I feel that the future of writing is in space, not time.
William Burroughs
on the show in Sydney, Australia:
Anita Kocsis, Andrea Sunder-Plassman and Sigi Torinus's collaborative net installation browsing beauty attests to the ongoing hybrid adventure of creating "in - between" iconographies, textures, ideas , forms and spaces that is made possible with trans-generic experimentation in the contemporary visual arts. This is now particulary more evident with artists, curators, new media producers and writers creating art on the Internet - that protean global network of computers - whose oceanic archives of information resembles an electronic Borgesian labyrinth of techno - creativity.
Since the sixties certain influential media thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary, Gene Youngblood, and Roy Ascott, have been instrumental in contributing to the current Zeitgeist concerning contemporary technological media. These writers in their respective writings have extolled the creative, cultural and technical possibilities offered by interactive media - especially the Internet.
Today the net (to use its more colloquial expression) is rapidly becoming an attractive dynamic mass medium of expressive communication and a delivery promotional system. Its yet undefined symbols, syntax and icons suggests its immense artistic and technological potential for anyone who cares to experiment with new forms of cultural expression and sites to access digital art forms (audio art, interacative art, hyperfiction, virtual installations, etc).
The multilayered conceptual architecture of browsing beauty indicates the artists' pronounced interest to define border - crossing forms, spaces and textures of sensuality and physicality into the net (providing a subtle eloquent contrast to its rapid corporatisation) by looking at complex interlinking issues of the body, beauty and mystery in the mutating context of culture and nature. Computer - inflected media (especially the net) allows us to experience in anti-binary non - hierarchical terms the intertextual fluid experience of browsing. The various online web elements of the installation allows us to browse through a rich interactive world of liquid poetic configurations which contests the more rigid ideological views of the human body as a commodity fetish. (For example, witness Paul Virilio's recent remarks concerning a new global consumer eugenics of the athelete's body as a reworking of the Nietzschean myth of Great Health in The Art of The Motor [1995].)
Arguably, browsing beauty in terms of its formal, spatial and technological contours suggest not only a critically informed supple hermeneutic notion of beauty as an expression of interior experience, but it also vividly reinforces how the artists' in their respective collaborative ways display a self - critical approach to their own media. As we negotiate the collage spatiality of browsing beauty we encounter its deftly designed amalgam of online, aural, imagistic and textual components suggesting the artists' highly intuitive and experimental approach to creating the work. We navigate the installation as if we are traversing an elaborate dynamic dream mosaic of desires, hunches, memories and thoughts.
The artists seek to animate their media, to create images, sounds, texts as an interactive archeology of dream space that critiques the limits of media technology and the more one dimensional heroic notions of feminine and masculine beauty as the siren song of thirties fascism.
What we see and hear with browsing beauty is how the artists' have created their own "inbetween" language of interactive installation art. Artists using computers are oblige to become critical of the cultural myths embedded in the cyber hype that heralds the new media artforms of today. We need (as Nietzsche once said) to question "the armies of metaphors" that colour our thinking fields concerning art, culture and language. To this end browsing beauty succeeds as it represents an engaging work conscious of the necessity to construct an ethics of media technology.
But the installation also, equally signifies, how the artists have forged their own interactive symbols, motifs and forms that point to Gregory Ulmer's idea of how artists are also oblige to customise the computer - human interface. By doing this artists working with computers can (if they are self - critical in their approach to their media and their (in)visible histories, etc) create their own chora - a personal sacred space with their own interface graphic devices, forms, and templates. This space since Aristotle's time, Ulmer argues, has been traditionally overshadowed by topos (space that is universal in character) in Western epistemology and pedagogy.
browsing beauty in terms of its conceptual and formal concerns italicise how artists are becoming attracted to web art because the experience of "surfing the net" aspires to the anti - narrative collage and textual "cut - ups" mechanisms of this century's avant - garde literary and visual arts. Further, it suggests that the viewer/participant can experience a rich dynamic plural text whose web polyvocality offers a stimulating array of unpredictable "in - between" images when art forms collied which each other, as they do in browsing beauty, images that echo Duchamp's legacy of the de - materialisation of art.