standard, basic quality of what can't be changed – it's a gift. I like the fact that my work arrives unexpectedly in offices, airports, cafes, shops and has to be re-contextualised within that space. In my early online work there's a sense of it arriving late at night, in the city, in summer, the windows open, the traffic a low hum outside – I made the work with this environment in mind, although I couldn't ever be sure that it was received there. It felt like radio waves. Sometimes people come across a specific piece years after it got made and send me emails. It feels like they've just seen a white plastic bag blowing high up across the city park and think – who made that? SM: What kind of critical reactions have you had from the art world to your shift from performance to the web? There's been a longstanding suspicion of technology in the art world and I wondered if you found this still to be the case. MA: With the change in my output, I had to manage a different audience. Few people who saw or liked my early performances could understand the move to the online environment, so I had to build a different practice, with a very different critical framework around it. At times that was very challenging. However, my difficulties with the work have generally not been to do with constituencies at all but wider issues that the material has thrown up, like the problems for some viewers – they question whether what they are looking at is art. Naturally this always surprises me. Also, all my work is free, so that takes it further out of the gallery system and beyond the critical loop. Recently Grayson Perry wrote a column about my piece dusk for the Times – quite a serious article contexualising it within a fine art framework, referencing some artists that I mentioned – Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and some more that he included – Whistler, Ansel Adams. The impact of this article was very interesting – it enabled people to 'see' my work in a way that they couldn't before. It was suddenly OK for a wider audience to come towards it. SM: How would you describe your aesthetic? Do you see your work as being part of any particular tradition? MA: A minimalist aesthetic of less is more. After a gap of eight years, I've started making new performance work, something of a reverse process, so my aesthetic is changing again to accommodate these new physicalities. I'm currently interested in – I Ching, John Cage, Bruce Nauman's early performances, audiences, energy, astral magic, the Japanese aesthetic, C.G. Jung, 70s, chance procedures, the collective unconscious. Some of these influences have been around for a while, some of them have come together in order to support this new work. I'm slowly developing a new vocabulary, perhaps taking some of the themes that have manifested over the last few years in my installation work but putting myself as a performer back in to the practice. If I treat 'me' as a formal conceit, like I would any other visual material, or object, what might happen? SM: In your latest work, dusk, you have used quite simple technology compared to what is possible online today, just small photographs and bare text set in HTML. With such a broad array of technology you could have used why did you choose such a simple mode of delivery as a linear hypertext? MA: What you see is the first part of a series of works. For example, the next section is sourced from digital video material that I recorded on the South Bank, London, then processed in a variety of ways. But you're right, I've often used simple technology – bare bones HTML, images, simple text. In fact a whole series of works – e-says – are largely based on the word, online essays delivered in small, bite-sized pieces. I like the engagement that comes from clicking through a series of simple screens. It's like learning to read, putting your finger under the word to follow the sentences. If my early theatre pieces were about being read to, my early online pieces were about learning to read, or re-learning the relationships between words, how they sit in spaces. I'm always trying to direct people to defunct technologies as a way of generating ideas – one of these would be hypertext. I think its potential is still largely unrealised. SM: Could you tell me about the point of view of your work. Your voice comes across as often quite detached. How does the aesthetic of Zen Buddhism fit into your work? MA: I'm a complex person. My online works are often very minimal, building up complexity through a series of simple moves. Perhaps this comes across as 'detached'? I'm not sure. I believe the online environment has a tendency to encourage remoteness, or constellate it. Usually you're sitting in front of a computer looking at something on your own. You are connected but somehow still alone – that's a very interesting feeling, that I try to exploit in the work. Also the philosophical nature of my recent pieces – about the nature of seeing, or being – seems to somehow require that precision of language, like a koan opens up a wider territory, a bigger space for the practitioner. So the aesthetic of Zen is unconsciously present in my work and although I am a committed Zen practitioner, I never thought it would be present in the tone of the pieces. I'm always surprised by it being there. I was recently reading something Kyudo Roshi, a Zen master, said in Lawrence Shainberg's book Ambivalent Zen – 'He likens our formal meditation – zazen – to taking a shower, advises us to think of your breath as a windshield wiper which, sweeping back and forth with inhalations and exhalations, cleans dust from the mind as wipers clean a windshield'. I began to think of my online works as the equivalent of taking a mind shower; gap, a breath, a space opens up. SM: Do you think the proliferation of new web-based tools which make cultural production and cooperation significantly easier, such as Youtube, Flickr and Blogger, mark a new direction for web-based art, or as some think, actually the end of web art? It seems to me that these services have changed the aesthetic of the web and our perception of it. Have they made a difference to the way you approach your work? MA: I'm wondering whether web-based art is a historically discrete period. Certainly the recent books on net art make it more visible, create more boundaries around it. Does that mean that as a form it's coming to an end? I don't know. Web art might be like video art, in that it will continue, but it will always have a particular imprint of a certain time, the 90s. After a long period in the online environment, my need now is for more engagement with audiences, a kind of one-to-one, not the virtual high jinks of myspace.com but a real human connection with people. These tools like youtube.com don't preclude that, in fact they might also encourage it, but my need is to make my explorations in a live space. I won't abandon web work, I will just make it a parallel process. My work will continue both on and off line. Also, sometimes the web environment seems to have changed. It's as if you go to a familiar part of town and the streets have altered, quite subtly; a new building has suddenly gone up; there's a flashy new cinema and a Tesco Metro. I feel the sense of life understandably but quickly moving on. It's impermanent. Sadly I feel the pull towards the mid to late 90s, the world of HTML, low res and BBEdit but I stop myself. I remember that it's time to change. Simon Mills frAme Online Journal 2007