[Nettime-bold] Harvesting the Net: MemoryFlesh - Interview with Diane Ludin by Rachel Greene

[diane ludin <duras@thing.net>]

Harvesting the Net: Memory Flesh
Interview with Diane Ludin
by
Rachel Greene


Rachel Greene: Harvesting the Net: Memory Flesh is part of a
series of works on genetics, and the new technological realities of
bio-humans. Can you talk about how your earlier pieces informed
what you wanted to do with this latest one? Clearly, it makes sense
for you to have taken on the Genome proper... but what else?

Diane Ludin: About three years ago I started investigating what the
human genome was attempting to make. I found it almost impossible
to sift through the emerging public discussion around it; it was and
still continues to be a subject that stages a certain type of
information warfare. But it kept making the papers and getting a lot
of media attention with inflated projections of its potential.

After 6-9 months of pretty focused research I was able to recognize
some recurring themes. I had enough information to build proposals
for online projects that would get funding from Franklin Furnace and
Turbulence.org. These projects, at the intersection of performance,
the body, computer technology and the Internet, gave me a more
concrete understanding of the surrounding info-science. My projects
became containers for reflecting recurring themes I was beginning to
recognize. Some of the themes being: the economic inflation
surrounding biotech companies; the invention of online software
tools to help track information such as patenting on sequencing
research for companies and research initiatives; the inflated
projections by pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners
of biotech's potential.

Like any futuristic phenomenon it takes projections extremely well. It
was very hard to get to some of the practical mechanisms and
real-time processes behind the hype being manufactured.

So Genetic response system 1.0 was about imaginary visual
projections from movies that would draw together a broad approach
to biotech in general, and not specifically the human genome. It had
a series of quotations from various sources (none of them scientific),
invented terms, and links from friends' projects, all mixed with
biotech companies and scientific research initiatives. I had spent a
few years working in collaboration with artists such as Francesca da
Rimini, Ricardo Dominguez, and the Fakeshop gang whose work
projected critical, imaginary scenarios approaching technology and
science in an art context. Genetic response system 1.0 became a
disembodied structure framing my work with these practitioners in
my (impulsive) reasoning at the time.

In 1998 I began studying with Natalie Jeremijenko. I found many
commonalties in Natalie's critical view of science, technology and
culture, with that of Francesca, Ricardo and the Fakeshoppers.
However, Natalie had a different practical relationship to the
discussions of the designing of that technology and it's journey into
culture and economy. Her ideas and work gave me a contrast for
thinking about different cultural projects that technology and
emerging sciences were bringing forward. I was able to modify my
working practice and build my own investigations. This and financial
support from Franklin Furnace and Turbulence.org allowed me to
build some projects where I was responsible for the conceptual
structure.

Genetic response system 3.0, commissioned by Turbulence.org,
was more of solo meditation than Genetic response system 1.0. I
decided to radically reduce the materials I was pulling together. I
was chasing after computer companies advertising biotech and
related sciences, and began archiving images of economic behavior
through online news services like CNN. I mixed these still images with
educational video on cellular behavior. It was a place for me to start
conceptually mixing the imagery I was drawn to in a more focused
manner.

When I finished working on Genetic response system 3.0, I was
still feeling the need to go deeper. I had been considering trying to
build a search engine, thinking that would be the ultimate way of
tracking the shifting and large amounts of information on the human
genome without spending much energy weeding through
unnecessary information. I looked into what it would take to build a
search engine, how they were programmed, and what their
limitations were. I concluded that building a search engine kept me
too far away from the information content I wanted to capture, and
there would need to be some heavy duty filtering of that data to get
the returns I was looking for. This, and the thought that I would be
making temporary links based on information that other groups
maintained, made me realize what I really wanted to build was a
repository to record searches that I and other people I was working
with could make.

So I proposed a database project whose contents I would gather
and re-purpose for viewers over the course of a year. I then began
working with Andrea Mayr to design a database that we could use to
archive online materials I wanted to work with. We used MySQL with
a php3 interface. MySQL is an open source database software, and
php3 is a scripting language with html embedded in it. So
Harvesting the Net: Memory Flesh is a more complete framing
structure in that it contains the original source material discovered
through my time-based searches online. As far as some of the
differences in the type of collage this project makes, it is a
relatively more permanent one. Its contents are more focused
conceptually.
The relationships between all the visual elements are clearer and
more generalized. Part of what I accomplished with this project,
which I was unable to reach with the others, was to capture what
the laboratories that make the human genome look like. What are
the tools of the scientists who are making history? What do the
laboratory workers look like, and what is the type of imagery these
new factories are manufacturing to tell their stories?

RG: How has Natalie has influenced you, and what have you learned
from her? Not only am I a fan of her work, but I think seeing these
exchanges/pedagogical relationships at work can be interesting.
Especially since as women we are often discouraged from this kind of
exchange, and or get caught up in, or held up by, the goal of
technomastery.

DL: Amen, been talking a lot about this phenomenon with Shu Lea
Cheang, Yvonne Volkart, Diane Nerwin, and Ricardo over the last
couple of days. They are part of the show I presented some work in
here (in Lucerne, Switzerland). We have been calling it
technoformalism, but I like "technomastery" better.

RG: Cool! So what did you take from Natalie's work and teaching?

Many things... the most recurring phrase that comes back to me as I
am working on this project and technowork in general (be it devices
or the internet), is a phrase that I got from an essay of hers you
published on RHIZOME.org called "Database Politics." She wrote:
"...technologies are tangible social relations. That said, technologies
can therefore be used to make social relations tangible."

I often ask myself whether or not I am making tangible the social
relations I am interested in--apparent or not. It has become one of
the standards I use to evaluate my output. I was curious as to what
that meant when I read it. I was only able to imagine it partially. It
seemed that a technological relationship had its own category, and
very little social interaction within it, by the fact that it has only
begun to move into public awareness in the last couple of years,
(therefore having low contrast and only extremely minimal social
experience could be accessed). It became an idea I understood more
as I activated it, and layered it into my thinking.

RG: You said "... Natalie had a different practical relationship to the
discussions of the designing of that technology and it's journey into
culture and economy." Let's talk about that.

DL: Ricardo and Fakeshop did not work through the institution the
way that Natalie does. Francesca began with a more organizing
interface in Australia (and a background in corporate technological
purposing), so there are specific differences that we in New York,
outside institutions, had yet to access. Ricardo and Fakeshop were
trying to mobilize their cultural activity through art, writing and
activism and are more bound by these filters than Natalie. Natalie
worked at Xerox PARC, and was doing her doctorate at Stanford in
Silicon Valley, which I consider a social and developmental root of
the computer industry. Stanford was where a lot of the industry
stars were educated. It seems that it offered her interior access to
the industry development that we as East Coast artists and activists
were struggling to grasp. She was able to practice her work and
social activity with access to the machinery that was, and still is,
defining technomastery.

RG: I really like that for a number of your projects you use links,
images, text, or often some basic, frames technology. In your
statement you use terms like "search strings" "conceptual parsing
engine"--you're using somewhat inflated tech terms to talk about
your own subjective hunting, gathering, and filtering. Can you talk
about that as a strategy?

DL: I think emerging or progressive technological distribution
language contains inflated projections. It is a creative process that
is accessed by various types of PR media machinery building it. The
distribution language we are fed needs to be regenerated. It is often
very sci-fi, and applies inflated technological language to simple
software and Internet manipulations. This is a way in which I can
locate the tangible social relation in whatever technology I am
working with and behave it. It is in the concept and creative
manipulation of that language that I can move the fastest.
Visualization technology and visualization culture move at a different
speed in relation to text, and writing within computer technology.
The part of my practice that is regenerating technological terms is
often the most fun for me. Word-processing interfaces and text
manipulation are closer to innate computer language. The database
that we designed for Memory Flesh is a simple relational database.

RG: Tell me a little bit about what it's been like as an artist
circulating through some of the institutional hallways of interactive
art? New media art has been so trendy and privileged lately; it
worries me! I worry that the elements I cherish most about
it--hacktivism, tactical media, and its capacity for institutional
critique and social engagement will be lost in favor of presentation or
dumb technomastery.

DL: Part of the work I have been developing is possible because of
the privilege that institutions are now affording to net-specific work.
A major reason for my building on the net has to do with what I am
financially supported to do. I have other work, both artwork and
labor for living, but I am not paid enough to develop it, not to the
level I am to work on the net. In some ways it makes my work as an
artist easier, that I don't have to work as hard to promote myself,
propose projects or convince institutions of its significance. The
institutions are doing this for me. It is also helping me activate a
practice that is more culturally motivated, as opposed to artwork
that has a set relationship to culture, and a history of cultural
expectations that categorize it.

There is currently a scramble to find work that utilizes the net in the
way that I have been using it in the last few years. I don't know
how long this will last, but I have been fortunate recently to propose
ideas that institutions are willing to promote, and to fund. And last
but not least, it is easy to translate my artistic practice into
experience as a designer and technical consultant for companies
wanting to use the net.

The institutionalization or trendiness of any emerging artistic or
cultural movement of attention goes hand in hand with the weaving
of standards that are driven by previous historical traditions of
mastery. As far as socially engaged/politicized work being replaced
by technomastery work, I think technomastery work is already given
more attention. There is the entertainment industry driving novel
visual affects, not to mention the speed with which technology
companies are infecting the economy and popular culture with
hardware and software. Such technology is framed as a
"must-have:" cellphones, cellphones with email, palmtop's, wireless
palmtops, beeper's, digital cameras, portable mp3 players, etc.
These cultural mechanisms shape our expectations of computer
technology's purpose. As a result so much attention and time are
given to keeping up with the latest trends in devices and software
that there is little left to consider the impact of them. So we are left

with a technology for technology's sake attitude in our culture. This
is an agenda that drives a lot of institutional funding of art. Artists
are great for manifesting what doesn't yet exist in culture at large.
For me, when considering my recent projects, I think of what I want
to do with people's attention. I assume that the user of my sites will
pay attention to all the choices I've made in assembling the
elements of the project. This allows me to play with associations
within the given set of text and images, and begin to interact with
the expectations we are given when considering work on the net.

The potential we are losing in the transfer of art that is
technologically based/interactive to being evaluated for it's
technomastery is the possibility to reach audiences that may not
have been looking for socially engaged or politicized work, or even
the opportunity to encounter it. It seems to me that the committed,
politically motivated and socially active types will always find each
other as will their work. And yet the Internet offers a new layer of
communication continuum that can help motivate or mobilize groups
of people quickly.

Then there is the sensational nature of issues connected to the
Internet, which has been promoted as being more than it is, offering
more than it delivers. Perhaps this is the result of wildly successful
distribution and advertising campaigns by star computer industry
companies like Microsoft and Cisco. Not to mention the inflated,
economic impact venture capital injects into the system via
companies and jobs. I have faith that there will always be artists
who redirect our attention to social issues, and discussions around
social issues, to see the limitations of authoritative representation
we are fed. And there will always be a parallel group of artists who
are uninterested or uninspired by what is behind what infotainment
tells us is happening in the world. For them technology for
technology's sake will allow an easy transition to new
discussions of aesthetics made possible by new media.

RG: Your work takes on quite a weird industry sector. Have there
been any conflicts or issues you want to mention? Have any biotech
companies/webmasters/publications objected to how you have been
using their material?

DL: I think they are way too busy trying to develop, expand and
distribute their industry and its potential economically to be aware of
the way in which someone other than themselves would be using
their imagery. Last year at this time I wasn't able to find the imagery
I now have. Most of the imagery in the database was loaded in the
last six months. This suggests to me that the speed with which they
are currently operating doesn't allow for careful examination of a
sophisticated advertising/company representation campaign. Plus
they, as biotech companies, aren't expected to put forth an
advertising campaign that compares with older more traditional
companies.

RG: One of the central phenomena your project points to is the
homogenization of rhetoric and language around the Genome Project
and biotech more generally. And I think you effectively undermine
some of the bureaucratic, marketing-speak of the current discourse
with your projects. But did you ever worry that the barrage, remix of
images and text (what you explained as your own process to "drive
conceptually and mix imagery you were drawn to"), would create
more confusion for the user?

DL: I don't think it could be more confusing than the way in which
the human genome and biotech in general is represented. This media
mess allowed me to take a simple approach, combining the language
around economic distribution and promotion with images of the tools
and the environment the tools exist and operate in. The interjection
of phrases like "genetic landlords" and "point and click genes" are
little bits of spin that nonscientific types can interpret and more
easily understand when considering the battle over the human
genome.

RG: I wasn't sure if you were just showing how the genome
discourse reproduce its masters' images--or if it was your
experimental aesthetic in effect. What do you think?

DL: It starts in my experimental aesthetic. But when placed on the
content of the human genome, its press, generative environment,
and tools--these elements lead to the larger issue of how "the
genome discourse is using technology to reproduce its masters'
images."

RG: what do you think is powerful about the tools of new media?
Compared to the tools and mechanisms of euro-corporatism?

DL: It is a space that is open to interpretation in a way that older
media has been defined. There is more room to work, more work to
do to translate the drives that various groups find in it. It was
originally designed as a communication and research source for
computer geeks and research scientists to share their findings. This
communications nature and the audience it was originally designed
by and for still remains at its core. The distribution and buzz from
computer companies to wire the world and create stable ecommerce
markets still has yet to be fully realized. The business models used
to try and make it profitable are not working. We are seeing the
limits of artificially generated economic value that venture capital
creates with recent NASDAQ crashes, and ecommerce companies
dropping out of business. In order for the net to be successful as a
commerce circuit, it would have to be as prevalent in our individual
homes as television currently is. It is not and I can't imagine how
long it would take for this to be a reality. The mainstream media
attention it is given creates an opportunity for attention redirection
on a global scale, potentially.

RG: You spoke about deflating some of the projections and claims of
technology and the rhetoric of "distribution" and "network," but let's
end in a place where you encourage folks to use tools.... ;)

DL: It is important to me, always to translate what I am given into
my own terms. In this way I examine the limits of what is distributed
via mainstream media representation. In this process I find various
strategies that wrestle with the same questions and varying
strategies for how to deflate the rhetoric of distribution. It is a
beginning, a reintroduction to allow a more realistic view of what is
happening behind the hype. I can't imagine coming up with a sound
strategy to build work on without this more realistic view of practical
mechanisms within a given industry, be it new media or biotech.
Since the culture at large are rushing to also go through this process
of translation, new media has a cultural currency that other forms of
media do not. As a result, reflections on translating net-specific
topics like the Human Genome are a beginning that I look forward to
seeing expand. And I am optimistic that the route that this
expansion takes will be unexpected, and not defined by companies
distributing for monetary profit.

     http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/ludin/

Harvesting The Net: Memory Flesh is the latest iteration of a
series of projects by Diane Ludin. This work was commissioned by
Gallery 9/Walker Art Center with funding from the Jerome
Foundation.

Rachel Greene interviewed Ludin via email in March 2001.





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