Past Exhibitions: Page 2

Past Exhibitions

Evan Roth

n50.204520e1.538171.fr

9 November – 30 November

“The project started as a venture to find the Internet, but has slowly changed to the relationship between data and the landscape, and then again to the relationship between the self and nature.” Evan Roth.

(Click to launch)

n50.204520e1.538171.fr, Evan Roth, 2016, Network located video, 18:00, Unique, Price on application

Introduction

n50.204520e1.538171.fr follows on from Evan Roth’s solo exhibition Landscapes on Carroll / Fletcher Onscreen, 28 June – 28 July 2016. A physical counterpart to the work is included in the exhibition Looking at one thing and thinking of something else, Part one: Dialogues with Art History, Carroll / Fletcher Eastcastle Street, 11 November – 26 November 2016 (the online exhibition can be viewed here and details of the physical exhibition can be found here).

The work forms part of Roth’s Landscapes series, which first featured in his solo exhibition, Voices over the Horizon, at Carroll / Fletcher’s Eastcastle Street space in Spring 2015. The series began as a pilgrimage to a remote area of Cornwall, on the south-western tip of the UK, where the trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables that carry the Internet emerge from the ocean; a quest to rediscover the optimism, inspiration and sense of community he had found in the Internet’s early days. His pilgrimage has continued with journeys to Internet landing sites in Australia, France, New Zealand and Sweden – n50.204520e1.538171.fr was filmed at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme along the North coast of France.

During his explorations, the project evolved from his initial specific concerns with changes in the structure of and our relationship with the Internet, to a more general meditation on our relationship with and the impact on our lives of the physical, digital and cultural landscape:

“The longer I work on this new series, the more peripheral the Internet becomes in my thinking. I’ve been using the phrase “Internet landscapes” to informally describe the work, but lately I’ve been dropping the “Internet” and just calling them “landscapes” (which I think is more true to what they are). Even though the Internet is a strong character in the narrative, the work is really more about the questioning of my surroundings and search for solutions to issues that fundamentally challenge my art practice and worldview.” Evan Roth in The Black Chamber – surveillance, paranoia, invisibility & the internet, interview with Domenico Quaranta, Bani Brusadin and Ruth McCollough.

n50.204520e1.538171.fr

Although the work begins with a journey by the artist to the landfall site of an undersea Internet cable and a single, continuous static shot film of the landscape (for n50.204520e1.538171.fr, Roth visited Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and shot an 18 minute film), the work itself consists of a digital file of the film located on a web server situated near the landfall site, displayed on a website with a URL web address made up of the GPS co-ordinates of where the camera filmed the landscape, and of the server hosting the video – for n50.204520e1.538171.fr, n50.204520e1.538171 are the GPS co-ordinates and .fr locates the server in France – and, for Roth, the work is only completed when the website is viewed by an audience, i.e. when an infra-red signal travels along the cables from the server hosting the digital file of the film, to the viewer’s computer which displays the film in their browser – the work is the film, plus the network, plus the viewer.

“Visiting the Internet physically is an attempt to repair a relationship that has changed dramatically as the Internet becomes more centralized, monetized and a mechanism for global government spying. Through understanding and experiencing the Internet’s physicality, one comes to understand the network not as a mythical cloud, but as a human made and controlled system of wires and computers.” Evan Roth in Domenico Quaranta, Internet Landscapes. A Journey in Space and Time, in Evan Roth, Kites & Websites, 2016.

Roth films the landscape using infra-red light, a reference to the infra-red light that transmits the signal along the Internet’s fibre-optic cables and to surveillance cameras. The images are accompanied by a two-channel audio track; one channel being the ambient sounds of nature and the other from custom-designed hardware that scans radio frequencies in sync with the artist’s heartbeat. Both the camera and audio-recorder are based on equipment used in ghost hunting.

A still from n50.186091e1.643751, courtesy Evan Roth

“I would also point out that there are things happening within the frame. On first glance it seems as if nothing is going on, but you should be able to notice subtle changes in light as clouds pass in front of the sun, animals, people, airplanes and boats moving in and out of frame, and changes in the wind and wave patterns. These aren’t ‘actions’ as we are used to actions in a typical Internet experience, but actions in nature. I also think there is a performance aspect in watching the piece from start to finish. All of the things that might happen during that period (email notifications, SMS messages, incoming tweets, your impulse to move the mouse so you can see how much time is left) are all a part of the viewing experience. These clips, which are typically shorter than the length of a TED talk, can seem like an eternity to watch in their entirety (especially when viewed in the privacy of your own browser).” Evan Roth, in Domenico Quaranta, Internet Landscape A Journey in Space and Time, in Evan Roth, Kites & Websites, 2016.

n50.204520e1.538171.fr – an expanded experience

If the viewer pastes the co-ordinates n50.204520e1.538171 into the search bar of Google Maps, an alternative exploration of the location is possible.

The route taken by the infra-red signal from the viewer’s computer to the web server can be followed using the computer’s terminal window: with the website open on the screen, go to the computer’s terminal window – /Applications/Utilities/Terminal on Macs or /Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt on PCs – paste the following line and hit return: traceroute n50.204520e1.538171.fr (for Macs) or tracert n50.204520e1.538171.fr (for PCs). Alternatively, James Bridle’s Citizen Ex – http://citizen-ex.com/ – can be used.

Another dimension of the work can be experienced through the source code: in the Chrome menu bar, go to: View/Developer/View Source; Firefox menu bar: Tools/Web Developer/Page Source; Safari menu bar: Safari/Preferences/Advanced, check show Develop Menu in menu bar Develop/Show Page Source (more details can be found here).

A step by step guide to installing n50.204520e1.538171.fr at home

In making the image larger than the browser window, Roth encourages the viewer to navigate around the website using the scroll bar. A detailed exploration reveals a small blue forward slash in the top left corner of the image. This character, known as a path, is used extensively in computer science to specify a unique location in a file system. This path functions as a direct link to the video file on the server: http://n50.204520e1.538171.fr/packets.mp4

Here the video can be viewed to the size of the screen, framed by a black border (it is best viewed full screen without the bookmarks bar or toolbar) and, if mounted on a wall, it becomes reminiscent of a traditional landscape painting.

Collecting the work

Each landscape in the series is a unique work. On purchasing the work the collector receives a monitor, a networked media player, cables, ownership of the lease to the URL and digital files of the video. The purchase is covered by a sales contract (viewable here).

Bio

Evan Roth is an American artist based in Paris whose practice visualises and archives culture through unintended uses of technologies. Creating prints, sculptures, videos and websites, his work explores the relationship between misuse and empowerment and the effect that philosophies from hacker communities can have when applied to digital and non-digital systems.

His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Israel Museum. Recent exhibitions include the 2016 Biennale of Sydney; Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at Whitechapel Gallery, London; and This Is for Everyone at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Roth co-founded the arts organisations Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art and Technology Lab and in 2016 was a recipient of Creative Capital funding.

Links

Related texts:

Kites & Websites, Evan Roth with text from Domenico Quaranta
The Black Chamber – surveillance, paranoia, invisibility & the internet, interview with Domenico Quaranta, Bani Brusadin and Ruth McCollough (full exhibition catalogue here).
Infra-red Wuthering Heights, interview with Filippo Lorenzin in Digicult magazine.

Related exhibitions:

Voices Over the Horizon
The Black Chamber
Internet Landscapes: Sydney
Kites & Websites

Related works:

Total Internal Reflection
Kites

http://next.liberation.fr/culture/2015/03/26/evan-roth-debris-de-fond_1228978
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/evan-roth-physical-internet-ghost-hunting
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/exploring-internet-ghost-hunting-equipment/
http://hyperallergic.com/283973/a-pioneering-net-artist-mourns-the-unfulfilled-promise-of-the-internet
http://mashable.com/2016/03/15/evan-roth-biennale-sydney/#bU98Tus1Zuqw
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3058543/making-it/the-mysterious-infrastructure-of-the-internet-made-visible/1

“The filming requires me to be still in these locations for periods of 10 to 20 minutes at a time, and what I found during these moments of stillness was that I really wanted to check my inbox. After 30 seconds I would instinctively reach for my pocket to see what was happening on email/twitter/instagram. I remember one time I was filming on top of a cliff in Sweden looking out over the water and whales started coming up for air. It was so quiet that the sounds of their breaths were strikingly loud. Despite this being one of the most beautiful moments I’ve had in nature, I was disappointed in myself as I went from witnessing this sublime moment, to feeling slightly bored, and then finally questioning whether I should post it on Instagram, all within the course of two minutes… Part of what interests me in the Internet Landscape series is the struggle to take more control over my relationship with time and how it is connected to the consumption of media, nature and the moments when I am not being social (online or in person).” Evan Roth, Infra-red Wuthering Heights, interview with Filippo Lorenzin, Digicult magazine.

Jan Robert Leegte

On Digital Materiality

3 August – 19 September 2016

Introduction

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition, the fifth in Carroll / Fletcher’s series of online exhibitions (previous exhibitions can be viewed here), continues the exploration of Internet aesthetics, digital materiality and the contemporary sublime. In the vein of the performative sculptural tradition of Bruce Nauman’s and Dan Graham’s early work, Jan Robert Leegte’s exhibition playfully explores the nature of digital materiality and its manifestation within both online/virtual/digital and offline/physical/analogue spaces, and the relationship between these spaces as they constitute a single reality. Leegte considers the Internet as an ‘online public studio and exhibition space’ and often, albeit slightly tongue-in-cheekly, describes himself as an ‘Internet-based conceptual sculptor exploring the time-based, performative nature of the Internet in net installations’.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay, in which Leegte outlines his development as an artist and the principles underpinning his practice.

A note on viewing the works

The exhibition is a combination of physical works, experienced as static images of the works installed in an exhibition space, and website works, experienced through an iframe, which provides a window onto the work itself. For the optimal viewing experience, it is recommended that the website is opened in a separate tab or window in full-screen mode. Many of the works are interactive. Consequently, visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to click, drag, drop, and generally play with the works. As ever with website works, the online space extends beyond the webpage to the address bar, tab, history cache, source code, etc. Navigating around these spaces often yields surprising results and insights. To view the source code in Chrome menu bar: View/Developer/View Source; in Firefox menu bar: Tools/Web Developer/Page Source; in Safari menu bar: Safari/Preferences/Advanced – check show Develop menu in menu bar/Develop/Show page source.

Please note: most of the works predate the smart phone, and have been made exclusively for a desktop or laptop computer. Hence, the show is not experienced optimally on a mobile device.

A note on purchasing websites

The website works are for sale. The rights and responsibilities of the parties to a sale are detailed in a sales contract (available here). The buyer receives, amongst other things, a digital file of the underlying code, a lease to the domain name, a certificate of authenticity and a video of the website. Further information on collecting internet-based work can be found in the ‘Collecting’ section of www.carrollfletcheronscreen.com.

On Digital Materiality – an Internet exhibition

The Scrollbar Composition Series

Scrollbar Composition, 2000

Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

To view the work optimally, visit http://www.scrollbarcomposition.com

Scrollbar, 2002

Computer animation, media player, projector, wood
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: 120 x 6 x 1.6 cm (+ projector distance)

Scrollbar Composition, 2005

Computer animation, media player, projector, wood
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: 380 x 266 x 244 cm (+ projector distance)

In Memory of New Materials Gone, 2014

Archival Inkjet print mounted on MDF, vitrine
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: 110 x 50 x 100 cm

Dumpster, 2016

Dumpster, Archival Inkjet prints mounted on MDF, construction light
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable (approx. 500 x 500 x 200 cm)

The Photoshop Selection Marquee Series

The Act of Selection Objectified, 2013

Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

To activate use mouse or trackpad to click and drag. Laptop or desktop only.
To view the work optimally, visit http://www.theactofselectingobjectified.com

Random Selection in Random Image, 2012

Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

To view the work optimally, visit http://www.randomselectioninrandomimage.com

Selection, 2006

Computer animation, media player, projector
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: 50 x 70 cm (+ projector distance)

The Table Border Series

Untitled Work, 2004

Computer animation, media player, projector, painted wood
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: 100 x 100 x 100 cm (+ projector distance)

Cassette Ceiling, 2007

Computer animation, media players, projectors
Unique (site-specific), price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

Image Credits: Mediaruimte

Random Table Border, 2015

Website, domain name
Unique, courtesy Evan Roth Collection
Dimensions: variable

Refresh page to activate.
To view the work optimally, visit http://www.randomtableborder.com

The Computer as Studio (and Gallery)

Mouse Pointer, 2003

Website, domain name
Unique, courtesy Jonas Lund Collection
Dimensions: variable

Click once and move with mouse or trackpad. Laptop and desktop only.
To view the work optimally, visit http://www.mousepointer.name

Three Buttons, 2005

Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

Use mouse or trackpad to click. Laptop and desktop only.
To view the work optimally, visit http://www.threebuttons.work

Blue Monochrome, 2008

Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

To view the work optimally, visit http://www.bluemonochrome.com

Google Maps as a Sculpture, 2013

Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

To view the work optimally, visit http://www.googlemapsasasculpture.com/index.html

On Digital Materiality – an essay

The most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the statement. It was a kind of test—like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it. Once written down, I could see that the statement […] was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It’s true and not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take yourself. For me it’s still a very strong thought. – Bruce Nauman on ‘The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths’

It was 1997, at the height of the net.art movement, when I got my first real shot of Internet heroin. I’d been playing around with digital techniques, even browser-based experiments at art school – I was fortunate to be accepted at the Rotterdam Art Academy, which had invested heavily in digital labs in the mid-nineties. But it wasn’t until I acquired my first XS4ALL hosting account, that the hit set in. On a midweek night, after uploading some HTML experiments to the web space of my account, I became a net artist. Standing in my brand new browser-based studio, public to the whole world, and feeling the electricity of a practically unexplored artistic realm and potential revolution, a new door had been permanently kicked open. I had read and seen work from the net.art movement and was already interested, but it was this moment that changed me from interested student to rookie net artist.

My background until then had been studying Architecture at the University of Delft, after which I enrolled at the Art Academy in Rotterdam. This combination of disciplines led to my practice including both making sculptural objects and installations, and also physically experiencing, often performatively, the objects to better understand their spatial and material properties. Examples from that time would be Untitled (1998), a paper sculpture I could crawl into, Seclusion (1998), a performance with a stack of Xerox paper, and Scotch Tape (1999), four short strips of scotch tape holding a pocket of air. I conceived of these works as investigative probes, materialized ideas that dealt with trying to question and understand materiality through making materially ambiguous sculptures, and interacting with them either conceptually or physically. This way of working used traditional materials and our preconceptions of the materials, twisting and stretching them to alter our perception. This resulted in my academic work experimenting with performance, interactive sculpture, projections, installations, drawings, etc.

During Art School I had introductory classes in coding, mainly in Macromedia Director and early versions of Flash. I became interested in simple procedural techniques, animation and interaction, but the graphic-oriented nature of these programs didn’t relate to my sculptural interest. We were also taught to make websites using Adobe PageMill, but the WYSIWYG nature of this editor made it feel like a DTP tool for webpages, so again, not something that resonated with the sculptural works I was making at the time. However, it led to an interest in the underlying code of the browser, the HTML markup language. By copying parts of web projects I liked, (these not being editable in Adobe PageMill) forced me to start editing the code directly, which became my new default way of working in the browser space. This, ‘getting your hands dirty’, way of working, in combination with putting something online for the first time, resonated with my sculptural work in a totally new way.

Working in the fresh online public studio space, I began labeling my experiments ‘net-installations’. At first this was a perceptual description, as creating in the browser-space felt distinctly different to working in Photoshop. Photoshop is like a technical continuation of the painting tradition. Everything about the Photoshop experience is working on a surface: brushes, pencils, stamping, erasing, etc. Although the interaction is of a haptic nature, the result is basically an extension of painting. In contrast, working in HTML and the browser felt very similar to my studio practice of sculpture and installation: constructing within a space material compositions and sculptural constructions, which I could experience mentally and physically through direct physical interaction. Not an interaction like making a work in Photoshop, but a direct haptic experience of the work itself: I have never experienced a browser-based work the same as an image-file based work.

The materials I first used were basic HTML objects, buttons, scrollbars, frame borders, table borders, and also plain color fields and found images. I questioned what it was that rendered this practice similar to making installations rather than collages. At first it was the simulacrum of real world interactive elements (buttons, window frames, etc.). The operating system extended this haptic strategy with traditional paper-based forms, like check boxes, text fields, lists, etc, and, along with the form elements and the interactive document, led to an ecosystem of fake 3D, interactive objects.

Adding user-interaction to the tradition of trompe l’oeil, uniquely combined within the computer, formed the base of this browser-based sculptural environment. In contrast, I also began adding random animation techniques, which lifted the objects out of their passive, waiting stillness, like in Tires (1999). This enhanced the autonomy of the object and relieved the viewer of the need to interact (break the click habit).

All these materials were made with code, in contrast to drawing them in Photoshop. Using a simple text editor, I would type HTML code and JavaScript, then, after saving the file, I would switch to the browser to view the executed code, then go back and forth, repeating these steps to make the work. This switching of spaces, from the ‘back’, the textual instruction or invocation, to the ‘front’, the execution or manifestation of this text (code) as a website was key in my experience of the spatial character of browser-based working. A subjective, maker’s point of view, but one that has been expressed in works such as Jodi’s wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (1995) and my own Portrait of a Webserver (2013) or Source Code Mirroring Itself (2013) – in these works viewing the source code alongside the website enriches the experience of the work and reinforces the idea that the work consists of the two elements.

Another switch in space is the transfer from the local computer space to the public server space. By putting the files on a webserver, they become publicly accessible. It’s like relocating the work from your studio space to a gallery. Only in this case the whole studio is taken along. It’s more like opening your studio to the public. These moves between the different spaces and working in the browser intuitively extended my work as installation artist. It also captured the ambiguity of materiality in a much more exciting and new way.

From a phenomenological viewpoint, my experience of an interface button in a website or a wooden plank in a studio was the same. One of the first online materials I started using was the scrollbar. By making huge empty pages and putting them in framesets, I isolated the scrollbars and presented them in minimalistic compositions. From 1999 to 2002, the first years after art school graduation, I worked exclusively on the net. Following extensive online studies and experiments, the scrollbar thread culminated in the saturated Scrollbar Composition (2000).

In 2002 I began to realize that the online audience was misreading my work. Visitors would sometimes interpret my work as an intentional aggravation for the user or even subversive. To me, the browser-based context was a gallery space, and work within this context was to be perceived in a manner similar to any physical gallery space, i.e. with attention and reflection. But this was not how the Internet worked; it was a highly impatient, click-based environment. Consequently, I decided that it was the effect of the medium – the Internet – that created these unintended connotations and, thus, took the installations out of the browser and into the physical gallery.

This shifting to physical space was a very effective way of dispensing with this problem. An early experience of exhibiting net art in a gallery context was the website Scrollbars (1997), a work I showed in my graduation show as Scrollbars, floor piece (1999). This hadn’t worked, as people weren’t ready to read this as sculpture. The first successful attempt I produced was Scrollbar (2002). Projecting an isolated scrollbar onto a strip of wood made the hoped for impact. People took time to engage with the piece, become confused and let the new materiality soak in. Scrollbar (2002) marked a new important direction in my Internet-related art practice.

During the period of making online pieces only, I worked on both Windows and Macintosh computers, more specifically on the Windows 95 and 98, and Mac OS 8 and 9 operating systems. I made the choice to produce the physical works using the Windows interface, due to its minimalist design and widespread use (it being the industry standard at the time). The design stuck with me, I consistently used it until the installation Scrollbar Composition (2005).

A long time later, in 2011, when I revisited the scrollbar, I realized that the constant evolution of the interface was a fundamental material aspect of this proprietary, yet public, material. It was in a continuous fluid metamorphosis, both on the level of code and the material design. After this point I started showing scrollbar pieces in different interface versions, for example Scrollbar Composition 2011 (2011) and Scrollbar Composition 2013 (2013). In 2016, in response to this fluidity, and to capture the evolution, of Scrollbar Composition (2000), at the Whitechapel gallery’s exhibition The Electronic Superhighway, conservator Dragan Espenschied, the others at Rhizome and I decided to exhibit a triptych, in which each panel used a different operating system to show the work – Windows 95, Mac OS X 10.6 (also known as the aqua interface) and Mac OS X 10.10.

This fluidity and evolution has been described as the performative nature of the Internet. The transformations and decay of net-based art give them the aspect of a time-based performance. Even as some works have survived the Internet from the very beginning, the conditions in which they originally where shown, have changed; the browsers have evolved, the works have become visible on mobile devices, the display resolutions have become higher, but most of all the net cultural, economic and political context has changed, like works embedded in social media. The most recent steps in dealing with this history of passing sculptural materials are the works In Memory of New Materials Gone (2014) and Dumpster (2016).

In the time between 2005 and 2011, while the scrollbar theme was on hold, I was working on other key materials in my work, the HTML table border, the bevel and the Photoshop selection marquee. The HTML table border is another of the browser-based materials I took with me in 2002 into the physical context, from the projection Untitled Work (2002) to the sculpture Untitled Work (2004) to the site-specific installations Cassette Ceiling (2006, 2007) and many adaptations in between. The table border went full circle returning to the net in the website Random Table Border (2015).

I preferred the aesthetics of the Windows classic interface design because of its minimalistic design – no rounded corners and ribbings like the OS 9 design, but simple beveled grey rectangles, and a button object was merely a highlight and a shadow, nothing more. These design principles and their offspring, the drop shadows, defined the aesthetics of the operating system,

I was already applying table borders as traditional architectural ornamentation in the manner of cassette ceilings and wall paneling, when, during a residency at the Museum Quartier in Vienna in 2006, I started to use the bevel as a distilled digital base material. During this residency, I also explored the relationships between browser interface objects, architectural ornamentation and ideas of digital materiality. This led me to begin considering how our ideas of the sublime and of performance and the stage could be extended into the digital realm – the digital stage and the interface as stage set. This culminated in the investigative manifesto The Silent Ornamental Revolution (2006) and the image-based interventions Untitled Ornaments (2006) – procedural works developed in Flash, followed by projected site-specific works. The simulated ornamental bevels would be flipped from a positive to a negative state randomly in time, creating a living augmented ornamentation. In Alexandria, Egypt this resulted in Ornaments (Alexandria), (2006). A later version, emphasizing the interface as stage set, was Ornaments (Rotterdam II) (2009). The most recent execution of this series is Ornament (Amsterdam) (2016).

Projecting in the physical space had the advantage of literally bringing the digital materiality, in all its bits and pixels, connected to the net and processed in real time, to the physical space. The disadvantage was that the projection introduced a layer of light that augmented the gallery space and the light’s dominance prevented the work blending into the ambiance of the space – a level of cinematic reference fundamentally rendering the work ‘elsewhere’.

The installation Three Spaces (2006), made together with sound artist Martijn Tellinga, was my first attempt to overcome this problem. The three spaces involved were the space of sound, the space of the digital, and a new hybrid space, where the digital materiality was manifested in a non-electronic way. I painted two monumental murals of table borders in different states of random generation. The table borders became stills, but the materiality upheld, and the blending into the physical space was a big gain. Having taken this step, I applied this method in more projects, notably Inverted Relief on Door (2008) using tape and The Silent Ornamental Revolution (2008) applying urban postering.

Though the painting itself (as an object) defines its materiality, perception and artistic tradition, the act of making includes many others. The act is time-based and performative, the tools are sculptural in nature and the setting could be a site-specific intervention. Interfacing with computer software, I found these subsets to be particularly interesting over the commonly intended final result. Often I heard remarked that the computer was merely a tool to gain a result, whereas I experienced it as a studio in which I could engage and interact with the materials and objects. A space in which I could existentially relate to, feel, observe or simply just be. Examples of works mirroring this were Email (1998), Mouse Pointer (2003), Software Study (2004) and Three Buttons (2005).

One of these materials was the Photoshop selection marquee. The marquee, activated by dragging the mouse pointer, outlines a selected area with animated dashed lines, also known as marching ants. It is the digital equivalent of encircling something on paper with a pencil, though as with all digital materiality, much is different. Unlike the encircling with a pencil, the selection is decoupled from that which it is selecting; you can select over and over again, not leaving a mark on the document; the selection is autonomous. It’s like encircling something you see with your mind. And this was what excited me about this new stuff: it seemed to be a material manifestation of a cognitive process.

Note the use of the word “stuff”. It’s a term I use when the materiality in question is so exotic, it becomes hard to state in collectively objective terms, when to me it unequivocally exists.

I used the Photoshop selection marquee as a new base material in a series of gallery installations. The first and most elementary piece was Selection (2006) followed by more complex compositions and contexts, like Selections (2006) and Random Selections Objects (2015).

In 2008, I was introduced, by, amongst others, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart and John Michael Boling (who invited me to join the Nasty Nets Internet surfing club), to the emerging second wave Internet art scene and given a crash course in the new generation’s approach to Internet art. Although there was a lot of overlap, the cultural differences were wide, and it took a couple of years of introspection to reposition my work.

In 2012, when the tendency was to show Internet-related work in the gallery space, I moved back to work solely on the net. I had become inspired by the new generation of Internet artists, as well as the dramatic developments in technology, culture and politics online.

One of the first online pieces that came out of this was Random Selection in Random Image (2012), which introduced the Photoshop selection marquee within a browser-based context – the work features a randomly generated selection marquee within an image randomly obtained from the net. This automated procedural work emphasised the idea of the autonomous character of the marquee and also, through the use of photographic images, brought home its Photoshop origin. Other fundamental studies of the materiality of the marquee within the online context are Selection as an Object (2013) and The Act of Selecting Objectified (2013). Similar to the Scrollbar Compositions series formal development of the base work Scrollbar (2002), the Photoshop Selection Marquee series explores the formal application of a base material. An example, which has also been shown as site-specific installation, is the web piece Concentric Selections of Gradient (2014).

The integration of live appropriated net-based third party images used in Random Selection in Random Image (2012) was done through the API (Application Program Interface) of the image database of Flickr. Using an API of third party net services, either proprietary or open source, is a typical development in web 2.0 technologies that changed the materiality of the net. The change was not only of a technological nature, but also one with cultural and political impact. Through an API you could integrate services in your work, with brand new material properties. The Google Maps API was one I started working with. Through it, you could sculpt Google Maps as material and use it for your work. The first piece I made was Blue Monochrome (2008). In the work I tried to merge Yves Klein’s ambitions seen in the contemporary post-Internet context with my own interest in sublimity and proprietary materiality. A second piece I made using the Google Maps API was Google Maps as a Sculpture (2013).

Currently, my work is very hybrid, works are executed in either the browser-based or the physical domain, and jump back and forward effortlessly. Over the years the materiality still hasn’t been cornered, but does move fluidly in and out of the net. To conclude with a recent work, which loops back to the Bruce Nauman quote at the beginning, and again trying to respond to Nauman’s work and text in the contemporary post-Internet condition, but also on a more personal level, in the context of two decades working with the ambiguity of materiality: The Immaterial Materialised (2014).

The Immaterial Materialised, 2014

Silk screen on dibond, Website, domain name
Unique, price and further details available on request
Dimensions: variable

Image credits

All images by Jan Robert Leegte unless mentioned.

Biography

Jan Robert Leegte (born 1973, The Netherlands) started working as an artist on the Internet in 1997. In 2002, he shifted his main focus to implementing digital materials in the context of the physical gallery space, aiming to bridge the online art world with the gallery art world. In 2008, through exchanges with the upcoming next generation of Internet artists and inspired by the dramatic shift in online culture and technologies, he began refocusing on the web. As an artist Leegte explores the position of the new materials put forward by the (networked) computer. Photoshop selection marquees, scrollbars, Google Maps, code and software are dissected for their sculptural properties. He has exhibited widely, most recently in Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2016.

Jan Robert Leegte lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Website: http://www.leegte.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leegte

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JanRobertLeegte

Instagram: https://instagram.com/leegte

Evan Roth

Landscapes

28 June – 18 July 2016

Introduction

Evan Roth’s Landscapes is the fourth in Carroll / Fletcher’s series of online exhibitions (previous exhibitions can be viewed here). The series, launched in March 2016, forms an integral part of Carroll / Fletcher’s overall programme of exhibitions and art fairs, Roth’s Landscapes series first featured in his Spring 2015 solo exhibition, Voices over the Horizon, and includes work that is available for sale.

In the autumn of 2014, disillusioned with the increasing centralisation, monetisation and corporate and governmental control and surveillance of the Internet, Evan Roth embarked on a pilgrimage to rediscover the optimism, inspiration and sense of community he had found in the Internet’s early days. Roth’s quixotic quest began with a trip to a remote area of Cornwall, on the south-western tip of the UK, where the trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables that carry the Internet emerge from the ocean.

In subsequent journeys to submarine Internet cable land-fall sites in Australia, France, New Zealand and Sweden, what began as a personal voyage of rediscovery evolved into a deeper investigation of, and desire to make manifest, the impact of the Internet on our everyday lives, how it structures our perception of the physical and digital world and, consequently, influences our thoughts, feelings and actions. And, as Roth explores the cultural, political and technological contours of our natural and digital landscape, he emerges as an urgent chronicler of the contemporary sublime.

“One day, I was looking out over the dreary expanse of the desert. As far as the eye could see, the purple steps of the uplands rose up in series, towards horizons of exotic wildness… On such occasions, maybe, I have been possessed by a great yearning to go out and find, far from men and far from toil the place where dwell the vast forces that cradle and possess us… And then all my sensibility became alert, as though at the approach of a god of easy-won happiness and intoxication; for there lay matter, and matter was calling me.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, 1916 (quoted in Jeffrey Kastner, Call of the Wild: Four Natural Duets for Richard T. Walker, 2013).

Internet Landscapes: Sydney, 2016

(Scroll right to view more)

Internet Landscapes: Sydney, Evan Roth, 2016, a series of 11 unique network-located videos (price on application)

http://s33.727473e151.235952.com.au

http://s33.734152e151.304727.com.au

http://s33.806901e151.299299.com.au

http://s33.820180e151.184813.com.au

http://s33.843574e151.144477.com.au

http://s33.844228e151.144557.com.au

http://s33.848846e151.173501.com.au

http://s33.849695e151.244546.com.au

http://s33.851451e151.286459.com.au

http://s33.851850e151.244960.com.au

http://s33.898239e151.275644.com.au

Internet Landscapes: Sydney forms part of Roth’s evolving exploration of the physical, digital and cultural landscape of the Internet and its relationship to our overall worldview. Each network-located video documents the landfall, near Sydney, of the under-sea fibre-optic cables that carry the Internet. The landscape is filmed in infra-red light, in reference to the infra-red light that transmits the signal along the Internet’s fibre-optic cables, as well as to surveillance cameras. The images are accompanied by a two-channel audio track; one channel being the ambient sounds of nature and the other from custom-designed hardware that scans radio frequencies in sync with the artist’s heartbeat. Both the camera and audio-recorder are based on equipment used in ghost hunting.

Each video forms the content of a website located on a server in Sydney. The URL, or web address, is made up of the GPS co-ordinates of the camera-filming location, and of the server hosting the video. Thus, in http://s33.727473e151.235952.com.au s33.727473e151.235952 are the GPS co-ordinates and .com.au locates the server in Australia. If the viewer pastes the co-ordinates in the search bar of Google Maps (https://www.google.co.uk/maps), an alternative exploration of the location is possible.

In making the image larger than the browser window, Roth encourages the viewer to navigate around the landscape using the scroll bar. A detailed exploration reveals a small blue forward slash in the top left corner of the image. This character, known as a path, is used extensively in computer science to specify a unique location in a file system. This path functions as a direct link to the video file on the server:

http://s33.727473e151.235952.com.au/packets.mp4

“I would also point out that there are things happening within the frame. On first glance it seems as if nothing is going on, but you should be able to notice subtle changes in light as clouds pass in front of the sun, animals, people, airplanes and boats moving in and out of frame, and changes in the wind and wave patterns. These aren’t “actions” as we are used to actions in a typical Internet experience, but actions in nature. I also think there is a performance aspect in watching the piece from start to finish. All of the things that might happen during that period (email notifications, SMS messages, incoming tweets, your impulse to move the mouse so you can see how much time is left) are all a part of the viewing experience. These clips, which are typically shorter than the length of a TED talk, can seem like an eternity to watch in their entirety (especially when viewed in the privacy of your own browser).” Evan Roth, quoted in Domenico Quaranta, Internet Landscapes. A Journey in Space and Time, in Evan Roth, Kites & Websites, 2016.

As Roth notes, the audio track reinforces the image’s sense of place. The experience of the work within the ambient sounds and visual clutter of our everyday environment highlights our networked condition. And for Roth the network forms an integral part of the work: when a viewer visits the website a signal travels as a beam of infra-red light through the network of cables stretching from the viewer’s computer to the server in Sydney and back. This route can be traced on the viewer’s computer by going to the terminal window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal on Macs, or /Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt on PCs), pasting in the following line and hitting return:

traceroute s33.727473e151.235952.com.au (for Macs)

tracert s33.727473e151.235952.com.au (for PCs)

The path from the viewer’s computer to Sydney is traced out step by step:

(note: This traceroute was run from a computer located in Paris)

The route can also be seen graphically using James Bridle’s Citizen Ex – http://citizen-ex.com:

“Every time you connect to the internet, you pass through time, space, and law. Information is sent out from your computer all over the world, and sent back from there. This information is stored and tracked in multiple locations, and used to make decisions about you and determine your rights. These decisions are made by people, companies, countries and machines, in many countries and legal jurisdictions. Citizen Ex shows you where these places are. Your Algorithmic Citizenship is how you appear to the internet, as a collection of data extending across many nations, with a different citizenship and different rights in every place. One day perhaps we will all live like we do on the internet.” James Bridle.

A further dimension of the materiality of the work is opened up when the source code is viewed:

To view the source code in the Chrome menu bar, go to: View/Developer/View Source; Firefox menu bar: Tools/Web Developer/Page Source; Safari menu bar: Safari/Preferences/Advanced, check show Develop Menu in menu bar Develop/Show Page Source.

The code between lines 2 and 66 is written such that while humans can read it, machines cannot. In a reference to the horizon line and nodes of the network route, the star is a unicursal hexagram; a hexagram drawn with a single unbroken line often used in occult religions to symbolise the intermingling of micro- and macro-cosmic forces. Below the star we find a description of the work:

The title (i.e. the URL of the website which includes the GPS co-ordinates of the landscape and the location of the server): 727473e151.235952.com.au by Evan Roth, 2016;
The Google Maps page for the location: https://goo.gl/maps/obbadUD8tKF2;
The terminal command to follow the route from the viewer’s computer to the server hosting the website: traceroute s33.727473e151.235952.com.au
The web address for two alternative installation orientations for the work: http://s33.727473e151.235952.com.au/rotate/90/packets.mp4 and http://s33.727473e151.235952.com.au/rotate/270/packets.mp4

And if the viewer goes to line 110 some more human-only readable code can be found, a note of gratitude and thanks from one artist to another:

<!–hat tip Olia Lialina, view-source:http://best.effort.network/ –>

The Landscape Series

Total Internal Reflection, Evan Roth, 2015, single-channel video, 9′ 46″, edition of 3 + 1 AP, price on application

In the autumn of 2014, as a pilgrimage to rediscover the optimism, inspiration and sense of community Roth found in the early days of the Internet, he made a trip to Cornwall on the south-westerly tip of the UK, one of the world’s most important telecommunications hubs dating back to the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cables laid there in 1870. Today, fibre-optic Internet cabling connecting the United States to Europe ascends from the depths of the Atlantic basin onto the Cornish coast carrying 25% of the world’s Internet traffic. Zigzagging and disappearing through several small beach towns, here the physical Internet meets a picturesque, untamed landscape, long steeped in tales of both communication technologies and the paranormal.

In a quixotic attempt to re-establish a spiritual connection, Roth turned to ghost-hunting technologies to record his trip and investigate the physical and virtual landscape. These strange-looking devices, including full-spectrum video cameras, thermal flashlights and electronic voice phenomenon recorders, were developed by a close-knit DIY community. They not only lent themselves to Internet-focused modifications but also re-kindled a sense of mystery and wonder toward technology. Like his ghost-hunting counterparts whose urgent enquiries into the supernatural were often conducted on sites of assumed paranormal activity, Roth ventured out with his ghost-hunting toolkit into the landscape that physically hosts the Internet, in a personal quest to visualise and reconnect with what has become so integral to contemporary life; making sense of a web which feels less dynamic, less chaotic, more centralized and more controlled.

Total Internal Reflection connects together a series of moments from Roth’s trip shot with a full-spectrum ghost-hunting camera. The audio for the piece, recorded on location, is drawn from a custom-built instrumental trans-communication device or ‘ghost box’, which scans radio frequencies at regular intervals in search of paranormal activity. The scanning of radio static blends with the ambient noises of waves and wind and the warm tones of the images to evoke a powerful sense of place. The video formed part of Roth’s solo exhibition Voices Over The Horizon at Carroll / Fletcher.

Voices Over the Horizon at Carroll/Fletcher, Evan Roth, 2015

“Visiting the Internet physically is an attempt to repair a relationship that has changed dramatically as the Internet becomes more centralized, monetized and a mechanism for global government spying. Through understanding and experiencing the Internet’s physicality, one comes to understand the network not as a mythical cloud, but as a human made and controlled system of wires and computers.” Evan Roth quoted in Domenico Quaranta, Internet Landscapes. A Journey in Space and Time, in Evan Roth, Kites & Websites, 2016.

http://n57.680235e11.668160.se, Evan Roth, 2015, network-located video from the series:

http://n57.630653e11.878293.se
http://n57.675322e11.662511.se
http://n57.888698e11.688815.se
http://n57.889503e11.685638.se
http://n59.329452e18.132398.se
http://n59.329736e18.132242.se
http://n59.363142e18.254658.se
http://n48.879773e2.367629.fr
http://s36.784432e174.777591.co.nz
http://s36.787854e174.775050.co.nz
http://s36.809596e174.417374.co.nz
http://s36.810855e174.422624.co.nz

All works unique, price on application.

As part of the Kites & Websites solo exhibition and Black Chamber group exhibition, Roth continued his pilgrimage with visits to Internet landing sites in France, New Zealand and Sweden. The locations are often remote and inaccessible; not meant to be visited by land – the signs indicating the presence of the submarine cables face the ocean, unreadable by casual visitors strolling on the beach or hiking along the cliffs. With a sensibility reminiscent of a Romantic landscape painter confronted by the sublime, he used an infrared camera to shoot the images and a custom-built audio-recorder to capture the ambient sounds and scan and capture radio frequencies at intervals regulated by the artist’s heartbeat. The use of an infrared, rather than full-spectrum, camera and two-channel recording marked a refinement in the techniques used in Total Internal Reflection, and, in a further development, the videos are viewable via websites hosted in the locations of the landscapes (see the section above for further details).

Kites & Websites at Belenius/Nordenhake, Evan Roth, 2016

“The filming requires me to be still in these locations for periods of 10 to 20 minutes at a time, and what I found during these moments of stillness was that I really wanted to check my inbox. After 30 seconds I would instinctively reach for my pocket to see what was happening on email/twitter/Instagram. I remember one time I was filming on top of a cliff in Sweden looking out over the water and whales started coming up for air. It was so quiet that the sounds of their breaths were strikingly loud. Despite this being one of the most beautiful moments I’ve had in nature, I was disappointed in myself as I went from witnessing this sublime moment, to feeling slightly bored, and then finally questioning whether I should post it on Instagram, all within the course of two minutes… Part of what interests me in the Internet Landscape series is the struggle to take more control over my relationship with time and how it is connected to the consumption of media, nature and the moments when I am not being social (online or in person).” Evan Roth, Infra-red Wuthering Heights, interview with Filippo Lorenzin, Digicult magazine.

http://s33.849695e151.244546.com.au, Evan Roth, 2016, network-located video, unique, price on application.

“I see Internet Landscapes more as a series about a personal struggle to find optimism and inspiration within an environment that feels irreversibly changed. It’s reflective of the cultural and political issues that precipitated this change… [and as an attempt] to come to a better visual and conceptual understanding of what the network is, and how it affects us individually and as a society.” Evan Roth, Infra-red Wuthering Heights, interview with Filippo Lorenzin, Digicult magazine.

Collecting the work

Links

Related texts:

Related exhibitions:

Voices Over the Horizon
The Black Chamber
Internet Landscapes: Sydney
Kites & Websites

Related works:

Total Internal Reflection
Kites

Bio

Afterword 3

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel (quoted in Elephant, Summer 2015).

—

“What do we mean by the web of the mid 90’s and when did it end? To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous…or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.” Olia Lialina, A Vernacular Web, 2005, http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

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From an interview with Eva and Franco Mattes:

TB: Overall, how have the changes to the Internet over the two-plus decades you’ve been working affected your practice?

FM: There was a lot of idealism connected to the Internet in the ’90s, even, I would say, utopianism: that we’d finally found the technology that was decentralized and free and open sourced, that would bring about democracy, if not anarchy, on planet Earth. You could share information with the rest of the world for free in real time without any copy restrictions, without any monetary interchange. Of course, we’ve realized that it’s not that simple.

EM: We were young kids trying to make things. We both come from very narrow-minded, provincial, small places, so the Internet seemed like a place where you could get to a wider audience than you could normally if you were trying to show your work in a gallery. You could bypass traditional institutions and get in contact with audiences directly. It was really inspiring, in a way.

FM: And it’s gone.

Courtesy Eva and Franco Mattes, Thea Ballard and Modern Painters, 2016.

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“Hello might easily be seen as in line with Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s call, in his 1970 text Constituents of a Theory of the Media, to overcome the ‘consciousness-shaping industry’ of corporate broadcasting by harnessing media’s ‘emancipatory potential’ through interaction, feedback, and the potential reciprocity of reception and transmission. Like Nam June Paik, in his 1984 New Year’s Day satellite broadcast Good Morning, Mr Orwell, Enzensberger pushes back against the Big Brother thesis of media’s inherent complicity with sovereign power, seeing this as a paranoid fantasy of totalisation. Though such a McLuhanesque technoutopianism does indeed permeate Hello’s promise of connectivity, the tele-happening also points to something crucial that has become a central point of interrogation for many of the artists making work with and about new technologies: the exercise of power does not cease to exist over distributed networks, it simply functions differently. Time and time again, the Internet has been heralded as the harbinger of freedom, progress and the expansion of democracy. For many artists, the task is not to deny such possibilities, but to offer a deflationary, ambivalent form of engagement that stems from within the technosphere and emphasises the extent to which we all operate within a system founded on principles of algorithmic control. Even bi- or multi-directional interactive apparatuses remain apparatuses, operating at the intersection of power and knowledge and possessing, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, “the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model. Control, or secure the gestures, opinions, behaviours, or discourses of living beings”. Contrary to Enzensberger’s claim, this capactity is made even more powerful by the transformation of these living beings from spectators to participants.” Erika Balsom, On the Grid in the catalogue for Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, 2016.

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“When I’m in the field filming [the Landscape Series], I usually shoot still tripod shots between 10 and 15 minutes in duration. Because I’m recording audio (both from the ambient surroundings as well as from the radio spectrum), I need to remain stationary for the entire duration of the clip. In that sense the filming process is like a digital retreat with mandatory periods of 15 minutes of solitary meditation in nature. And what was most striking to me when I started this process was not ‘omg, this retreat into nature and being away from screens is amazing!’, it was more, ‘holy shit, this is boring’. In the beginning I found myself negotiating internally whether certain shots were worth the 15 minutes of stillness that was required. As I continued with the project, however, this perception of time became one of the most interesting aspects of the work.”Evan Roth in The Black Chamber – surveillance, paranoia, invisibility & the internet, interview with Domenico Quaranta, Bani Brusadin and Ruth McCollough.

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