July, 2001

Interview by Rosanne Alstatt

RA: In your installation at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art, you combine virtual bodies from the Internet with recordings of the performance „notime: cellular trans_actions" taking place on opening night. What is the connection between the bodies and the phone?

VV: I'm interested in examining how technology contributes to the fragmentation of our identities in our daily lives. Computer technology holds a promise that it will save us time, but it actually has made us more busy than ever by extending our communication networks beyond what we can handle biologically. Cell phones are the first sign of ubiquitous computing, away from the screen. In my opinion, cell communication networks are very much contributing to a shift in our perception of public / private space and time. In our daily lives, they help us enact what I call ‘ready-made’ performances. In fact, I see my role here as the context provider -- audience members are performing.

This idea was inspired by observing people every day, of all walks of life, talking on their phones in public spaces – some are very animated, almost dancing, some are more shy – they crouch and whisper in public spaces. I started thinking of it as a collective Net performance and wanted to make this obvious by enacting it in a cultural space. The connection between the bodies and the phone is the move away from the screen… Plus, telephones have an amazing history -- just think of Alexander Graham Bell --he actually developed them to talk to the dead.

RA: I'll have to show you the interview with Kristin Lucas, she also talks about ghosts and technology. It's odd how the avatar in electronic space also conjurs up thoughts of the supernatural.

VV: To me, the avatar in cyberspace represents a strange interplay of utopianism on the one hand and right wing entrepreneurism, mixed up with esoteric spiritualism, on the other. New Age religion operates in tandem with networking technologies and "organic" corporate structures--the new "cool" companies that are emerging all over the high tech industry map. Agents and avatars are closely linked to our ideals of immortality, which is related to the idea of ghosts. The avatar can assume a representation that is ageless, the agent can make it function autonomously, beyond our life span.

I did a lot of research on the concept of the avatar, and the descent, from a very complex hierarchical hindu idea of the concept, to the simplified online persona that is marketed. My interest is to redefine this concept once again, by moving it away from replication of the physical representation, to a visualization of an information space that connects to our physical being via the ‘radio’ from another space and time…I am interested in playing with the idea of having the sound generated from the conversations mediated by cellular technology. I wish I could follow the trajectory of the voice data being bounced via satellites, between people…

VV: With cell phones, you now have access to another realm at another time. You have multiple identities going on. You are able to engage many levels of communication at all times. Having ready access is what causes this. If people feel a little insecure in their current social environment they have the option of calling someone on the phone. It's comforting. That, of course, was always the case, but now it's accessible at any moment. Also, it is very advanced satellite technology that is very user friendly and low tech at the same time.

RA: It's the „reach out and touch someone" effect, except nobody seems to have noticed that there's no actual touching going on.

VV: In a way, cell phones are much closer to people than the web that is screen based. This is somehow considered ‘virtual’, while the cell phones, equally networked and digital, are not. This liberates us from the separation of the 'virtual' and the 'real', the body / mind separation that plagues the western mind. And, I like the fact that they are really are radios and the conversations can be very easily streamed on the Net.

For quite awhile I have been fascinated with the shift from centralized to decentralized networks, whether social, political or personal. The Internet, along with wireless technologies, have certainly accelerating this process. Cell phone technologies helps actually enact this shift in our social environment and it is fascinating to see how the technological shift translates to social behaviour. Until now, the phone was centrally located in the city or in your house, and it was analogue. In public spaces there were phones booths and an established etiquette

as to when it is appropriate to talk. With the shift to digital technologies, everything is getting decentralized and this is clear when watching the cellular technology in action. How it impacts out own self-centered approach to our selves is really the question...

Ra: I wonder if that's cultural? Here in Germany there certainly is an etiquette evolving. If I pick up the phone in my car, everyone around me immediately starts honking to let me know they don't like it. And almost nobody talk on the phone in restaurants anymore.

VV: New etiquettes are slowly emerging everywhere, just as e-mail netiquetes have. Our voice networks have moved form centralized, analogue stations, to decentralized, digital and cellular technologies. There is also a shift from the perceived centralized, 'me' identity, to a collective identity. The way this translates in my work is to engage the performative action from the audience while I give a talk about notime.

I am also very interested in seeing how the cultural difference emerges with these technological shifts. I plan to start developing a database of video streams from performances in various cultural spaces and geographic locations. I want to see how audience behavior changes the performance, and what kind of interactions take place in various environments. For instance, it is well known that social etiquettes are entirely unique in a place like Japan. My role would become really strange in that setting…And, of course, the language will always be native to the particular space, so in many instances I will not even understand what the conversations are. Typically, I would speak in English and foreign audiences would barely understand what I am saying…

RA: Here you are referring to the plan of incorporating audience members who are called on their cell phones during your talk at the opening and

videotaping their conversations (while also projecting them live). I like the fact this necessarily integrates the local context. Yes, being international is necessary in today's art world, but you can't forget your home base.

VV: My work is based on the Net, but when I am invited to work in a physical space, I try to engage the specificity of that particular context. In the past I have exhibited 'bodies' that are generally behind the scenes, such as curators, sponsors and helpers. This localizes the project and comments on the cultural space that I am working in at the moment. I decided to do the same here and have you and people you invite become my collaborators to create content for the show.

I believe that my work on the net has completely changed my process and thinking about audience interaction and that I bring that into the physical space. Audience feedback and participation is an essential part of developing the piece. I am not interested in delivering ‘finished’ work that does not allow some kind of intervention from the audience.

As for integrating the phones, I love the tension that the phone creates. Think of movies where the phone creates a shift of scene when one person calls another or the phone is picked up, there is a shift in the narrative. Phones really are used as a structuring element.

For this particular space, the conversations will be mediated by the cell phone, amplifies and eventually streamed. I will honor the theme of the show and ask people you choose to speak to people they choose, publicly, about avatars and others. In addition to the 'planned' performative aspect, I ask everyone to have their cell phones on, and in a Cageian fashion, introduce chance. Every environment that this is enacted in will be very different from the next, even in the same city. This will be the basis for an online database of conversations.

RA: I also think it's interesting that just about everybody I know could participate since almost everyone has a cell phone.

VV: Cell phones are soon going to be much larger in numbers of users than computers. It doesn’t require any kind of expertise to be connected. But, there is also the underlying sense of danger from the radiation. Yet, we can’t help ourselves. We are ultimately social animals and the urge to be available and connected is too strong.

RA: I read a Canadian study that said it doesn't do anything to you. Maybe it's all just paranoia.

VV: Maybe. Some say that there is no danger of a greehouse effects too. I guess it all depends on the interests behind the messages that are given to the public. I read an article in Scientific American about a study that claims that there is definite danger to the brain from overexposure. They followed a cell phone user and showed on the MRI that the area around the ear started to actually change color. I also heard of case of a doctor who constantly wore a cell phone because he was on call and he ended up with serious heart problems. I am not on a mission to warn people, but I believe that there is some sort of a risk for our collective health. Perhaps we are all turning into mutants.

RA: Aha, so we are all turning into cyborgs on some level.

VV: Yes, and it is much less science fiction than we imagine. Another thing that I find fascinating is the way cell phone technology works -- it is designed to work in a hexagon system. Cities are split up into hexagons and each point is a node in the network that switches, thus allowing multiple users to talk at the same time. It looks very much like a beehive. It is designed in this manner for efficiency, not because the engineers intentionally based their design on natural systems. It is interesting that when you go for efficiency, you come back to a system that resembles shapes found repeatedly in nature -- heaxogons, spirals, tetrahedrons... Maybe our move into cyborg existence actually brings us closer to nature than when we were ‘natural’... life is full of paradoxes!

RA: This reminds me of the work in the 60s and 70s with Kenneth Snelson and Bucky Fuller who were making models for atoms, patenting them and integrating the structures into architecture and sculpture. But maybe that's something for another conversation.

VV: No, actually it is very relevant, because the geometric forms that the notime bodies or avatars are reduced to, are based on tensegrity systems that were developed by Snelson and Fuller. The programmer who developed the software called fluidiom is Gerald de Jong who lives and works in Holland. Our collaboration really developed on the Net. We came to a very similar conclusion from very different perspectives -- if these shapes work in Snelson's scultpures and Fuller's domes, and are found in molecular structures, such as the c60 carbon (called Buckyballs), why wouldn't this work in information architectures?

RA: Could you tell me a littlle more about the background of the project?

VV: I've been working for some time on representation of our identities on the Internet. When I did “Bodies Inc." I really was responding to people in the earlier project called “Virtual Concrete" where I asked people to imagine their and order their online body. At the time, I never intended to visualize these bodies because it was a conceptual piece. What really threw me off was people's demand to see the bodies they had described. I started questioning this need to visualize your alter identity and was at an absolute creative impasse. I felt that compelled to respond, but was also sensitive to the problem of physical representation. Finally, to make the long story short, I decided to deal with this by using a corporate model where the bodies are incorporated into the project. This was really a tongue in cheek response to the utopic ideals for the Internet that were being promoted at the time.

When people started asking for community, I once again entered a creative impasse. Community? What does that mean? People don’t have time for their own lives, let alone for a community. Plus, the most interesting community to me is people who have no time. So, I decided that it would be best to start creating a database of people with no time, and that their bodies would be represented by these tensile structures that carry information and evolve independent of the persona’s presence. So, the avatar would assume an autonomous life and this would give us more time, right?

I then started thinking about how people represent spaces on the Net. It really is about putting things in an information space without gravity and other demands for light etc. The challenge is to shift the perception of ourselves in that space as information personas, as data bodies, without dehumanizing us. If that is at all possible is the challenge of the notime project.

RA: Do you really think there is a dehumanization?

VV: Yes, there is definitely a lot of dehumanization at work, but I do not feel pesimistic about it in the long run. The Internet is something that was invented for machines to talk to each other -- it was conceived as a network of machines, not of people. If you talk to the inventors and pioneers, which I have had the opportunity to do, they are shocked at its current application. Metaphorically I see how technology is humanized or dehumanized by imaging technology as concrete, and little spurts of grass, people, popping out in between the cracks. Eventually the earth, the moisture and the grass crack and start reconfiguring the concrete. I believe that you can't really hold back the human quality. Technology has historically been used in ways that it was not meant to, it is many times absorbed and reappropriated. There are too many of us, and there is going to be many, many more with the population boom, so it will be more and more difficult to repress humanity.

RA: Repressed, no, but maybe ordered and thus more easily controlled. Who knows what the future will bring?

VV: Our planet is mapped, we have explored every little bit of it. Our bodies are also mapped -- genetically mapped and with nanotechnology, we will have gene splicing, chip implanting, roving cameras in our bodies. This is a really interesting time because we can't predict where it's going. It's as if it is 1900, electricity was just invented and people are predicting where they will be a hundred years later. We are in the same place with all the emerging technologies. The best we can do is to embrace the change and work with it. It may sound like science fiction, but it quickly turns into reality. Perhaps the turnover is faster...

RA: The difference is that then, it was science fiction with the emphasis on fiction. Today, the emphasis is on science. People look to literature and the arts for direction as to where all this can go and immediately believe that anything is possible. It's almost like there is no fiction anymore. People very readily believe that all their techno-dreams will come true.

VV: I also think we live in a science culture. I see it happening everywhere and this will have a huge impact on the role of the arts if it hasn't already. Artists and humanists take on the role of interpreters and raise questions about what science is doing.

RA: Are your virtual bodies and cell phone performances really raising questions or embracing technology? I'd like to know if you think your avatars play a role in all this.

VV: I hope that I am doing both, even if that is perceived as contradictory. I embrace technology, but as an artist take liberties to break it, redesign it, and question the role it plays in our lives. The projects I develop are meant to engage the audience in this process and create a dialogue. None of us have the answers, but we can all ask questions and not simply accept any new technology that is marketed to us. Avatars and cell phones are the mediations that allow this to happen in a creative, playful way. They help to create the context for the interaction.