Speed Frenzy – A fast trip to slow suicide
In a slow drive to suicide, slow for a fast trip. Every fast food that has been eaten a million times. Every song heard, Every sight seen. There is no place to enter, no body to hide…..No words to read, no poems to sing. It is a slow drive to suicide. The truth cannot keep the speed of the image longer. Real shudders, collapses and disintegrations, in many different eddies of reality: Part cybernetics, part designer, part dregs, part obsolete hoard of polished reality. Today things have accelerated to inertia. Fast economy, but slow business. Fast images, slow eyes. Fast money, slow morals. Fast sex but slow desire. Fast globalization, slow regionalization. Fast media but slow communication.The fatal fate of the law of dissolution from which we can never escape and overcome in the slow mirror of speed… faster technique, slower speed of thought, more accelerated culture, slower rate of social change……………
Arthur and Murilouise Kroker – Speed Delirium(1)
Today, new computer-related technologies and the use of new techniques in art called new-media, internet and digital art have brought about new discussions. Following the direct relationship established between video art and the Postmodern period, the extensions and boundaries of new mediums, especially internet and digital art, are still uncertain for art theorists as well as for today’s artists. Considering its prevalence, the fact that the internet has a very short history is also the reason why the boundaries of internet art have only just begun to be considered.
The fact that computer technologies, which have become mediums in the form of application areas such as computer animation, music, interactive art, CD Rom and internet applications, web writing, etc., are so related to art, has led to a new post-modern art-science unity in recent years. or draws attention to a new Modernity. Although it may seem like just a tool in art, it is the technical knowledge-coding systems, creativity and design, as well as the technical equipment required for internet art and digital art application. For the first time after the Modern Era, we witness science and art being so intertwined. According to Kroker; (2) “our time is a digital renaissance that is not medieval but hypermodern. “After the long slumber of modernism, the coded design of daydreaming, the creative imagination opens its own eyes and tries to rebuild the digital world.”
Considering the prevalence and spread of computer use today, it is clear that computer-centered communication is the mass communication form of our age. Although computers and the Internet have a very short history, the most important reason why they are the most widespread form of mass communication is that they can incorporate other tools such as radio, television and telephone. Naturally, it cannot be expected that a technology that is so central to life should be outside of art as a medium or subject. Computer and internet technologies are more than just a medium for artists, as widespread information and communication technologies, they often form the conceptual infrastructure of the created design.
While the visual field related to computer technologies is limited to the two-dimensional computer screen today, it is now possible to talk about three-dimensional technologies that are much closer to reality, which can be achieved with visual reality modeling technologies and the illusory central perspective field. (Remember the Matrix movie..) Just as, according to Baudrillard (3), ‘the message of TV is not the images it conveys, but the new relationships and perception styles it imposes, the change of the traditional structures of the family and community’; What kind of a life will be offered to us in the near future by simulation technologies and messages that are suspicious and complex, and can reach or even exceed reality? This is a comprehensive issue that also needs to be addressed. However, this much can be said; Art readings on this subject predict a Neitzsche-like Nihilism. Kroker’s web-text titled Speed Madness, quoted at the beginning of the article, also supports this prediction. In the text; With an intense pessimistic atmosphere, every change in our age is remembered with its negative contrast.
At this stage, as a different perspective and another example in internet art;
In my opinion, Radar-Web, designed by Shu Lea Cheang, Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker, is a project worth mentioning.
Radar Web (6) is a project created as an interface with “Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker”. The project is designed to create a mobile “Radar Web” replica of memories, a mobile site between Okinawa-Tokyo and the Internet ECBL. 19.5% of Okinawa is an island leased by the Japanese Government for the mandatory base of the American Army. It is a developing semi-tropical summer resort full of its own kind of butterflies that are unique to the region. The people of Okinawa believe that butterflies guide souls to heaven. Butterflies are memory-information copies.
When you open the site (image 1), on a black background, there is information about the site and Okinawa in a section on the left, and in a larger area on the right, there is a global arrangement created with butterflies and vector lines, also on a black background. The only moving element in this section is the three clock-like circles (image 2) rotating on the right side of the level, moving clockwise. Each one opens to three separate links.
In 1-link; (image 3) The information section on the left contains information about the Okinwa Project; Since Okinawa returned to its former owner (Japan) in 1972; There were 4700 reported crimes and accidents caused by the US Army Establishment in Okinawa. 30 of these were compiled by Kaori Sunagawa. Using the Elephant Fence, the echo chamber is planned as moving vectors (poles) designed as indicators or reflectors of crime, a memory copy and an indictment of a colonized territory.
On the right side there are four radar movement charts with some neon green dates on them. When you click on any of the dates, the crime or event corresponding to that date becomes visible on the left.
Date: 3.18, 1996 Onna Settlement – 120 tons of oil residue (chemical waste) containing eleven type’s of chemical poisons were detected in the Onna Communication Site of the USA.
Date: May-June A jet dumped fuel residue, containing Chemical BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) 36400PPM, into the Tengan river.
Date: 1988 Okinawa City – A 26-year-old woman with a minor mental disability was kidnapped by American service officers in a car and raped for several days in the single men’s ward at the American base…like….continues with the news..
2-Link; (image 4) Live internet from the Elephant Cage 22 June 1996 archive, Yomitan, Okinawa between 4-7 pm (Okinawa time) moving poles, 1000 memories-memory vectors and live internet event from Yomitan Site. In this link, images of colorful butterfly wings in small squares on the left side, on a black background, are listed downwards. When you press any of these, small photos related to the theme appear on the home page design. (image 6)
3-link (image 7) In this link, with the circular radar scanning scheme and moving light beam, it hovers over the dates written in blue in the area it scans. While the dates in the area he travels become clear, the regions he moves away from become blurred. When you touch any date with the vectors at the tip of the arrow, in the right area,
The document related to that date becomes clear to read.
History; 6 August 1948 Ammunition Explosion: II. During World War II, a bomb exploded while the American Army was loading the cargo ship Kabira New Peer. The explosion injured 76 of the passengers who soon left the boat and caused the death of 106 passengers.
History; October 20, 1951 A US Air Force fuel tank crashed into a private house in Makishi. While the house completely burned down, 6 people in the house died…
Date: April 23, 1971 A 23-year-old woman was hit with a rock and killed by an American Service officer in Ginowan. The suspect was arrested by the American Army, but was found not guilty due to lack of evidence.. It continues with the crimes and accidents identified in the history of the region…
Radar Web Project was designed by Shu Lea Cheang, Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker as a site that moves between Okinawa-Tokyo and the Internet ECBL. As a break in the history of the region, it is an incriminating record of the crimes and accidents committed by the Americans during the period when it was used as an American Base. In other words, design is like a serious questioning and accusation against imperialism and war, as well as an effort to create a memory against the concept of speed and rapidly changing agendas of our time. This is an inquiry into the criticisms made about the memorylessness of media techniques and products, which most art theorists of today agree on, by creating a new memory with the use of new technologies such as the internet. It works in the logic of a memory machine that sheds light on a period of a region from today.
Since the local people living in the region believe that butterflies guide souls to go to heaven, butterflies are symbolized as memory-information copies in the project; The contrast between the imaginary and mythological beliefs of the local people and a technology (radar) designed for war purposes helps to present the project as a silent, dignified and intellectual protest, saving it from dry ideological criticism. Kelebek is on the side of the local people. From another perspective, butterflies must have memories since they can guide souls to heaven. The same memory may well record and document the crimes committed, just like in the project. (The designers of the project must have thought so)..Radar-Web is a successful arrangement and an effective project that derives its aura from history, collective belief (butterflies), and being right.
However, another point that should be mentioned is; An art project designed for the internet, such as Radar-Web, is unlikely to meet people among the millions of channels of the internet. People must visit this address knowingly and willingly to watch this site. A symposium on this and similar problems and limits of internet art may shed some light on these issues.
‘An Online Symposium on Digital Art’, held on the occasion of the ‘Bitstreams’ exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the ‘010101: Art in the Technological Age’ exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 2001, became the basis for one of the important inquiries on this subject. (3) In parallel with this, the internet’s Whether art is a form of art? There is a search for a common understanding on issues such as the problems of digital presentations, the social and political consequences of internet projects, the difficulties of exhibiting such projects in galleries, and archiving problems. Digital Art in the Symposium; It is described as an interesting model that stays away from the Pop-Minimalist axis that dominates American Art, while also staying away from the more Conceptualist/document model that is popular in Europe (at least in the north).
Following Lawrence Rinder’s distinction, “All internet art is digital, but not all digital art is internet art”; If digital art and internet art are ‘one of a kind’, then these fields need to establish their own independent institutions and discourses. If these are art, then art history and the other art. states that they exist in the context of their form. (4) Wolgang Staehle**; Museums, primarily as spaces where authoritative knowledge, classification and context are valid, have the opposite structure with the internet environment (due to their widespread networks, free distributed content and the possibility of a show of creativity that is difficult to keep up with), and therefore curators will face more contradictions in the future. attracts attention. (5) In addition to these
It can easily be said that internet art, in this respect, has given the artist the opportunity to institutionalize with his own internet space and address, against the hierarchy of the art world. In his own words, it is very important for the freedom that art and creativity should have that he saves the artist from gallery owners, museums and all kinds of authority. Because it has no materiality, there is no sales concern. It is without intermediaries. The ephemerality of Internet art also protects the artist from historical responsibility. With the features listed up to this point, internet art seems to have provided art and artists with the vital freedom environment required for the creation of art. The most obvious reason why many artists have chosen internet art since the 1990s is the freedom environment created by intermediation.