The website presents five images, immediately recognisable from art postcards. Andrea Mantegna’s 'St. Sebastian', Cezanne’s 'Still Life with Plate of Cherries', Van Gogh’s 'The Night Café', Malevich’s 'Black Square' and Warhol’s 'Campbell’s Soup Can'. Good, standard art historical subjects that representationally depict the subject of their titles. But what is this? St. Sebastian’s arrows are misbehaving. There’s one bloodily piercing his head, no, his leg, no … his head again. Clearly, a user manual is required.
A careful reading of the accompanying texts reveals the unlikely explanation that the number of arrows in St. Sebastian and the location of the entry wounds correspond to the frequency of letters of the alphabet in web addresses entered into browsers by users of the computer network of the Neue Gallerie in Graz. The other images are similarly deviant. Malevich’s square waxes and wanes depending on the time of day, Cezanne’s perspectivally distorted nature mort mischievously refuses to be 'mort': cherries appear and disappear from the table as emails are sent and received by the gallery office staff as they organise the next exhibition.
Though this may sound like some kind of insane techno-numerological experiment to uncover hidden divine messages in masterpieces of western art, it is in fact the latest masterpiece by Vuk Cosic, net.artist extraordinaire. Visitors to the Neue Gallery are treated to the same set of animated images, but projected onto easel-mounted screens amid the ornamental plush of Josef Hueber’s interior design. Living up to the baroque surroundings, Cosic’s piece is premised on a dizzyingly intricate set of internal references and technical detail.
The mechanism which underlies the animation of these images is itself a work of art: so-called 'software art' by the Radical Software Group (RSG). Set up under the aegis of the 'rhizome.net' net.art portal, the RSG makes self-consciously polemic artwork by appropriating existing technology and dressing it up in the kind of political rhetoric that antagonises/appeals to the popular discourse of surveillance paranoia.[1] In this instance, Cosic is using RSG’s 'Carnivore' software; a pastiche of the FBI’s technology (of the same code name) that monitors data traffic (emails, web browsing etc.) on computer networks[2] and extracts interesting information. What the FBI probably consider to be 'interesting' are keywords like 'Ricin', 'Al Qaeda' or 'Hijack', but the RSG software leaves it up to the artist deploying Carnivore to define the data filtering criteria.
The Carnivore software essentially spits out streams of data that artists are able to filter, and then interpret visually or functionally by designing 'clients'; subsidiary software that turns the dataflow into sound, colour, or movement. For example, Cosic has decided that the proportion of '.org' domains in relation to '.com' and '.net' domains that users of the Gallery’s network visit should determine the lighting levels in his animation of Van Gogh’s 'The Night Café'.
RSG’s Carnivore software has been heavily criticised by commentators for believing its own rhetoric, and overstating its technological achievements, but more importantly, it has been criticised as an artwork for performing the opposite of its stated function: 'RSG longs to inject progressive politics back into a fundamentally destabilizing and transformative technology.'[3] RSG suggest that the aim of the Carnivore project is to politicise and motivate users of their surveillance software. The compelling argument against Carnivore attaining this aim is that by creating a software tool and a context for artists to aestheticise the mechanisms of data snooping, RSG actually trivialise the issue, allowing viewers to sit back, relax and enjoy the beauty of total surveillance. In many cases this assessment holds true. Many of the artist made 'clients' available on the Carnivore website simply produce abstract data visualisations or slavishly adopt RSG’s ham-fisted polemic.
Cosic’s piece, however, takes itself far less seriously. By hijacking the canonical artwork as an interface to surveillance software, Cosic subtly pokes fun at Carnivore’s sincere tone, while actually using it for its intended purpose. The revised experience of a famous artwork, codified by centuries of art criticism and art education comes closer to the 'destabilising' effect that RSG aspire to, but fail to achieve with Carnivore itself.
Viewers wondering around the gallery in Graz are offered a foolproof and quantitative method of narrative analysis: red means incoming traffic, white means outgoing traffic, the arrows signify alphanumeric characters in web addresses. Facetiously, Cosic dispenses with the ambiguities and problematics of art interpretation, leaving no room for the stereotypical gallery bores who self-consciously announce the 'meaning' of paintings to each other. At the same time, by asserting a blatant and prosaic utility on the familiar artwork, Cosic engages with areas of art historical, ethical and aesthetic discourse that are often lacking from new media art. It may be a big joke, but perhaps it is time to look at these images again, and consider their place in the history of informatic aesthetics. While on the one hand the piece problematises the function of the Gallery, and notions of interpretation and utility in art history, on the other, we are invited to interrogate the norms of software interface design. '...avant-garde theories and practices gave rise not only to modern and, later, post-modernist style (MTV montage-like aesthetics, for instance) but they also became ›materialized‹ in human-computer interfaces through which post-industrial work is accomplished.'[4]
In The Avant Garde as Software, media theorist Lev Manovich re-phrases the title of Abigail Solomon-Godeau's article on radical formalism from Weapon to Style to from Weapon to Style and Instrument of Labour. He extends her line of reasoning, that new wave photography and the 'new vision' style became an aesthetic norm, by identifying the use of the formal elements of that style in the structure of the computer's Graphical User Interface (GUI). Cosic’s re-reuse of the familiar canon of art history as GUI is well aware of this dynamic. Many artists working with these technologies have attempted to problematise the GUI. The ubiquitous metaphors of 'files' 'folders' and the 'desktop' as well as the two dimensional 'page' metaphor of the web have provided net artists and software artists with a rich resources of aesthetic-cultural assumptions to be subverted, destabilised and critiqued.[5] Whereas many of these efforts have intervened in the user's experience of software with aesthetic shock tactics (browsers crashing, lights flashing, counter-intuitive and unpredictable systems), Cosic presents a calm, decorative and superficially unchallenging interface.
'Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data'[6] Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information is the bible of computer interface design. On one level, Cosic's interfaces follow these rules. The animations of the images are extremely simple and, once the system is explained, it can be argued that fluctuations in brightness and contrast of Malevich’s 'Black Square' make a very neat clock. However, on another level, the data is both simple and trivial: numbers of incoming and outgoing emails could be adequately represented by a two column table. By choosing a graphically, historically and contextually complex painting to display this data, Cosic completely inverts Tufte’s rules.
Rather than obscuring the apolitical in technical mumbo-jumbo and hyperbole, Cosic willingly submits the viewer to aesthetic distraction. After all, why not provide the leisure-seeking FBI agents with a more pleasant visual index of the surveilled subject? He is presenting us with a more socially acceptable spectacle of surveillance; a high brow version of the popular TV series 'Big Brother'.