November, 2016

The Swedish artist Jonas Lund combines media art deconstruction strategies with contemporary art practices. This results in works that are often participatory, conceptual, or performance-based. In his work Lund easily moves between online and offline systems, and between technological and socio-cultural constructs, all the while working the analogies that bind them. He first got international recognition in 2013 with his first solo exhibition the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), at the Rotterdam art initiative MAMA. For this show Lund created an elaborate analytical software system that told him how to construct each piece in the exhibition, with title and all, based on work by the top-selling artists of the time.

Jonas Lund - Selfportrait

April, 2001

This short interview is part of a small set of interviews I did for a semi-ironic text about net art in the home called 'The Interior of Net Art,' which is also on this site. The goal of the interview is to find out how artists working with the Internet think their work could be exhibited in physical space, and also whether they think it could be sold. These questions have been hovering around net art from the mid-nineties. The artists and art examples in 'The Interior of Net Art' show a great variety of apporaches and opinions.

The grammar and spelling errors in this interview are not accidental, but part of Peppermint's writing style at the time.

May, 2000

Peter Luining lives and works in Amsterdam. His net art is rather 'stylish', in the sense that compared to most net art it does not that clearly reflect on net culture and information. His work is more easthetic. A few years ago [1998] he was called 'the next generation Superbad', because of his particular use of imagery in combination with sound. Peter Luining was asked to curate an exhibition for a Dutch gallery called Planet Art, on the alternative artfair Kunstvlaai. He has gathered an interesting collection there. This interview concentrates mostly on his own work though.

May, 2000

Mary-Anne Breeze, better known as Mez, lives and works in Australia. She first got into a larger net.art picture in 1997, via the net.art mailinglist 7-11. Her work is highly 'textual', but expands to for instance sound as well.

March, 2000

Sound artist Ron Kuivila was in a panel at V2 during the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000, the other speakers being David Blair (Wax Web) and Martin Berghammer (specialist in games). He had the idea to have a net arts notation festival, and would very much like to see it realised. Somehow in the edit he himself made of the interview (I let people do it together with me usually) an interesting aspect of this was lost, namely that it would be very good to also look at which notations would/do -not- get realised and why. Notation/realisation has a long history in performance and music, and a slightly younger one in the visual arts.

November, 2000

Meeting Frederic Madre was a pleasant surprise. Madre had made himself notorious in a very short time by inventing something called a 'spam engine', to create spam art. These days spam (unsolicited advertising in emails) is annoying. In the nineties, when spam was much less pervasive, it was considered not only rude, but also damaging to the Internet. It takes up massive amounts of bandwidth, disrupting the flow of Internet traffic and increasing costs for providers and users.The controversy around spam was easily abused however, by people who wanted to eradicate voices and expression they did not approve of on online platforms. On the mailing list nettime for example it was used in a disagreement between artists and activist and academic users, about what could and could not be posted.

September, 1997

RTMark was the forerunner of the Yesmen. We met at Ars Electronica in 1997. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno presented themselves as Ernesto Lucha and Francisco Gerrero, otherwise known as 'Frank and Ernest'. Their main focus was fighting the incredible power of corporations, which have the same rights as citizens in the United States. By removing the unfair protection this gives to corporations RTMark hoped to force them to act more responsibly.

published: July, 2000

At the time of this interview Steve Dietz was director of new media initiatives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since then Dietz has curated several exhibitions, lectured around the world, and he is currenty artistic director of ZeroOne, an art festival in San Jose California. 'The Walker', as the Walker Art Center is often called in short, was unique for its depth of commitment to multidisciplinary (not interdisciplinary) programming for a large part thanks to Dietz' creative adaptation of his job title of head of new media.

published: March, 1999

"...the netscene wants to stay ascii..."

Station Rose are Elisa Rose and Gary Danner. They are what could be called a multimedia group, mainly doing live performance online and offline. They have been doing this since 1989. In 1999 it was time to ask them a little bit about their motives and ideas after 10 years of engagement in network culture. 

published: September, 1998

I met Kathy Rae Huffman for the first time at the Digital Chaos conference in Bath in 1996. This interview is from about two years later, and it was published on nettime and in 'Netzkunst' edited by Verena Kuni in 1998. It is a very interesting interview in that it covers a very long period of time, from the early work Kathy Rae Huffman did as a curator with Bill Viola, to her work with Van Gogh TV at documenta 92, to her online art project Siberian Deal (with Eva Wohlgemut), and her work with the mailinglist for women in new media 'Faces'.

foto: Jan Sprij for V2

published: February, 2000

In this interview Jeffrey Shaw talks, among other things, about the net.art browser he built for the exhibition Net_Condition in 1999.

August, 2000

Igor Stromajer is a Slovenian artist. I interviewed him in Moscow in 2000. Stromajer talks about how he moved from making art purely for the Web to doing net art performances at the end of the nineties, whereby he would sing or dance the HTML code his website was built from. Nowadays Stromajer mostly does online performances uses robots. Interestingly also his work with robots still shows great sensitivity and the robots are easily given human or emotional traits as they dance, battle or fight for survival.

published: January, 2001

Prema Murthy is an artist living and working in New York. She is one of the founders of the online performance group Fakeshop. Fakeshop is well known for their performances in which a poetic mix of both on and offline environments created a powerful immersive experience. Other Fakeshop members have been fellow founder Jeff Gompertz, Eugene Thacker and Ricardo Dominguez. The interview concentrates first of all on the effects and experiences of CUseeme performance. After that Prema Murty explains why she left Fakeshop and why she has decided to make a video documentary about women working in computer hardware factories in Asia.

This short but sweet interview about Tanaka's Global String was never published. In this beautiful installation Atau Tanaka uses the Internet as a musical instrument, in which the connection between two sites serves as a kind of guitar string.

published: March, 2001

Eugene Thacker is a writer, theorist and artist. I know his work mostly through his collaboration with the New York based net performance group Fakeshop, but he has also done solo projects and is mostly a writer and theorist. Eugene Thacker's work centers around bio tech, science fiction, experimental literature, art and science. We talked at DEAF'00, The Dutch Electronic Art Festival organized by V2 in 2000.

published: December, 1999

This is an interview made with Gerburg Treusch-Dieter made at V2 organisation in Rotterdam December 19th 1999. It is only a brief introduction to her work, but Treusch-Dieter is one of few who deal with the tension between biotechnology and feminism. Gerburg Treusch-Dieter is a sociologist, and she works at both the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Vienna. She also teaches genderstudies, plus she has "a history" in the women's movement (as she calls it: the second or 'new' women's movement.) The interview was roughly translated from German.

published: September, 1999

This interview was made for a publication of the Walker Art Centre in Mineapolis.

published: September, 1999

Mark Bain "I guess my Vibronic system attempts to question this architectural authority in presenting art."

Mark Bain is an artist who makes installations in which sound is an important aspect. His work is interesting, wild and funny. He connects oscillators to architectural structures in order to make them tremble. I saw his work for the first time at DEAF '98, where he not only had used the V2 building as an instrument, but where he was also asked to be part of the big boat party of the festival in the Rotterdam harbour. He attached oscillators to the metal of the top of the boat. He does not use the internet (yet, that is. as you can see at the end of the interview one of his new works involves an extension: an etherconnection), which could be caused by the fact that his work is something one has to preferably experience live, at the site where it is produced. His unconventional choice of the medium to produce sound with however, plus his relaxed attitude towards it, seemed inspiring enough to share with you.

published: July, 1999

Bruno Beusch and Tina Cassani founded TNC network four years before this interview was made. Their work is interesting in that it serves as one of few examples of complex network art, in which audio plays an important part. Here we don't have audio or netradio so much though, but a form of network art that covers many layers of public life (in which media play a basic part) at the same time. Not only media are used as an instrument, but also human participants are carefully chosen for their speciality.

Connected to this, what I like about their work personally much, is the ease with which they 'play' institutions, or the path along institutions to get things done, touching the right string so to speak. Complex net art works need a lot of equipment, input and network-space. Strategies people are trying to develop to ensure independent media art will keep having some space on the net (like independent servers or independent institutions) will never be enough to support them. It is nice to read how clever social networking can accomplish a great deal. Looking at the TNC projects in their entirety, the term 'datajockey' Beusch and Cassani use for themselves seems well chosen.

December, 1998

This is a very short and simple interview with N. Katherine Hayles, who spoke at the DEAF symposium November 20th. Her lecture was very hard to understand for most of the audience, and left people afterwards asking eachother what she had been talking about. I decided to ask her some questions out of curiosity, as I was one of those that lost track at some point during here speech. She was most patient.

published: February, 2002

This interview was made for the newsletter Cream after a symposium on net art criticism in the Balie, Amsterdam. In it Graham Harwood talks about his views on art criticism and specifically about the beauty of systems. 'It is useful for me if people that do net art criticism can write about the context in which the work that I am making appears.'

December, 1999

It would be foolish to state there are no developments in net.art. The developments are simply more difficult to follow, as they are squeezed between a relatively rapid expansion of the net.art field (in what some would call a commercial way) and the growth of 'offical' recognition of net.art by 'high art' institutions. At the same time these two things of course also are developments in net.art, or they for sure produce them. We just need to think of Peter Weibel's project 'the net.art museum'. I spoke to a multimedia art veteran, Antoni Muntadas, about art in new media, net.art in particular, and recognition of artists. Muntadas created an early webproject called the Fileroom in 1994.

This interview was never published because it took a long time before I got to transscribing it. Marko Peljhan thought it was outdated by the time I got to it. It might be interesting nevertheless. Note that the interview was made before the first appearance of Makrolab (at Documenta X) and before Ljudmila Media Lab in Ljubljana got problems that led to its closure.

published: April, 1998

Helen Thorington is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore), and the founder and producer of New American Radio and Turbulence.

Thorington is an award winning writer, sound composer, and radio producer whose documentary, dramatic, and sound/music compositions have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. In September 2003, she performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at The Kitchen, New York. Thorington has also created compositions for film and installation that have been premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and in the Whitney Museum of Americna Arts' annual performance series.

Thorington has produced three narrative works for the web including Solitaire, which combines game and storytelling; and she has played a principal artistic role in the cutting-edge net work Adrift most recently presented as a performance and installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. She is also a seasoned speaker on radio and net art.

published: September, 1997

This one digs a bit into the history of net.art and it shows net.art did not start as a joke or as a hoax. It's made at the infamous nettime meeting in Ljubljana. After the rumor earlier 1997 that net.art would be declared dead in Linz, net.art gets taken to a higher plan instead.

published: November, 1997

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) was interviewed about the text 'As Above, So Below', which they wrote with Faith Wilding. The collective included 5 people at the time: Steve Barnes, Dorian Burr, Steve Kurtz and, (not appearing in Ljubljana) Hope Kurtz and Beverly Schlee.

 July, 1997

Olia Lialina is a net.artist. She lives and works in Moscow. She is also a filmcritic and filmcurator. We talked in Ljudmila Media Lab in Ljubljana in May '97, on the first day of the nettime conference, while the conference was in progress with an American history lesson of the Internet in the main room. We were sitting between other escapees that were doing mail or surfing and the friendly kitchen crew. (JB 1997)

April, 1997

This interview was made at V2 Rotterdam, April 19th 1997 and published on the Nettime list later that year. It was translated into Serbian and published in 'Cyberfeminizam [ver. 1.0]' by Igor Markovich in 1999. Alla Mitrofanova is an art critic, media-philosopher, and media art curator at Gallery 21, St. Petersburg. Olga Suslova is a philosopher and media theoretician; also she is editor of the Virtual Anatomy journal. We discuss this journal and its recent theme, the body. From this we also talk about cyberfeminism. Both Alla Mitrofanova and Olga Suslova consider themselves cyberfeminists

July, 1997

This is a short interview made with Alexei Shulgin made in Januari 1997, at the secret conference on net.art in London. We were both tired and distracted by the surroundings, sitting in a corridor of a pub, people passing, talking loud...Y

July, 1997

June, 1997

So net.art is hot this year [1997], and the net.artists have mixed feelings about it. In Lubljana the part of the program dedicated to it was not satisfying the curiousity that the net.art thread on Nettime had evoked. What it is or isn't is not the main question at the moment and it probably never was. There are other things at play, which unfortunately were not spoken out loud at the conference. This of course is the choice of anyone involved. When you read this interview however, I think you will see just like I have, how more openness could have made the 'secret' part of the conference, the part where the members of Nettime discussed Nettime's future, even more interesting. Is the list too big? Is it turning into a political platform? Will art-postings be barred from Nettime? Is Geert Lovink secretly an artist? These were some of the questions that came to my mind while typing this out.

Dirk Paesmans en Joan Heemskerk collaborate as Jodi since 1995. They were interviewed at the 'secret' conference on net.art, organised by Heath Bunting, in the Backspace gallery, London, in January 1997.