Xcult, the extremely committed art server from Basel operated under Reinhard Storz's initiative, in August launched its now fourth project curated by a single team¹, which is to last until May 2002. Its name, »Shrink to Fit,« is a reference to our late-capitalist »economy of attention,« which controls an optimum of seductive power and prestige in as short a time as possible. For this reason, the individual contributions, too, are not meant to take more than five minutes to get their message across. The project is conceived as a sort of nomadic parasite that can be relatively simply downloaded onto one's own web site². Two weeks before an artistic contribution goes online, there is a trailer text by a critic dealing with the concept of the coming project.

The artist Herve Graumann from Geneva started off, with a setting for writing anonymous letters – so-called blackmails. However, he does not offer the possibility of spontaneously sending anonymous e-mails, as could have been expected. Using a typewriter with old-fashioned characters, one can write a letter on the screen, print it out, and send it. The work thus not only denies the interventionary nature inherent in the medium, moving it into the sphere of real-life possibilities, but also makes it clear that old media are by no means out-dated. In August, I would have scarcely thought it possible that this metaphorical function of the work, which at first glance does not seem very radical, could retroactively take on an explosive character. However, the project also doubtless points to the hierarchical divide with regard to technological possibilities that confronts us in the present situation.

This gesture of Graumann, who has been working with the internet as an artistic medium for some time already, again points up the change in the treatment of the medium that has been developing now for a fairly long while: so-called Net or online art is now also using more symbolization, and less direct intervention and activism, which were characteristic of the early attitude to Net art. This does not mean that one has replaced the other, or that early, intervention-orientated Net art did not work using symbolization – in my opinion, it actually did so to a high degree – but, rather, that the internet is about to become a center of art activity, the way other places have been for some time. »Shrink to Fit« tries to support this aspect, and also invites artists who have not yet worked with the internet to Web projects.

The thing that unites all works in »Shrink to Fit« is the latent question of existence in a technologized and hierarchized media society. This question is not asked openly, however, but tends to be articulated indirectly. For example, Thomas Feuerstein's updated version of Helmann Melville's story »Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street« from the 19th century seems at first to be only a conglomeration of nonsensical sentences. Feuerstein uses the ticker service of the New York Stock Exchange – which shows news flashes from Wall Street – and adds Bartleby's stereotype sentence »I prefer not to be.« The whole thing makes no sense, because these news flashes are not a question-and-answer game, but also because Bartelby's words are always completely inappropriate and can only serve to sabotage the accumulation of facts in a mechanical, brainless act. It is also possible to download Melville's text to read, and one is then confronted with the heart-rending story of Bartleby's wretched existence as a clerk, an existence that maneuvers its way completely out of capitalist logic. Feuerstein radicalizes the mute, robotic nature of Bartleby's work. In a manner similar to Melville, he reveals the numeric language of the economy as being the most powerful and global one, with resistance to it only able to be expressed as a mechanical act of universal negation. The events of September 11 and the fluctuations on the stock market that followed them – something which brought attention to the fact that the catastrophe had consequences at an economic level that endangered the whole world – gave this work, too, a radicalized reading. The acute relevance of certain artistic projects suddenly made it clear – something that was also noted on the Xcult web site – that it is also possible to judge works according to whether, and how, they can be »infected« by present-day events. It became abruptly obvious that unintended and unconscious elements in works play a central role in meanings.

In view of this, the question can also be raised regarding the third project, »Basicray Netcasting Service« by Vladimir Muzhesky (New York), about what unconscious elements are present. This work deals directly with the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, and is the continuation of a series of fictive TV programs on the internet that Muszhesky started together with other artists and technicians under the names Basicray and love28. It is a video stream lasting about five minutes in which we see a Barbie-like cyborg woman standing in front of the smoking ruins of New York, who reads a text like a newsreader: The »global system has lost its balance« and cannot be restored. »The death of power symbols is the beginning of a confusing and painful but vital process of reorientation and enlightenment. It is a call for new progressive mentalities to enter the global scene and replace what Bataille called restricted economies. Without exaggeration this challenge is critical to our survival and prosperity.«

It is remarkable that this »synthetic Angel of Death« (press statement), who is also a bringer of hope, is young and female. In the three preceding Net-TV casts from the series, it was also a young, female figure that spoke to the Net audience with a rigid facial expression and a monotone, synthetic voice. Femininity thus has a very specific meaning here. Her sex wants to say something that lies beyond the text she speaks. With her body, which seems on the one hand dispossessed, immaterial and fleeting, and on the other petrified in its impenetrable compactness, she backs up »her« plea of instability. In other words: her body and her sex stabilize the instability of which she speaks, and which she also embodies through her non-authentic femininity and physicality. She is the personification of instability. The suspicion even arises that her 3D body, which makes what is being documented seem like a completely unreal science-fiction scenario, could be interpreted as a form of control and a denial of the historically real, contrary to the conscious intention of the work.

»Basicray Netcasting Service« can thus not only be read not only as the attempt to deal with (or possibly to obscure) a traumatic event, but also as an attempt to give it meaning retrospectively, with the option of the creation of new subject positions. The fact that the female body is referred to as an allegory indicates, however, that, despite all progressivity, traditional images of women are used to express matters of universal import, which gives it all a bitter aftertaste when seen from a feminist angle. Without this point of view, it is of course not noticed, for the absorbing subject and seductive esthetics skillfully cover up the language of the unconscious male fantasies.

Finally, »The Great Game« by John Klima, which is the present project, modeled on a computer game, is the most concrete analysis of the contemporary political landscape, the war in Afghanistan and its meaning for our life. He does not play all this through using a universalized female body, but provides facts of war strategy. And the players learn very directly that medial realities are also material realities.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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