Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
 Our guests this time around are Gary Danner and Elisa Rose, two
 Austrian multimedia artists known far and wide as Station Rose -- which
 was also an actual place, by the way. On March 11, 1988, Station Rose
 opened as a "multimediale Kunststation" -- a "multimedia art station"
 -- in Vienna. Much more than a gallery, it was also a storefront
 showroom, a workshop, a meeting point for artists, musicians and
 scientists. 
 
 Station Rose went on to record and perform in Cairo, San Francisco,
 Japan, and of course, all up and down the European continent. Ten years
 after the original Station Rose opened its doors, Elisa and Gary
 celebrated their anniversary with a book, _1st Decade_:
 
 http://www.well.com/user/gunafa/1st.dec_book.html
 
 Now, Station Rose has released another, _private://public_, a
 collection of Webcast conversations with Geert Lovink, Petra Klaus &
 Hans Romanov, Bazon Brock, Birgit Richard, Stefan Weber, Thomas
 Feuerstein and Josephine Bosma:
 
 http://www.stationrose.com/private-public/Buch2.html
 
 Interviewing Station Rose is David Hudson, a freelance writer living
 in Berlin, author of _Rewired: a brief and opinionated net history_,
 and contributor to Artbyte, the Berliner Zeitung, de:Bug, Feed, Mute,
 Salon, Spiegel Online, Wired News and a slew of other publications.
 David will be mining the historical perspective Elisa and Gary have to
 offer after nearly 13 years of artistic collaboration and brainstorming
 with them about the rapidly evolving future of the multimedia
 experience.
 
  

    

Please join me in welcoming David and his guests Gary and Elisa!
  

    
I first met Gary and Elisa online. Appropriate enough. Even more
fitting, the setting was Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds where,
having relocated to Germany, Elisa and Gary were hosting the Frankfurt
conference. I was immediately caught up in their energy and intrigued
by the ways they toyed with the conferencing system, based on Well
Engaged, so that it became a multimedia playground and workspace with
an invigorating look and feel all its own.

A few months later, I was lucky enough to finally meet Gary and Elisa
face-to-face. This would be 1997; Sony was throwing a big party for
them in Munich and I got to see Station Rose live for the first time,
dance to Gary's beats and be wowed by Elisa's morphing imagery -- and
what's more, Elisa and Gary were kind enough to let me interview them
directly afterwards:

http://www.rewired.com/97/0512.html

In the interview, Gary and Elisa describe the vital role The Well has
taken in their work and play over the years as well as their personal
relationships with some of its founders and early members. Sure, they'd
been online before attending the raucous Cyberthon of 1990, but The
Well opened up a whole new chapter for Station Rose.

For now, though, Gary and Elisa, let's start with the book,
_private://public_. The description at your site is in German, but I
can briefly outline the basics: out of 124 Webcasts, you've selected
seven of the most interesting discussions you've had with some pretty
hefty names in media and art theory. What was the overriding principle
in your selection, in other words, is there a unifying theme that runs
through the book? 

And then, a more banal but irresistible question: Why a book? You seem
to have purposefully *not* archived these discussions on the Net --
why not?
  

    
We selected the conversations in which we touched a topic which is
very important to us until today as multimedia artists: realtime
("Echtzeit"). What does it mean to perform live, what makes this
experience so unique and fascinating. What makes this section of
artistic work different from, let´s say, composing a piece in the
secluded atmosphere of the multimedia studio, with no connection to the
outside world.

Yes, why a book ? We have been confronted with this question since our
first book ;-)
I´d say, because that´s the great thing about being a multimedia
artist: you do not have to stick to one medium, be it analog or
digital. You can do/produce a book, as CD, a piece of netart, webcast,
do a photo session, produce a video (to be seen at MTV and high-art
sources like 3sat and arte), present yourself in a gallery as well as
in the Net, perform in underground dungeons as well as at high art
festivals, you can do anything - well almost; Lisa woulden´t paint a
picture, and I wouldn´t play guitar in a band ...
  

    
<Why a book? You seem to have purposefully *not* archived these
discussions on the Net -- why not?>

The idea behind inviting guests to join us in the webcast studio was
to be able to dicuss themes that were in the air. It was some sort of
verbal break in between the pure multimedia jam sessions. At the same
time it was a chance to invite guests, like we did when we had Station
Rose as a real place in Vienna. Very fast we realized that many
important discussions happen. Even for us it was difficult to recall
them 100%, basically because it is really intense to "webcast in front
and behind the cameras in realtime". So when we wanted to go back to a
certain conversation, we would have to see/hear the whole webcast (on
DV tape) again. We thought that pure text - which we dont use much in
our art - would fit here. At the same time the publisher had asked us,
if we wouldnt like to do another book after "1st decade" (released 98).
 The book gives the chance to read about our point of views on art,
cyberspace, music... and those of our guests. While lying on a sofa.
This is nice. Seeing us perform is something else. The 2 are opposites
but go together.
  

    
What fun to see you here!
  

    
Heavens, lots to sink our teeth into here, and I want to come back to
some of the ideas you've touched on, but one comment really leaps out
at me: "Lisa wouldn't paint a picture, and I wouldn't play guitar in a
band ..."

What a great opportunity to ask about the choices you've made and your
commitment to electronic and digital art. Let's go back, way back, and
let me ask: Do each of you remember your first experiences with
electronic music and/or imagery -- maybe even your first computer?

Gary, I know you've been interested for quite a while in some of the
earliest electronic musical instruments. There's a great theramin piece
on the EP "Tree," for example. Was there ever a certain moment, maybe
a first encounter with e-music you heard on the radio as a kid, where
you thought, "That's cool -- that's what I want to do"?

And you both attended the European Art University in Vienna, so Elisa,
you must have tried your hand with a set of oils or watercolors at
some point; why do you find a digital palette a better fit for you?
  

    
Pardon me excuse for interupting the Station Rose inquisition
happening here... but I have a comment and another question. I first
experienced Gunafa listening to the Grateful Dead playing from the
Pyramids in Egypt. I wasn't actually there but only listening on tape.
Besides the strange trip of the Grateful Dead music coming through the
speakers, there was another vibe that I had never experienced that I
later learned was called Gunafa. Gunafa is the experience of something
totally enmeshed in art or something to that affect. When I finally met
Station Rose through the Art Com Electronic Network g acen at the
Well, they had been enveloped in Gunafa already for about a dozen or so
years if I am not mistaken. They too had been in Egypt looking for the
cosmic giggle when they realized the concept of Gunafa and decided
then and there to pursue it. Station Rose are clearly digital bohemians
in the full tilt boogie mode! They can be modest about the their
stellar Austrian heritage. No they, did not exactly evolve from Mozart,
but Gary raised a major ruckus as a young pop star before going to art
school, and Elise did her understudy with Karl Lagerfeld, no slouch
himself. But back to this Gunafa thing. What is it exactly?
  

    
<Do each of you remember your first experiences with
electronic music and/or imagery -- maybe even your first computer?>

David, my first experience with electronic imagery was at the art
univerity in 85. There was a commodore c 64 with a pad. I was so
interested, and made my first computer grafics on that machine. I used
that grafics for the experimental fashion show called "Uranus with his
5 moons", which I did together with Gary. It was a one night
performance event at the museum of modern art in Vienna. I used this
very first computer piece of art in divers versions for the show: we
made a slide out of it, because there was no other way to get the
picture out of the computer. the slide then was projected on a big
screen on stage. ( at that time I worked with slide projectors a lot,
cause I always wanted the work with the light of grafix. it was some
sort of an earlier version of video/data-projectors.) Then I
screenprinted the same grafics on canvas, and on cloth, in different
colours and material- for the collection. Maybe I find a picture of it
to show here. These were my fashion & grafics years, as I was in the
Karl Lagerfeld class at the university of art, as well as in a video
class. 
When Gary and me finished the art university with diplomas in 87 (we
got an academic title : magister of art), a month later, I bought my
first computer, a commodore 500. I was immediately fascinated and toyed
around us much as I could. I knew on from the moment I unpacked it,
that this was the right machine for me. As we had studied in a video
class, I had a lot of contact with video editing, mainly on u-matic. I
never liked that big dinosauresque videosystem. It was clear for me,
that with my own computer a special part of my artistic life would
start.

To your second question 
<Elisa, you must have tried your hand with a set of oils or
watercolors at
some point; why do you find a digital palette a better fit for you?>

I was never much into painting, neither oils nor watercolors. I never
really liked canvas. If I wanted to work with "material", I decided to
do it more in fashion. But the problem here, too, was that material
like cloth is so final. As soon as you put colour on it, or
screenprint, and then cut and make a clothing-you cannot make any or
almost any changes later. When you cut into cloth, and make a mistake,
it is not <repairable/changeable> any more. that fact made me very
nervous. I wanted a fluid medium, where I can make updates and changes,
if I wanted. And what is maybe even more important, I am an RGB sort
of artist, not a CMYK. I am into light, not into print. RGB has much
more intensity colourwise. When I talk with collegues, it comes out
very soon, who is into RGB, and who is into CMYK. A female grafic
designer I know in Berlin came up with an interesting formula: If you
mix more and more colours on paper, in the end you get black. if you do
the same on screen, you get a bright colour. (I am not sure if I
sampled her 100% right, but the content goes like that). So the digital
palette in my case is almost always linked to the intensity of light,
the screen, the projections. When I produce art for exhibitions, I try
to transfer that idea- I show light-boxes, or C-Prints on plexi (which
are developed in a digital foto lab). Sometimes I use both in an art
show: art pieces out of light, and screenprinted art. 
My production modus is always industrial. I do the art on my computer,
and then pass it on to professionals to produce/finish it. I
defenitely believe in the original, but of an idea, composition. Not in
the original in form of a painting. This is retro for me.

Hello Are We Really! an answer to gunafa is following.
  

    
I cannot distinctly remember a "childhood flash" that sparked into a
musical career. Maybe one little episode, when I was watching Beat Club
(a german tv series with live bands in the 60ies) I noticed how
extremely annoyed and aggressive the "grownups" in the room got. I
thought "wow, I normally really have to plan a long time to make them
so mad, these guys only need to play the drums and guitar and have long
hair!" I was deeply impressed (later I found out they had showed The
Who in that episode).
It became more clear when I was 10-12, at the step to adulthood. I was
extremely bored, nothing seemed to make sense. Then I discovered my
parent´s record collection, and I was hooked. From then on I spent 99%
of my money and my time listening to and making (I picked up the guitar
then) music. I got involved in electronic musical instruments later,
as during the punk movement in Europe end of the 70ies, where i did my
first live gigs and recordings, the use of these was deemed
reactionary, being used by the so-called despised prog rock bands like
Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis (yuck) etc. 
I started working with samplers in the mid-eighties, because the
guitar seemed too limited. My first computer was an Atari, an extremely
relieble machine; I even took it with me on the road when playing
live. 
Today I prefer HD recording, doing practically everything with
sequencer software.
  

    

Gunafa is an Arab slangword, which we discovered when we were granted
a post-graduate study in Cairo, Egypt. It means something like
"positive chaos", "merger of seemingly impossible-to-mix things",
"cocktail". A word of many meanings! Ask a befriended arab, and she
will tell you her personal definition of that word; this is also a nice
effect that term has. I find the word appropriate for avantgarde art,
not only for ours.
Our recordlabel, where we release 2-3 vinyls per year, is called
"Gunafa", by the way.
  

    
I like that line:  "I am an RGB sort of artist, not a CMYK."  It is profound
and also a little bit of a smile after a recent conversation here about
personality types...

Over in <inkwell.vue.97> the MBTI personality codes are related to 
colors, so this is a fun and thought-provoking addition.
  

    
I am both an RGB and CMYK kind of guy. Thanks for the clarification on
the meaning or derivation of Gunafa.

I was at your latest performance at 76 Minna Street in San Francisco.
You used enormous video projectors fed out of your Powerbooks that you
collaborated with each other making digital sounds to accompany the
visuals. It was a fascinating, psychedelic experience. It was very
technocentric feeling. Why not so much melody? Are you creating just
pure technical visual and auditory riffs?
  

    

Elisa, I'm with you!  I love light-produced color and usually tear my hair
out at pigment produced color.
  

    
Welcome, Are We Really?, and Gail, I forgot to say, Hi!

Gary and Elisa, I don't want to just deluge you with questions -- yet
-- especially since Are We Really?'s is such a terrific one. I'd be
interested in hearing you riff on that one, too. I've practically worn
out the Station Rose recordings I have (and btw, the cover for Au Ciel
is fabulous!), and melody or not, I'm humming along to *something*. <g>

Gary, check out this piece in The New York Times today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/14/arts/14HAMP.html

It's about the return (more or less) of 70s prog-rock, particularly in
bands like Radiohead. Now, I realize this isn't exactly the type of
music you were referring to, but I was happy to see Can and Cluster
mentioned as influences. I'm wondering if you were into Krautrock at
the time, too.

And the Atari! That was indeed the die-hard centerpiece of many an ad
hoc studio -- and more than a few professional ones, too. Even into the
late 80s, when I visited Logic Records (Münzing and Anzolotti, Snap,
"I Got the Power!" and all that), and among all the mixing boards,
offices, studios for video shoots, kitchens, what have you, the heart
of it all was nothing fancier than an Atari.

Elisa, it's remarkable that you didn't catch the video fever of the
mid to late 80s when it seemed next to impossible to attend a
performance of any sort without bumping into a monitor. And I like this
image of trying to "get the picture out of the computer."

I hope you can find some examples of your work in fashion from those
years. The evolution of the *look* of Station Rose is great fun to
survey in the book, _1st Decade_.

But first, back to Are We Really?'s question...
  

    
<really> Why not so much melody ? We moved away from that since 5
years now, especially when playing live. We try to provoke a synergetic
effect, so that the listener hears a melody of him/herself, so to say.
The opto-acoustic patterns should not be too complex when performing,
although powerful enough as to make room for your personal son et
lumiere.
It´s different when recording. Here it has to be complete, burned into
CD or vinyl for eternity ! But even here there is not too much of a
melody used, as we are more into minimalism these days.

David, I would not call Can (that was the first record I ever bought, 
in 72, btw ;-) a prog rock band ! Krautrock, yes, I still like some of
it. Prog rock, for me, and many punk colleagues, was a craving of rock
musicians to be taken seriously by serious composers, mimmicking the
pompuous side of classical music (like Emerson, Lake and Palmer for
example).
  

    
I thought Emerson Lake and Palmer was rock music? Not Rock and Roll,
but Rock.
  

    
Linda and Gail, RGB seems to trigger something. ;-)  
Light is essential in my art. And with new and strong projectors it
will enter our rooms soon. It could become as "normal" as a good
soundsystem. 

And David, did you hear "Au Ciel" yet? There is a link to the
mp3-version at
<http://www.atrecordings.com/FrontSite/LabelArtistAlbum/Artist.asp?artist=art_s
tatio00>

I dont understand well what you mean with "it's remarkable that you
didn't catch the video fever of the mid to late 80s when it seemed next
to impossible to attend a performance of any sort without bumping into
a monitor"? 
we did use videos at that time, even made one for the diploma, but the
output medium then, monitors, was still small.

i like that we skip from present to past and back. it fits into 
LAH/Life After History. Concerning the fashion period, this is some
sort of a not catalogued part of our art. it was too soon for the 1st
decade book,too. we only webast parts of it in a remix last year, but
didnt make rm.files out of it. it was before station rose, 1983-86. I
found this from the very first fashion show: 
<http://www.well.com/user/gunafa/fashion1.html>

the one we talked above, with the first computer grafic lays in the
archive on videotape. Maybe I can scan some of it. 
  

    

Wow!
  

    
That´s a very good article, David !
I agree with Mr. Hampton 99,9 %. 
  

    
There are some terrific bits of writing in there, too. Even though I
much prefer Eno to Ferry, what a great description of Ferry's solo
collections of covers, suggesting "nothing so much as the imaginary
soundtracks to Elvis movies as remade by Rainer Werner Fassbinder."

Linda, I'll second that Wow! -- and add that I'm glad you two, Gary
and Elisa, are still working with. i.e., remixing the material. Elisa,
you write, "i like that we skip from present to past and back. it fits
into LAH/Life After History." Before we step into the future as well
over the next few days, tell us a bit more about LAH. The idea, I mean.

And now you've got me wondering how far back you two go; when *did*
you meet for the first time?

Also, Elisa, I must have misunderstood your first comments about video
and thought you shunned the medium entirely. Not so, so I see! 

Streaming "Au Ciel" as I write; more on that soon. For now, LAH...
  

    
LAH. The idea.

this was a difficult one. I was trying to write directly into inkwell,
was almost finished, and finally lost it. i had to start again from
the beginning and recollect my thoughts. so here is version 2:
LAH came up during the 1st decade book production (98). it had been
some sort of timetravel through the 90-ies, in which we saw many future
aspects at the same time. Concerning the net and digital art, 
projects like electric minds and palace were really early examples of
what can go. how online communities could and hopefully will have
conversations. We tested the system, tried out a lot. So when bringing
in older projects/ideas, as soon as they were in the conference, and
even hyperlinked they became part of the present. this was an
interesting fact.
It set us free from having to describe art, we had done long ago. we
didnt like to do that. especially when it was art that was not released
on the art or music market, but only performed once or twice. So the
net, well engaged, webcasting brings back art, makes it part of LAH.
with webcasting this is even more now, cause streaming is so active, so
fluid. here we can webcast material into the present in realtime.
so in a way the net puts the present much more into the focus. and it
includes the past - remixed, updated, digitized. at the same time we
observed to pay less attention to the future. so many things are
possible now, which we want to experience before going on to a next
level. always thinking about the next (technological) levels sometimes
gets superficial, doesnt leave enough time for the production at a
moment. The reason why we looked so much into the future in the 90 ies
was because then programms, computers and the net were still in the
beginning.
i think i read about "future is now" in bruce sterlings inkwell topic.
this goes into the same direction. The future and the past is now.
after all those years of waiting for the adequate hard and software
(real)time is here to work with them, in LAH. 

but one has to see here that having hard and software & the net
available doesnt mean that the realization of projects becomes so much
easier. its easier to produce but it is still hard to release. it takes
much time to put everything online for instance, and to deal with
providers, software updates,...i think that in the present, where much
goes technically, digital art must really fight for its place in the
net. all the attention e-commerce tries to get, means a difficult
standing for the avantgarde. btw, maybe it was really good that that
the stock-mania has a down.

I am looking forward to how the net will evolve in the very next years
in LAH, how the digital art becomes a streamed full screen experience.
I believe in the net and in hypermedia. LAH for us is the time now,
where we can really work with and act in realtime. in the book
"private://public" we were talking about LAH with our guests, too.
maybe there the statements are sharper than in my version2 here.  but
on the other side is well engaged the right place to talk about - LAH.
  

    
        <IMG SRC="http://www.well.com/www/gunafa/1.jpg";>

So here is my very first computer art. I did it in 1985, working on a
Commodore C64, at the art university in Vienna. So far I never posted
it on the net. we only streamed the fashion show called "Summer 96" in
a remix once, but didnt archive it . I got it yesterday from a DV-tape,
 where I made stills with Firewire and the PB.
  

    
<IMG SRC="http://www.well.com/user/gunafa/STRcomputergrafik1.jpg";>
  

    
"so in a way the net puts the present much more into the focus. and it
includes the past - remixed, updated, digitized. at the same time we
observed to pay less attention to the future."

This is so much the character of the computer-mediated world for me:
transcending time, transcending locale. In the last few years I
realized I'd stopped reading science fiction because it seemed stale
compared to my life online!

In the work we did at FringeWare, Inc., particularly in Monte
McCarter's art and design work, and in his intensely realized
electronic compositions, we had this same sense of no-time, which is
something I had encountered in experimental fiction as long as thirty
years ago, where we talked about literature that was less transparent
and more just-is, just-now, sort of a zen theme emerging on the fringes
of western culture.

I'm interested, Elisa, in whether there's an ideological aspect to
your work, or do you think of yourselves as apolitical?
  

    
Definitely the question of the day, Jon!

To add briefly to yours and Elisa's thoughts on LAH: "The future and
the past is now."

I think there are many positive aspects to this outlook; technology
allows us to keep souvenirs -- photos, text archives, audio and video
recordings, etc -- all around us, as real as any other mediated
experience of the present. And in a way, sci-fi films, novels, even
some dreams allow us to add our "experiences" of possible futures to
the collection as well. But there's also the danger of leaping off the
deep dark end, a danger Scott McLemee describes nicely in his short
piece at Feed on Baudrillard (whom Bruce Sterling also mentions in the
inkwell.vue discussion you refer to when he talks about the area where
pomo theory and science fiction meet): "there is no more future,
trapped as we are now between what Baudrillard calls 'the impossibility
of anything's being over and...the impossibility of seeing beyond the
present.'" 

http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1552

Best line: "The end of history means the launch of reality's
syndication as endless reruns."

Your take seems to be the much more fun one; to accept this state of
affairs, to enjoy it, to riff on it, to turn it into art. Yes?

You also say, "i think that in the present, where much goes
technically, digital art must really fight for its place in the net.
all the attention e-commerce tries to get, means a difficult standing
for the avantgarde."

I just wanted to point folks to more of your thoughts on this in a
recent post to Nettime:

http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/200101/msg00095.html

But back to Jon's question...