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Subject: Behind the Screen / Russian New Media
From: marjan <marjan@kud-fp.si>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 11:46:06 METDST

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Behind the Screen / Russian New Media [1]

Lev Manovich



Should we be surprised that as the new computer-based
media expand throughout the world, intellectual horizons and
aesthetic possibilities seem to be narrowing? If one scans
Internet-based discussion groups and journals from London to
Budapest, New York to Berlin, and Los Angeles to Tokyo,
certain themes are obsessively intoned, like mantras:
copyright; on-line identity; cyborgs; interactivity; the
future of the Internet. This follows from the Microsofting of
the planet, which has cast a uniform digital aesthetics over
national visual cultures, accelerating the globalization
already begun by Hollywood, MTV, and consumer packaging:
hyperlinks and cute icons, animated fly-throughs, rainbow
color palettes, and Phong-shaded spheres are ubiquitous, and
apparently inescapable.
So, given its intellectual traditions, totalitarian
experience, distinct twentieth century visuality (a
particular mixture of the Northern and the Communist, the
gray and the bleak), and finally, its continuing pre-
occupation with the brilliant avant-garde experimentation on
the 1910s and 1920s, can we expect a different response to
new media on the part of Russian artists and intellectuals?
What will -- or could -- result from the juxtaposition of the
Netscape Navigator web browser's frames with Eisenstein's
theories of montage? It would be dangerous to reduce
heterogeneous engagements to a single common denominator,
some kind of unique "Russian New Media" meme. Yet a number of
common threads do exist. These provide a useful alternative
to the West's default thematics, while articulating a
distinctive visual poetics of new media.
One of these threads is the attitude of suspicion and
irony. Moscow's Alexei Shulgin writes of the excitement
generated by interactive installations (and I quote from the
website): "It seems that manipulation is the only form of
communication they know and can appreciate. They are happily
following very few options given to them by artists: press
left or right button, jump or sit." He views artists as
manipulators employing the seductions of the newest
technologies "to involve people in their pseudo-interactive
games obviously based on [the] banal will for power... [The]
emergence of media art is characterized by transition from
representation to manipulation." [2]
Shulgin views interactive art and media as creating
structures that are frighteningly similar to the
psychological laboratories the CIA and the KGB operated
during the Cold War era. I was born in Moscow and grew up
there during Breznev's era, so I find his thoughts not only
logical but enthralling. Yet my investment in his conclusions
doesn't blind me to the limitations of his analysis, or
rather, its cultural specificity: it takes a post-communist
subject to frame interactive art and media in such stark
terms.
For a Western artist, that is, interactivity is a
perfect vehicle both to represent and promulgate ideals of
democracy and equality; for a post-communist, it is yet
another form of manipulation, in which artists use advanced
technology to impose their totalitarian wills on the people.
Further, Western media artists usually take technology
absolutely seriously, despairing when it does not work;
post-communist artists, on the other hand, recognize that the
nature of technology is that it does not work, that it will
necessarily break down. Having grown up in a society where
truth and lie, reality and propaganda always go hand in hand,
the post-communist artist is ready to accept the basic
truisms of life in an information society (spelled out in
Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication): that
every signal always contains some noise; that signal and
noise are qualitatively the same; and that what is noise in
one situation can be signal in another.
In this spirit, Moscow conceptual artist and poet
Dmitry Prigov organized a performance during the
International Symposium on Electronic Art in Helsinki (1994)
in which he used business traveller's software on one of
Aleksander Pushkin's nineteenth century poems, translating it
from Russian into Finnish, and then from Finnish into
English. For Prigov, the final product was not a miserably
misbegotten translation, twice removed from the source, but a
new poem, its originality indebted -- however ironically --
to the operations of the lowest level of artificial
intelligence.
Like Prigov's performance, Shulgin's own new media
projects can be described as meta-art. In contrast to many of
his western colleagues who feel that they have to colonize
and appropriate the Web through a distinct category of
"artists' web projects," Shulgin proceeds from the assumption
that Web "is an open space where the difference between 'art'
and 'not art' has become blurred as never before in XXth
century." In this spirit he established the WWWArt Medal
<www.cs.msu.su/wwwart/award> to be awarded to "web-pages
that were created not as art works but gave us definite 'art'
feeling." Visitors check links to a variety of "found" Web
pages (importantly, not a single one of them is an "artists'
web project"), which have been singled out for "flashing,"
"moderation" and "valiant psychedelics," among other
categories. Like Prigov's poem, another of Shulgin's sites,
"Remedy for Information Disease" <www.desk.nl/~you/remedy>,
functions as a noise generator, implying that the cure for
data overload is to shift from receiving to broadcasting.
Prigov and Shulgin exemplify how the conceptualism
which has recently dominated the Moscow art scene offers a
valuable strategy for approaching new media. Another strategy
positions Russian new media within a larger historical
tradition of "screen culture." For Russian thinkers, the
meaning of the screen expands far beyond its function as a
surface displaying an image originating from elsewhere: it is
also a bridge across two spaces, one physical, one imaginary;
a link between a human subject and an audio-visual stream;
and a rectangular window which opens onto alternative
(virtual) reality. So understood, the "screen" is that which
unites old and new media, still and moving image, analog and
digital culture.
The emphasis on the screen as a space that opens onto
an alternative reality is echoed in much modern Russian art
which remains firmly committed to the tradition of easel
painting. In contrast to the West, where artists gave up on
illusionistic pictorial space in favor of the notion of a
painting as a self-sufficient material object, many Russian
artists, both representational and abstract, continue to
conceive of a painting ("kartina") as a parallel reality
which begins at the picture frame and extends towards
infinity. Thus, Eric Bulatov has described his paintings as
windows onto another, spiritual universe, while Ilya Kabakov
conceptualizes his installations as a logical expansion of
pictorial traditions into the third dimension -- a
materialization of reality models previously presented by
painting. [3]
Young Russian media artists are using the computer as
an excuse to re-think basic categories and mechanisms of
screen culture, such as frame, montage, and illusionistic
space. Thus, rather than representing a radical break with
the past, the computer screen becomes, for them, a re-
articulation of the models which have defined screen
consciousness for centuries. "My boyfriend came back from
war!" is a Web-based work by the young Muscovite Olga Lialina
<www.heise.de/tp/sa/3040/fhome.htm>. Using the web browser's
capability to create frames within frames, Lialina leads us
through a series of pages which begin with an undivided
screen and become progressively divided into more and more
frames as we follow different links. Throughout, an image of
a human couple and of a constantly blinking window remain on
the left part of screen. These two images enter into new
combinations with texts and images themselves engendered by
the user's interaction with the site. In this way, Lialina
creatively bridges principles of traditional parallel
montage, as it existed in the cinema, and the evolving
possibilities of interactive hypertext.
St. Petersburg-based Olga Tobreluts uses a computer
to expand the possibilities of cinematic montage in a
different way. In "Gore ot Uma" (1994), a video work based on
a famous play written by an early nineteenth century writer
Aleksandr Griboedov and directed by Olga Komarova, Tobreluts
seamlessly composes images representing radically different
realities on the windows and walls of various interior
spaces. In one scene, two characters converse in front of a
window which opens up onto a shock of soaring birds taken
from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"; in another, a delicate
computer- rendered design fades in onto a wall behind a
dancing couple. Because Tobreluts bends composited images to
follow the same perspective as the rest of the shots, the two
realities appear to inhabit the same physical space. The
result is a different kind of montage for digital cinema.
[4] Which is to say, if the 1920s avant-garde, and MTV in
its wake, juxtaposed radically different realities within a
single image, and if Hollywood digital artists use computer
compositing to glue different images into a seamless
illusionistic space (for instance, synthetic dinosaurs
composited against filmed landscape in "Jurassic Park"),
Tobreluts explores the creative space between these two
extremes.
Lialina and Tobreluts' projects offer a vision of how
Russian new media artists can negotiate between the extreme
materialism of Western computer art practice and the
historicism and conceptualism characteristic of their
country's art. The question remains, however, will Russia be
able to stop the march of Bill Gates' aesthetic imperialism,
the way she previously froze out the armies of Napoleon?


Notes:

[1] This text was originally published in Art + Text (Summer
1997). I am very grateful to Peter Lunefeld and Susan Kandel
for editing.

[2] Rhizome Digest: October 11, 1996, <www.rhizome.com>.

[3] Eric Bulatov, conversation with the author, 1980; Ilya
Kabakov, On the "Total" Installation (Bonn: Cantz Verlag,
1995).

[4] I explore digital compositing in relation to the history
of cinema in more depth in "To Lie and to Act: Potemkin's
Villages, Cinema and Telepresence," in Mythos Information --
Welcome to the Wired World. Ars Electronica 95, edited by
Karl Gebel and Peter Weibel, (Vienna and New York:
Springler-Verlag, 1995): 343-353.


Bio: Dr. Lev Manovich is an artist and a theorist
working in new media on the faculty at the University of
California, San Diego. His book "The Engineering of Vision
from Constructivism to Virtual Reality" is forthcoming from
the University of Texas Press.


Dr. Lev Manovich
manovich@ucsd.edu
http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich
http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/little-movies
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