Immersion and "Seeing Back":
A conversation on politics, technology, and artistic practice
Jordan Crandall and Brian Holmes

I. Early Blast Collaborations

BH: Looking over your work today, Jordan, it seems to me that it has developed in two diverging directions. In your recent installations, you attempt to model the way that a networked rationality configures its human subjects. Here you are dealing with the socializing pressure of technological and economic norms. In the e-mail forums that you organize and moderate, you seem on the contrary to be preoccupied with individual agency, as expressed and developed in dialogue and exchange. I find this split extremely honest, realistic, coherent with the state of the world, and thereby promising. But at the same time it increases my curiosity about your earlier work, which shows no such split, and is marked above all by a kind of communal, utopian playfulness.

JC: In the early 90s, before people really used the Internet extensively, there were many local BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) that were community-based forums for discussion. In the art world there was a very important BBS called The Thing. When I look back on the writing I did then, mostly on The Thing, I am struck by how naive it sounds. But the general atmosphere then was one of exhilaration, a profound hopefulness of what new communications technologies could bring. We weren't really talking about the politics of the network then, because we were just getting used to whata network was. We were just trying to see what it meant to exist online, what kind of social bonds and structures it helped to form. When I began working on the MUDs and MOOs (Multi-User Dimensions), what we were interested in doing was playing with new forms of embodiment, with new forms of existence in telecommunicational spaces. It is difficult to describe the power of this experience. I am very interested in processes of embodiment, and in order to think virtual or online embodiment you really have to experience it, you really have to spend the time to participate fully in online dynamics. You have to be a fleshed-out person and form strong communal bonds, you can't just poke your head in. So I think those years were really about being immersed, about surrendering to these new experiences. The critical work that I did in that period was mostly aimed at deconstructing the print publication.

BH: Artistic practice is always about experience, experimentation, and about forms that can bridge the gap between that experimental activity and a more-or-less distant public. Can you describe some of the specific forms you developed at that time? Do they owe something to conceptual art, or could they be better discussed with metaphors of virtual theater, of disjunctive or multistaged performance?

JC: The forms that we developed at that time–-and I say "we" because the early Blasts were developed as collaborative projects, though it is a problematic "we"-–were all centered around a reconsideration of the entity of the publication, and an investigation into editorial processes. In many ways, the processes came first, and then they were contained, contoured, circulated by/in various Blast "vehicles." The vehicles were boxes at first, and then they started to mutate. Beginning with Blast 3, we started to incorporate live, performative elements. In Blast 4 we created Parangolés (after Oiticica) as extensions of the vehicles. By the time we get to Blast 5, the vehicles no longer have an interior–-they are solid objects. All of the content of Blast 5 was performative, and we connected very much to performance issues. Particularly, we were interested in exploring the relations between scripts and actions, in the context of various locations both real and virtual. So while the forms of the early Blasts could resonate with, say, Fluxus editions, or boxed publications like SMS and Aspen, Blast was not really like them. It was not really a publication but a set of investigations that operated in the guise of a publication, and then moved on to other contexts.

BH: Let's take the metal valise of Blast 3 as an example. What does it contain, and what could not be contained by it? Who produced it, through which media and in what kinds of physical settings? The valise is a collector's item, released in a limited edition, but it conveys an imaginary of mobility and multiplication, as though trying to re-instigate participation processes that the form itself tends to deny.

JC: Blast 3 had three components: a metal valise, a collection of maps, and a "live Blast." One could contribute a project as an object or text (enclosed in the valise) or as an action in one's daily life. The live actions were documented by Ben Kinmont and this documentation was enclosed in the collection of maps. The collection of maps-–produced by Eve Andree Laramee–-served as the index. Rather than simply listing projects, it projected them into various constructed landscapes, and the idea was to position Blast as a space of different kinds of encounters, which actually could be mapped onto imaginary terrains. You took your valise and your sheaf of maps and you ventured out as a traveler. With Blast we always used the index as a strategic site, because it is an organizational format that situates you within the space of a publication. For us that publicational space is a process-–a process with certain constraints, determinations, positions, pathways. While the editorial items could be contained in Blast, we always worked to position this as but one instantiation. Our job was to point outward. To orient the reader and to make this reader aware of the procedures of orientation. This is why I have always described the Blast assemblages as vehicles.

BH: So the early compilations were an attempt at formally conveying what was in fact an experimentation with social structures–the idea being to embody and mobilize the relations represented statically on something like a newspaper page?

JC: Exactly. And it played out differently in the various Blast issues. Early on it involved the social dimension of editorialization per se, and the development of networked collaborative forms (though we really didn't have "networks" then as we know them now–we used correspondence, faxes, meetings, and, beginning in 1993, the BBS). The MOO was a way to open up an alternate site within Blast 4 that allowed realtime social dynamics to come into play–particularly as practical investigations of the theme of that issue, which concerned the relationships between physical life and information space. We were particularly interested in the ways that we were beginning to exist across the divides between the corporeal and virtual realms. The MOO was a particularly rich site of investigation, because here you could embody yourself in an entirely virtually constructed social world. You could create a new identity for yourself, you could assume any body type, you could build rooms and objects that would add to the virtual city of the MOO and have real effects on other people. All of this was done through typed commands. It is like being in a living play script–-a script that is being written in real time, with many different actors and directors. But here the distance between speech and action collapses. Speech becomes performative. And in immersive virtual worlds, you realize that the distance between symbol and referent shrinks, even disappears. There is also a completely different sense of what constitutes an object. An object is an entirely operative construct. It is like the difference between the letter A as it appears here and the letter A as a link on the Web. In any case, you soon realize that the quality of your interaction on the MOO is determined by the degree to which you embody yourself, by the choices that you make, and you realize the degree to which these are conditioned by your own cultural and personal history. I mean, you can embody yourself as a can opener if you want, but nobody will know what to do with you. People spend many hours in MOOs, building up characters, adding rooms, building objects. They create a virtual life, participating in the creation of a virtual society. There are even elective governments. But what's really interesting are the points where things bleed through, those messy things which are traces of embodied life that don't quite translate. The confrontations and the misalignments. The MOO is one arena for looking at processes of identity-construction as they occur across multiply formatted worlds. There is a lot to be said on this subject. I think what most interested me at this time was the relation between speech, embodied movements, and the determination of space. A way of performing self and space, as part of a networked social dynamic.

BH: These experiments with multiple authorship, fictive personalities, and virtual space coincided with the borrowing and re-creation of Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés, associated with the favelas of Rio and the samba of the Mangueira dancers. Even if you proposed them as a cue to flamboyant virtual fantasy, they also imply a sensual, bodily experience of others and of the street. They speak worlds of desire. What drew you to Oiticica, and what was it like to use these new Parangolés? In Oiticica's own development they mark the abandonment of a constructivist utopia that could spring full-blown from the artist's brush and mind. The social designer yields to the unforeseeable participation of the multitude.

JC: While I was working on Blast 2, my co-editor Laura Trippi introduced me to Oiticica's work in the context of our theme, which was the increasing spatialization of artworks and texts-–the ways that artworks and texts were becoming less unitary, centralized, or even locatable, and instead dispersing into various configurations in space, activated through the pathways of a mobile viewer. Laura and I decided we would reinterpret a Parangolé to put in the Blast box and make a connection to Oiticica's writing, which we also included on a computer program–-a hypertext "Pocket Dictionary" that was included as a set of computer disks. The Parangolé was only a simple gesture, really-–it was an orange plastic sheet, folded up like a book. You opened it up and there was a space cut out for your head to go through. It sort of ended up looking like a strange kind of rain poncho. On the index it was credited as "Parangolé (after Oiticica)." We presented Blast 2 in the window exhibition space of the New Museum in New York in 1992. I remembered how delighted visitors were to put on the Parangolé, and how it really created a new dynamic between wearers and watchers. It was very exciting to involve people in this way and create a space of interaction for the discussion of Oiticica's work and ideas and also for what we were doing with Blast. We were trying to break down the rigid grid of the editorial page. We were trying to spatialize the page, to open it up to a space of dynamic relation-–but more than relation: of immersion and inhabitation, in a way that maintains a focus on the body, on the movements of the body. This resonated very much with what we thought Oiticica was trying to do in relation to the picture plane. When you transform something that you used to stand apart from into something that you wear, you re-situate the space of the art within a social interplay that never forgets about embodiment. You add a social dimension along with a focus on the contours and movements of the body, in the formerly detached space of viewing. You can no longer master the work from afar-–but you integrate the work into an immersive interplay or cycle in which, among other things, watcher and wearer (or reader, writer, and work) are modes of a dynamic. Two years later, in 1994, I was working a lot on the MOO and I thought that perhaps the Parangolé could be used as a device for thinking of the integration of corporeal and virtual worlds. Because the interface, as it stands, can clearly be thought in different terms. Typing at my computer monitor while immersed in a social world, I am somehow here yet there, alone yet joined with others, embodied yet disembodied. Clearly we need new devices to think about this dynamic-–about inhabitation processes, sociospatial construction, and processes of embodiment. In Blast 4, we decided to create new Parangolés (after Oiticica) as Blast vehicles themselves–that is, as "soft Blasts." They were made of soft, sexy satin and on the MOO they were made of code. You could put them on in a gallery, or on the MOO, via typed commands. They were really a device for us to bring in Oiticica's thinking and to make it relevant today, true to a contemporary situation rather than fossilized. It created a bit of controversy, of course, as it should. The Oiticica Foundation ended up endorsing the project, and soon the Parangolés will travel to Brazil and we will have a conference at the Centro Hélio Oiticica. So these Parangolés will be a cultural import from the north! Perhaps it will be time to resituate them again as part of a different dynamic.
I remember clearly the days of presenting the Parangolés in galleries and how excited people were to wear them. They opened up a space of participation like nothing else I have seen. In the Sandra Gering gallery, with the MOO space projected on the wall, talking with others in that "other space" via the keyboard, there were moments of the most magnificent poetry-–multiple conversations and presences both online and off, converging and diverging, intertwining in strange ways.

BH: By crossing a continental divide to appropriate Oiticica's invention-–which for himself was an appropriation across class lines, from Brazilian popular culture-–you opened up a process of interchange that you are now pursuing in the Internet forums. You brought the "constructive principle" of Oiticica's work into play. Let me recall that the project of Tropicália, which developed from the principle of the Parangolé, was an attempt to transform Brazilian avant-garde culture on the basis of popular forms, the samba, the architecture of the favelas. Oiticica contrasted this to Cubism's purely visual borrowings from African art: "The Parangolé places itself, as it were, at the opposite pole from Cubism: it does not take the entire object, finished, complete, but seeks the object's structure, the constructive principle of this structure, the objective foundation so to speak, not the dynamization or dismantling of the object." Similarly, your engagement with Oiticica does not seek to comment on the new media networks with quotations from art history, but rather uses artistic principles to transform the emerging culture of the networks. Today that has a political importance, which we'll get back to. But in the early nineties, I have the impression that what mattered most was the sense of freedom you all experienced in this time-based performance art, immaterial or material, but participatory and evanescent in either case. In your text on the Parangolé, you quote from Michel de Certeau's reflections on inhabitation and wandering in the rationalized grid of the city-–which of course is related to the Situationist "drift" and the great refusal of authoritarian rationalization that had marked the late sixties. At the close of the Cold War you could develop anarchic popular uses of the most advanced technology, and drift through the very computer networks that had formerly represented the overwhelming power of the technological state.

JC: Yes, there was a sense of freedom–-we were all quite invigorated by it. It's like when you first discover a new space, you want to thrash about in it. We were interested in the carnivalesque. The pleasure of movement, of masquerade, of newfound desires mediated by this strange telecommunicational space. A specific agenda for me was to mobilize the body, rather than leaving it parked at the monitor, frozen up save for tiny little eye and finger movements. To position the body as a hybrid real/imaginary, physical/digital construct, enmeshed in embodying and integrating forces. At its simplest, the Parangolé was a device to get one's ass off the chair. I appreciated how De Certeau made a specific relation between movement and articulation. To move was to perform was to speak. In MOOs you continually enact the world around you, help bring it into being, through the agency of your body in motion–-all in speech. If you do not speak, you are like a ghost, no one knows you are there. But it is not just the speech itself that determines presence, but the rhythm of speech, the way speech is interrupted, intertwined with and punctuated by an awareness of bodily acts and environmental circumstances. So there is a rationalized, formal system, yes, but then there is always its enaction in practice, opening up new freedoms which we cannot foresee. What do you think that de Certeau has to say to us today? Margaret Morse says that De Certeau's introduction of "elsewheres" and "elsewhens" in the here-and-now, while once liberating, is now fully contingent on the operation of commodified spaces (malls, etc.), because these very means of escape are already designed into them. Margaret wonders if De Certeau could have imagined that there would one day be videocassettes that demonstrate how to "power walk."

BH: De Certeau's generation-–and not just the thinkers–-had to directly confront the reality of social control, the all-pervasiveness of disciplinary structures after the regimentation of the war. They sought to open up other spaces, in their minds, in language, in perception, in the intimacy of experience and in the common media of exchange. I think they were tremendously successful. They invented a thousand ruses to slip through the links of the rationalizing grid. After the revolt of the sixties, what the Frankfurt school had diagnosed as the "authoritarian personality"-–the propensity to submit, to enforce, to obey-–began finally to dissolve. De Certeau gave one of the most generous visions of that dissolution, with his attention to the body, to common experience, to the coexistence of different temporalities, different cultures, the vast, rhythmic mesh and disjunction of life on this planet which can never be reduced to the single process of commodification. The sensitivity and scope of his awareness is still liberating for people today–-as I think you discovered. And yet Margret Morse is right, the strategy of playing diversity, itineracy, uniqueness in time, against universal laws and an engineered social order is no longer enough, because conditions have changed. Unlike the authoritarian state, globalized capitalism does not seek control of desire, but control through desire, the channeling of experience and otherness into cycles of consumption and (increasingly symbolic) production. It seeks a kind of open, inventive, productive compliance, what I call the "flexible personality." Under this new regime, each space of freedom you create is potentially open to colonization, manipulation. Disruptive gestures are not prohibited, but studied, emulated. The game has almost entirely changed.

JC: I like to think that la perruque ("the wig"), as De Certeau describes it, is alive and well and working in ways that we aren't able to see. There are worlds being created right under our noses. Within this new game, we do have something very valuable to offer through art: a kind of informed play. Opening up spaces of possibility, not only in terms of creativity itself-–which is important, yes, but creativity is a general quality, which everyone shares to the extent that they allow it to emerge and grow–-but in terms of the awareness of factors that go into the creative act, in its intersections with the field of symbolic production. It is crucial to articulate that we are not just speaking about subjective work, or about expression for its own sake. The other night I was talking with someone about art and he condemned contemporary artists for the fact that they don't master their materials–that they don't write their own code, for example. He found it hard to believe that an artist can create a digital work and not know how to write a program. I pointed out that good artists work with the codes of reception, and that this is a material as much as clay. What are we doing but trying to develop specific interventions within the field of symbolic production, in order to open up those spaces that De Certeau talks about, but in an informed way that does not just amount to a wry, knowing wink?

BH: The question of free play within reception is a subtle one. Stuart Hall gave a whole new twist to the understanding of media culture with a 1980 article called "Encoding, Decoding," where he distinguished between dominant, negotiated, and oppositional reception. People either take the message as it was intended by those who encoded it, or they work out a compromise between that "preferred" sense and meanings that fit their own reality and desires, or they decode the message in total opposition to the intended meaning. With that insight, the old notion of the media as pure brainwashing or behavior conditioning went out the door and the great celebration of creative consumer culture began. The idea was brilliant, but now it has become too easy for fundamentally conservative academics to just say people are free to decode whatever they like. Hall himself notes that "encoding will have the effect of constructing some of the limits and parameters within which decodings will operate." Advertisers, managers, and administrators have learned how to set the range, extend the variability of reception in all kinds of ways that still encourage buying the product, toeing the line, or getting the job done. Things have loosened up, undeniably-–but I'm not satisfied. What interests me in your writing, especially in a piece like "Editorializations," is that you precisely describe the technological and psychological means for the production of social norms, and the ways in which those norms are internalized by expressive subjects. Expression (or "creativity") then appears in a relation of tension with the normative fields in which the subject always participates, to some degree. That awareness allows you to help develop "editorial formations" or "publicational bodies" that skew deliberately further from the norms of expression, without sliding off into the illusion of total freedom. As a networker myself–-employed in the postmodern information factory-–that's how I prefer to use the "stolen time on the machines" that French workers call la perruque.

JC: Working in the context of editorialization, there were all kinds of things to explore, such as indexes, bindings, systematizing forces, and the kind of contouring that occurs in the form of a publicational body. I began to see this as a pliable, moldable material, and that is how the Parangolé came about, as well as the molded vehicles, in particular the RFs (rhythmic fittings). The body pushes against this "material" in practice and it registers its movements, routines, and contours, while the systematizing forces push back-–making the surface in between a tensional, pliable space that is itself a medium.
The work on editorialization came out of a way to look at the space between reader and information in a manner that brought these tensions into play. To be aware of circumscribing forces, of the systems of binding, arranging, circulating, locating, that are at work in the most innocuous of forms. How quickly one assumes a role without thinking. There is a slot that that is called forth, into which one slides. Or there are two slots, and you pick one. ("Interactivity.") Editorialization was always more interesting to look at than just "information" per se, this free-floating, indeterminate thing which you just engaged arbitrarily. At the time there was the slogan, "information wants to be free." To editorialize is more clearly to call forth certain positions, and to draw into account certain social and economic formations, certain systematizing forces, certain mechanisms of binding. This harmless space of reading is really a war! I wanted to draw the idea of publicational bodies as entities that are more than just the forms we are familiar with, the forms we parcel out into print, video, and digital media. These new entities are materializations of all kinds of forces and practices, which connect in very particular ways to their use in daily embodied life. The forms into which they solidify are normative; they both monitor and maintain. It is almost a policing. Today, with identification and tracking technologies, it is certainly a policing. Editorializations call forth very particular kinds of group identifications, they are bound and ordered, and one is often miming their terms; but they also offer up many different possibilities of disruption or circumvention. La perruque is certainly one.
The vital work with Blast was always in the space of reception, in its pliable contours as they encountered the body, and in the systems outside of its publicational confines. To accomplish this the interior eventually had to be evacuated, as it was in Blast 5, and then it had to move into the networks. There were also all kinds of problematic separations at this time, as there are still. I wanted to draw alternate diagrams that would be based in overlapping fields, which would align and disperse in specific ways. It's an attempt to move toward formations that are more conducive to immersive realities, where we do not have the kinds of separations that we used to. To look at alignments and coordinations was a beginning; to see links in terms of circuits was another. A link presupposes a separation along a defined path, but a circuit temporarily connects a flow. In this sense, for example, there is no such thing as a Web page.

BH: The page relays other pages, to form a flow. But what does it mean, from a human point of view, to exist as a kind of relay in these multiple flows? The social world is now threaded or crisscrossed by what you're calling "circuits," which can be exceedingly different in terms of the communication techniques they employ, the values and motivations they bring into play, the number of people they integrate. Rather than receiving a message, we partake of circuits: we can aspire to participate or we can be compelled to, we can be excluded or lured in, sometimes without knowing it. Your notion of the circuit, its alignments and its binding mechanisms, is close to the sociology of Bruno Latour, who defines a network as a set of human and technological "actors" all of which are discrete, individual, local, but whose operations translate into terms acceptable to the others and are thus able to form vast arrays, without ever appealing to any transcendence, or subordinating any actor beneath an essentialist definition. Such a conception permits an open, pragmatic approach to the complexity of relationships in the global society that the Internet has helped bring about.

JC: Yes. The circuit or relay helps to get out of some of the traps that privilege individualism or even essentialism on the one hand, and society or power on the other. We know for example all of the culturalist work that suggests that an individual is produced per se, endowed with a range of capacities and faculties; and we know work that privileges individual or human agency, often arguing from nature. But what is exciting is that we now have all kinds of relays, all kinds of switching-points, valves, conductors, regulators. It is productive to see the collapses between private and public, interior and exterior, subject and surroundings, in this way. There is a commutability, a convertibility, and procedures to regulate those flows, but the transfers are bi-directional: there is not always one imposing on the other like a vector coming down from on high. I think this is why I am so interested in routinization, in cyclical repetitions, as enacted in the body, because there is a clearly a coordination at work between internal and external factors, between the corporeal and the technological systems of ordering, sorting, profiling, registration, etc.–-relays between the animate and the inanimate, which are helping to define the contours between humans, objects, and machines, between ranges of motion and the devices that meet it and fit it. Now in the relays between technological protocols and human behaviors, what is the organizational paradigm, the genre of ordering, sorting, aligning, calibrating? There is the database and its formats of statisticalization–-we have become what Mark Seltzer calls "statistical persons." We really need a new semiotics to account for this-–even Latour says we need a semiotics that does not distinguish between signs and things. Clearly the reign of "text" is over. We must even begin to see images differently.

BH: The aesthetics of endlessly self-altering text rapidly ceased to be subversive in the information economy, and instead became a functional description of the proliferation of electronic signals. Yet the proliferation remained fascinating, throughout the eighties and into the early nineties. After that long period of semiotic fascination it's a relief to see artists taking a fresh interest in sociology, with this new understanding that we also think and relate through the material forms of technology, just as we think and relate with our bodies. But Latour has pointed out that although all relationships can be conceived as networks, not all networks are the same, particularly not in scope and power. The example of finance capital and all its freely convertible forms looms large today-–and there, processes of "textual" proliferation clearly integrate and subordinate material elements, including our bodies. So the network paradigm raises some old questions in new ways. And these questions are increasingly political. That's what we'll have to look at next, to approach an important turning point in your work.

II. Netforms and Political Space

BH: Around the period we're talking about, say in 1995, you seem to have been mainly concerned with two things. The first was making the relational circuits visible, tangible, producing that informed representation you were talking about earlier-–and in your position, that often entailed pointing to the procedures being used by large corporations to extend their circuits into the new relational space of the net. The second was laying the organizational groundwork for viable editorial formations, composed of individuals seeking a free exchange of views and practices which might, over the long run, realize some of the promise that the net initially offered as a public space. The publication formulas of Blast 1-5 were viable, for a time. Then you moved into different forms of collaboration, and began developing your visual work along more personal lines, to explore the change in the way we see images.

JC: Blast 5 was clearly the end of Blast as any sort of locatable object. It ended that particular line of development. From 1991 to 1996, we systematically dismantled it. Not a good move, business-wise. We can't rely on Blast sales to fund the project anymore, but as Blast is produced by a nonprofit organization, the X Art Foundation, we receive support from the NEA and private foundations like the Jerome Foundation, the Lenrow Fund, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. In terms of the two concerns of mine around 1995 that you accurately describe, one can really see just how limited the format of Blast was, and clearly it had to be streamlined, it had to move into the networks, it had to become some other kind of system-structure that would be more conducive to that landscape. About this time I did a show in Paris at Galerie des Archives, called the "Blast Conversional Archive." It was an attempt to specifically diagram the editorial formations and processes and to position Blast very clearly across the divide between online and offline space. For the first time, all of the Blasts were brought together and an attempt was made to encapsulate that period, to situate it in a kind of closure. For that show I began to make diagrams of these formations and processes. These diagrams have become a core part of my practice.
Also, at this time, 1995-96, the mode of working solely in a collaborative capacity was beginning to run its course. I realized that pure collectivity, even networked collectivity, was not the most effective way to proceed. During this time, there were all sorts of conceptions of the net as a democratic space, dehierarchizing, decentralizing, and promoting the dispersal of ownership and control. It was hardly what we were beginning to see, even in the most ideal group situations. And Blast was contradictory from the start. It never really was fully a collaboration.
While we were theorizing about collective authorship, the net itself was helping to create new kinds of centralization, new kinds of hierarchies, new mechanisms of centralized ownership and control. How were we to strengthen ourselves to meet the challenges ahead? Here we were, fitting precisely into the role of marginal artists, trying to develop collaborative structures, all the while corporations, which have no such ideals and which know better ways of organization through clear divisions of authority with very effective means of motivation, were leapfrogging way ahead. Personally, I had many issues to confront at this time: what was mine? When could I say "I"? I was flipping between "I" and "we" so much that it became difficult to separate the two. I still flip between them. It is often more natural for me to say "we" because it includes others, others who are always part of what I say and do.
One needs an agency that can act quickly. I realized that working between an individual and a collective mode is a much better way. I worked in this way for the "Blast Conversional Archive" project, and I knew at once that this was the future for me. Now I flow in and out between individual and collaborative modes, and I find this to be a more realistic, and much more effective way of working. My own work and the work of X Art Foundation/Blast are complimentary, all the while maintaining a clearly defined legal separation. Often it is still confusing, but I find that a very productive place to be. In terms of working in the networks, there are times when one needs to deploy the resources of an organization and there are times when one needs to intervene as an individual agency. The Board of the X Art Foundation and my collaborators on Blast know what our goals are, and these goals I share as an individual. They have found that this working process has significantly increased our voice, and our ability to act. Today Blast has more participants than ever. It is truly a global project. I try to be a quiet agent. I help behind the scenes, I try to encourage, to set the stage, to provide an effective platform. I treasure every single post that goes into the Blast forums. I am trying to back up those voices with an apparatus that can help to promote change–-a platform for a voice to matter. We are now in a better position to deal with the politics of network culture and to develop reassertions of the relevance of artistic practices at this moment in time.

BH: It's interesting that you still use that word, "a platform." The final Blast exhibition included just that, a performance stage inspired by the constructivist information kiosks of Klucis and Lavinskii, designed in the early phases of the Soviet revolution. The platform of Blast 5 was poised at the juncture between the dispersive, coded vectors of planetary information access and the embodied, passional experience of the performer; like the constructivist kiosks, it sought to distribute the experimental breakthroughs of art and science to the widest possible audience of participants, actors, co-performers. It gestured or gesticulated to the most dramatic figure of Enlightenment, the expression of universal reason through a violent transformation of time-bound material reality. Quite a figure to set up in a clean white New York gallery! Of course it also had that aspect one often sees in the art of our societies: the miniaturization of a utopia which cannot exist outside the aesthetic frame. A revolution in a white cube. Most artists are of course content to remain within the existing structures, gallery or museum. But rather than plugging for a genuine revolution–the kind with all the blood and guts and broken windows–-I think you're right to try patiently to expand and multiply the frames, to extend the public space of democratic debate and to experiment with the possibilities of networked collaborations. One sees traces of this expansion, this experimentation with new relational forms, in the diagrams produced for the "Blast Conversional Archive." You referred in that show to Belisaire Asking Alms, a David painting which, through the presence of the "stand-in" figure of a soldier, fictively integrates the beholder to its representational space. Clearly you were pointing at the immersive quality of the Internet experience. Although you say this painting is "arguably located at the threshold of modernism," I would more precisely locate it on the eve of 1789, because it anticipates the great paradox of representative democracy: the necessarily fictive integration of the spectator. Only to the extent that the fiction is understood and mastered by the spectators can it positively affect the real. This is exactly where we now stand in the media democracies--and today, with "humanitarian warfare" increasingly appearing on our screens, the irony of a soldier luring us into a fictive spectacle of charity is particularly damning.

JC: The original idea for the Blast 5 stageset vehicle was to make something that was easily transportable and quick to dismount–-a guerrilla construction that could be installed and dispersed on the spot. It had to be able to broadcast and distribute Blast material while also providing an arena for performative action. In the stageset there were brilliant poetry readings, readings of manifestoes, theatrical improvisations, and performances that Franklin Furnace helped to organize. There were giant screens for projecting videos and Web projects. One of them was of Martha Wilson, the director of Franklin Furnace, impersonating Tipper Gore singing "The Star Spangled Banner." All of this activity was recorded and broadcast on the net. So, while earlier I said that the Blast 5 vehicle ended up having no interior, which concluded a line of development, I should also say that there was the opposite to that: the stageset vehicle opened up the space of Blast into a life-size space. You could have up to three people performing upstairs while several people mingled below in the racks of literature and propaganda. It grew into an architecture. But the architecture was deliberately positioned in terms of political potential and the reference to the constructivist kiosk was important. We never got to use it in the kind of open public space for which it was made. Right now we are planning a retrospective of Blast and for this show, it has to be installed in the lobby or on the grounds of the institution. The question would be how to activate it in such a way that it would not be a single oppositional gesture safely ensconced in the museo-corporate world. Perhaps it is better just to keep it as a relic. Because clearly its limitations are visible; as you said, the idea is to distribute breakthroughs and engage the widest possible audience and group of participants, but the political potential of such a construction remains confined, remains a gesture that can only signify opposition, an opposition which is already called forth, manufactured, provided for. The limitations of the material forms of Blast become quickly apparent in relation to the potential of the net-–here are the new platforms, the new Blast architectures that can have real effects beyond institutional gestures. It is not about doing a "web project" or "net art," but rather about developing very specific architectures of engagement, strong editorial formations that intersect with material realities in complex ways, in an effort to sort through and register the potent combinations of history, cultural identity, and individual and group agency that are arising through the networks of communication and translocalization. It aims to provide a platform for artistic and critical voices that can exist on par with the commercial media–-that can meet them on its own terms, to assert its own value. In this way we are not simply "content providing" but creating our own channels and systems, our own audiences and participants. And we are especially creating awareness of the paradox that you locate as marked by the David painting: only to the extent that we can master the terms of representation, and the terms of our being registered and called forth as agents, can the "virtual space" affect the real. Now that you point out the irony of a soldier luring us into a humanitarian spectacle, I realize to what extent I have to continue to work on this figure.

BH: It's obvious that such "architectures of engagement" will have to confront, grapple with, and also elude many other, antithetical formations, which also project themselves through the old and new media channels, or which proliferate there chaotically. To work in that environment with middle or long-term goals like the ones you've laid out is challenging. I think the stageset and the references behind it can be valuable for that effort, to the extent that one develops their constructive principle. The principle of the Soviet kiosks and pavilions at their best-–I mean, beyond their sheer propaganda functions-–was to place the artistic intervention at the meeting point between a broad, yet philosophically oriented matrix of information and a specific urban situation, with all its political, social, and cultural forces at play. A model of that would be Melnikov's pavilion for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which we studied in the so-called "kiosk group" with Jean-François Chevrier at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. That pavilion included a kind of worker's club and reading room designed by Rodchenko: it housed a space of self-education and intellectual exchange within an architectural signifier of revolutionary aspiration. In other words, it expressed a utopian political philosophy in a dialectical way, though a confrontation between discursive practice and artistic form. If we take that as a principle to build on with the Internet and in our "globalized" situation, it seems to me that three major questions emerge. What are the broad philosophical ideas that can orient the treatment of information today? How can the processes of self-education and intellectual exchange reach beyond isolated individuals to engage with embodied complexity of urban situations, which are themselves interlinked? And finally, how to signify this effort artistically, how best to make it visible?
I think the most successful philosophical approach in the real world of "networked activism" has revolved around something like Habermas's description of the public space-–with the essential realization that this public space is at once threatened by various forms of manipulation (particularly by what is called the "spectacle society") and prejudiced by its fundamentally bourgeois and now technocratic origins, so that it is constantly in need of enlargement and transformation, particularly through the inclusion of other cultural dynamics. These are very real problems, which are being worked on by all kinds of people. What do you make of a list like nettime, for instance? How has it influenced you, and how well do you think it has mastered the terms of representation and individual/collective agency? They have taken an interesting tack, as through trying to build a virtual/physical institution along radical-democratic lines. I was very impressed by the recent Next 5 Minutes event, and the way that this sort of anarchically orchestrated e-mail list could help weave together so many political activists, and reinforce their ties with a physical meeting.

JC: In terms of critical net culture, nettime has been one of the most influential venues of the latter half of the 1990s. For anyone who is interested in the political economy of network culture and who wants to develop informed critical strategies in the nets, it is absolutely essential. It has always been more than just a mailing list: it has combined publications, conferences, workspaces, and meetings across west and east Europe, and much of its success is due to the multiplicity of its forms and the strong sense of community it has built across the divide between online and offline. Its success has also been due to the high critical standard it has maintained, while there is so much noise out there. I have felt a part of this community many times, and I still do to a certain extent, though I am not a European and nettime is strongly Eurocentric. I don't necessarily feel like an American, either, by the way. Sadly, there are few strong articulations coming out of the US in terms of net critique. There is a lot of essential reading on technology and culture coming out of the academic publishing industry. But there are no venues anything like nettime or Syndicate, or the countless regional net forums like CyberNS, which comes out of Novi Sad. There is The Thing, yes, which has a place in history because it was the very first--it was actually the BBS that influenced nettime. But generally it is too complacent in the US, people are too seduced by high-tech gadgetry and there is a overriding sense that technology and the market will solve everything. The fact that a system built for public use, and which has shown enormous potential as the kind of enlarged public space you spoke about, is now in danger of being completely hijacked for commercial purposes is not really seen as a problem. For us in America, our contribution at this point could be to try to interface the commercial world with the critical community. But, really, this is not going to come out of the US because there is no critical distance, except of course in academia which is its own world. While both nettime and Blast are pushing for the development of tactical media practices, the difference is that for nettime, art is basically useless. Blast is much more oriented toward art per se. The difficult thing right now is, of course, that the category "art" has been under siege from all sides, including from the inside, and it has all but been emptied out. Further, most net practitioners want nothing to do with art history. There is a huge gap between the traditional art world and the new media world. In the kind of technology-oriented art festivals like Ars Electronica and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival, you find installation work that has absolutely no awareness of anything before 1994–-the whole history of critical, installation-based art practices and their particular strategies, which could be engaged and built on. There is no place for Oiticica, no place for the constructive principles you so compellingly describe. You have written before on the need to pick up on latent historical energies–-to revisit critical work of the past and reactivate certain lines of development. I was in a group of new media people recently to help develop a plan for an exhibition at the Hamburg Kunstverein, and when the strategies that the group suggested resonated with certain critical practices of the 70s, I remarked that we might look to them for a historical basis for proceeding. I was looked upon as a heretic.
Now the problem with nettime is that it so often engages in knee-jerk reaction against what it perceives as the neoliberal agenda, and at worst finds itself backed into a corner with no critical tools that are effective in a landscape which has changed drastically over the last thirty years. It promotes a kind of ethical consciousness that sits there satisfied with itself, and doesn't really deal with the ambiguities and complexities of life today. While we see the intensification of nationalisms in the world under globalization, we can also see the declining significance of history per se and the rise of global market ideologies. We have to take them more seriously. We have to take consumerism more seriously. There are complex new kinds of identification at work. Manthia Diawara has pointed out that people in Africa live consumerism differently from that way that mainstream white people do, and that for an African, consumerism can be a way to put oneself on the marketplace as someone who counts. Putting oneself strategically on the marketplace can be a platform, in a way that we have yet to know how to handle.
A few months ago Geert Lovink and I were at a conference in Madrid, and we spoke about this in the context of the future of nettime. We agreed that it has to be the next stage. The danger is that some people will skip over the first stage.

BH: Certainly that first stage has been inventive and effective. And when the critique of neoliberalism doesn't become too reactionary, it can still help a lot to preserve and develop certain civic institutions, built in the context of the nation-state and dependent on public funding. The thing is not always to "smash the state." As to the role of art in the context of global consumerism and market ideologies The late eighties and early nineties saw a lot of speculation on the transformative potential of sheer popular pleasure. Some people who still believe they are "on the left" pointed back to the theses of the conservative critic Daniel Bell, who held that consumerism itself would undermine the "Protestant work ethic," that it represented the "cultural contradiction of capitalism." To me that's wishful thinking. People have just gotten schizophrenically clever at dividing their lives between hedonistic intensities and corporate discipline. If art has been emptied out-–and I think that's true, it's everywhere on the verge of being liquidated as a project distinct from cinema, design, and advertising–that's because artists and above all, art institutions, are no longer developing cultural alternatives. By which I simply mean different ways of spending your time, the search for different kinds of sensations, emotions, and ideas than the ones exalted by the global market ideologies. The problem is not markets per se, which can have their relative place in society–it's the ideology, which claims that the relative place should be total. This is why I think that artists can do their best work by overstepping barriers of culture and of class, just as Oiticica did his best work that way, and enlarged neoplasticism without destroying its constructive ambitions. I thought that the <eyebeam> forum which you set up in 1998 offered a promising opening in this direction, a chance for artists on the global circuit to be confronted with different concerns, different temporalities. This is where the individualistic processes of self-education can become collective and dialectical, when the geographic and social divides are taken fully into account. Now I'm hoping that the <iniva><blast> project will go much further–and there, legitimacy and agency for "non-Western" artists is going to be the critical issue.

JC: With the <eyebeam><blast> forum we aimed to open up other cultural vectors, we worked hard to engage participation from under-represented regions-–voices that have not really been heard in the dominant net forums. Olu Oguibe has pointed out that we think we are doing under-represented voices a favor by speaking on their behalf, while they remain absent, but often the opposite is true. Right now we are at a point where we really can have much more diverse conversations. For example, there is a lot of net access now in India and in coastal China. Cheap satellite access is on the way in many areas. This is not to dismiss the problematics of access. You remember we had the "localization" thread in the eyebeam forum, where people would write about their daily lives-–you wrote a very impassioned one-–and this helped to balance the homogenizing, globalizing aspect of net communications with evocative local articulations. Everyone remembers the handicapped person logging in from a log cabin in the woods of northern Alaska with no running water. There were many strong articulations of the fate of national identity in a globalized world-–Ricardo Basbaum, Luis Camillo Osorio, and others from Brazil, and people like Pedro Meyer in Mexico-–and there were so many events and symbols that brought together such potent contradictions, such as the favelas and the huge fire that raged through Brazil at that time. Carlos Basualdo asked, what can we do to help in the context of this fire? This led to debates about the relation between artistic and humanitarian intervention, between aesthetic and political practice, as well as what the physical effects of a networked discourse could be. We are dealing again with the relevance of artistic practice in a state of emergency in the <voti><blast> forum, which is called Cultural Practice and War. It is in the context of the war in Yugoslavia but is not particular to that crisis. This brings us to another point on the issue of access and diversity. We used to think that simply wiring up the world was enough. There was a popular slogan for quite a while that read: "only connect." All you need is to get connected. But with so many people getting connected, we now find that we are not necessarily understanding each other. I don't mean this in terms of language barriers, although that is a problem too, or in terms of the general misunderstandings that are always part and parcel of net communications. I mean it in the sense that there are "walls" up that are not so easily penetrated simply by establishing networks. There are deep ethnic tensions, suspicions, rivalries, and power vectors that override the openness of the net. There are histories, fears, desires that we don't understand. There are deep-seated convictions fueled by state media that limit one's ability to partake of the vast differences of opinion and reportage that the net offers. One has access to this world of diverse knowledge and opinion but one doesn't necessary partake of any of it. Many Serbian citizens with net access who were writing during the context of the war simply refused to believe that atrocities were committed in Kosovo by their government on the scale that was reported by the world media. Some believed that much of the televised footage was of refugees from years ago. Deeply related to this is the problem of veracity, because of course there is bias everywhere and on the net you often can't be sure of the degree of truth. It is truly a jungle out there, and we are all looking for markers. We are not really "net people" but we are people embedded in circuits and forces that the net may help to rework but cannot evacuate. We have to take into account the ways that the networks do not simply overwrite geography or neutralize national identity, endlessly spiraling outward in vectors of dispersal, but also act to prompt the reassertion of borders, centers, nationalisms. I hope with the Blast programs–-which by the way are grouped under the heading "Blast Agencies for Critical Network Practice," which is basically Blast 6 even though we are no longer numbering Blasts in that way-–we can help to develop new possibilities for artistic intervention, new formats, vocabularies, platforms.
The next Blast forum, <iniva><blast>, in collaboration with the Instituteof International Visual Arts in London, will take up these challenges.

BH: In these open, almost unfiltered forums, where we address ourselves to anonymous groups and yet constantly end up exchanging with individuals who see things very differently than ourselves, there is a shake-up of "public" and "private" which is intimately troubling–-and can happen in the thick of a philosophical or political debate. I'm tempted to say that the symbolic boundaries of us and them, of myself and the others, are shifted or perhaps simply rendered more palpable, even in the distanced act of framing ideas and writing. But I don't know if that is only my experience, or even how deep it goes. In any case, for me that lends an almost artistic dimension to the forum activity, which otherwise would be a kind of cerebral polemic or disembodied chat.

JC: I'm glad you brought up the artistic dimension of the forum exchanges, and hint at what makes them so engaging, so different from disembodied polemic. You wrote in one message in the <eyebeam> forum about sensing the presence of others behind the screen. It is so true. You sense it in the tiniest turns of phrase, in the vaguest rhythms, in the most fleeting of patterns. The Blast forums bond people together in cross-distance relationships, whether professional or personal or both. When the <eyebeam> forum ended, one woman in Sri Lanka, Carla Sinclair, broke down in tears-–or at least, seemed to do so in her post. Saskia Sassen wrote that the forum was "a profoundly public space, the sort we find only in complex, intensely diverse urban centers." It is something very new, to see the forums in terms of the urban, and to try to understand what gives them that quality. I want to know everything about this new kind of space where people gather and share the complexities of living in this moment in time, at the crossroads of so many deep changes. This strange space that people inhabit-–what is its potential, personally, socially, politically? What kinds of agency can the forums facilitate, what physical effects can they help to orchestrate? There is a lot of chatter out there, but what are the conditions for the formation of groups, of strong group articulations, that push beyond mere "interactive communications"? I think that we can discover new types of agency in the networks. There can be new kinds of alliances that involve machines as well as people. There are new sculptural spaces, ripe for artistic and personal appropriation. To help to activate this kind of space gives me hope. One must live it. It is a space built of social relationships that adhere over time. There is also something crucial in the process of learning to navigate the shake-up of public and private that you mention, and the ways of figuring and using the relays between public and private modes and subjectivities. I am trying to figure these relays. I locate my practice here.


III. The Scales of Artistic Practice

BH: We have spoken of the way you moved from a highly experimental group process to a more formalized but in many ways more open and inclusive working structure, resulting among other things in the various Blast forums. What links can you draw between these forums, which have become a vast relational endeavor, bringing you into the physical presence of participants all around the world, and your current, more personal artistic practice, where not only technologies are manipulated and explored but images are also created and projected? I said at the outset that your installation work dealt with the "socializing pressure of technological and economic norms," and I'm sure that's true, in an installation like suspension for instance, which places the visitor at the center of various converging processes and tools which affect (self-)perception and even the body's mobility. The texts you've written describe the various technologies, informational vectors, behavioral rhythms, and we have covered some of that ground in an interview reproduced in this book; but there is more in such a work than just analysis. What doors are you seeking to open, what are you seeking to feel, to encounter, or to leave behind? How does the creator of these immersive installations use them?

JC: It was important for me to spend a lot of time in the exhibition space of suspension during the opening days of documenta, to see how the space was activated by visitors. In conceiving the project, I resisted turning the space into a technological spectacle. It was important for me to create a different kind of experience that is more about how a space is determined through use, through personal, social, and networked activation, which often involves the coordination of patterns of practice. This is something that was brought out in the suspension book (co-edited with Keller Easterling), which housed the more figurative aspects of the project. There are relays between technological systems and embodied habits, that manifest in very simple, palpable ways. One creates a place for oneself, a practiced space, through repeated patterns. Behavioral patterns are trackable, and your routines locate you as a consumer, but there is something else in the thickness of the space between the body's sensorium, in the subjective and social dimensions of experience, and in one's ability to relay across diverse, often overlapping formats-–something else that always eludes control. Rhythms can be coordinate or disjunct, and through their coordination larger patterns emerge, secret practices that, through the networks, can bond distant peoples. So more than a retreat into individualization or subjective play, the idea would be to discover how, as Margaret Morse writes, "people walk, talk, and perform daily tasks in coordinated rhythms that shift from locality to locality, in a beat influenced by media and even by historic echoes"–-I can add too, in coordinations that shift across public and private-–in order to discover new agencies, alliances, identifications, new formats of speech and action. Further, there is the ability to create new awarenesses of where one is, how one is located physically as an embedded person yet at the same time distributed through networks. There is the ability to discover new sensoria, new faculties, that technologies can enable. Clearly we are seeing differently, and the point is to be able to know how we are seeing differently, and to use that seeing in order to make ourselves more aware. In McLuhan's sense, to create more extensions of oneself, but then also to know how to regroup and mobilize oneself in distributed alliances. Theorists like Latour show that it is possible to form alliances between machines and people. Can machines be part of new social groups? It sounds very sci-fi, but we have to learn to harness the power of machines and create bonds with and through them, on an everyday level.

BH: You're so optimistic! But there's a need for lucid optimism, in the face of what could easily become a dystopian reality. And anyone who looks closely at your work realizes that you're not naive about that. Take the model of the phoroptor, for instance, which figures prominently in the concept of suspension. It's a benign, positive piece of technology: an optician's device for measuring the abnormalities of individual vision, facilitating the creation of precisely cut lenses. Yet like any medical device it has an unsettling aspect: "They're going to do something to my body." Via this analogy of the phoropter, your work in suspension allows us to conceive how our sensory perception of the world is being reconfigured, renormed, by a matrix of devices and circuits immeasurably farther from our reach and control than a pair of glasses. But suspension is not only an analogy, it does not only offer a distanced analysis of sociotechnical forces, like so much critical work influenced by a narrow reading of Michel Foucault. Instead, it sets an immersive stage for conscious swings between the intimate dimension of experience and the public, discursive sphere of debate over the shape of the future.
I think the important distinction now lies between intimacy and a contractualized public sphere. Intimacy can be personal, psychic, and it can also be shared. Whereas the contemporary service economy encourages an increasingly stricter privatization of experience, keeping people at a distance through contract relations. It promotes a normative individualism, whose technological symbol could become the VR helmet hooked up to company server or a commercial laser disc. The flexible individual, responding to every stimulus, has time only for work and pleasure dictated from afar. The bubble of the self becomes hermetic, and poses no more questions to the social order. But in our confrontations with machinic norms, we can try to open this passage from the intimate to the public. Against the chronometrics of tracking, we can explore the rhythms of bodily movement-–and of speech.

JC: Was it Raymond Williams who talked about the walling off individuals and families into enclosed worlds, which then became part of larger formations through new communications media? The encapsulated home carried with it the need for new kinds of contact. The bubble of the self becomes hermetic, yes, but the enclosure is provisional, and there is a give-and-take as the subject moves through space: a continual exchange between inside and outside against a trajectory registered as movement or travel. The flexible individual is certainly the site of sensitization, yet is not the "bubble" a provisional formation, whose very enclosure, however immobilizing it might be, sets the stage for new kinds of contact? Here I am being very optimistic, I know, but I am wondering if there could be emerging formations that we just can't grasp yet. I think that we are already seeing the case of a "stacking" or windowing along a new axis–-we know it as multitasking. Boeing, for example, uses headsets that allow its workers to call up schematics from the computer, which are then overlaid on top of the area where they are working, all without missing a beat. The VR helmet that you mention is awkward and too isolating, yes, but the goal is miniaturization and portability-–making it move with the body wherever you go, so you don't even know it's there. In fact you could see the new miniaturized headsets as less isolating than television, because you can move through the world and function in many different environments at once. You can carry on conversation, walk down the street, log onto the net, call up a file from the database.
On the other hand I am not so optimistic. Clearly multitasking formats are aimed at making the worker and the workplace more efficient. The only place to go after making time-increments ever smaller is to allow rapid flipping between tasks, the multiple overlaying of many simultaneous tasks. Can you imagine Charlie Chaplin trying to keep up in a Modern Times of today? We are talking about new fitness regimes, new formats of adequacy. This is where a figure like the phoroptor becomes valuable, in exactly the way that you say: to show how our sensory perception of the world is being reconfigured, renormed. We are made fit with adjustments, with lenses, with corrective measures. The lenses are the result. The goal is to augment the sensorium of the privileged body, to bring it up to par, at the expense of-–let's be blunt-–the continued impoverishment of millions of workers who will never share the frivolous advantages of these unnecessary gadgets. What a crime it is, this techno lust: wholly unnecessary to the survival of the species, to the quality of our life on this planet. If people–-privileged people--realized what was happening, what was being done to them, there would be mass revolts against corporations like Microsoft. I would join them. We don't need smart homes, we don't need to talk to our refrigerators. I recently made a tour of the MediaLab at MIT, and among their products are smart chips for groceries, so that at any time you can call up your house on the net and find out how many cans of soup you have in the cupboard. I don't understand how thinking people can put up with this. As an artist who wants to explore these systems, I am caught in a terrible bind. I need the tools, I need to know where we are going. But it is my duty to politicize the tools.

BH: Yes, that's the key. But what exactly does it entail? Raymond Williams believed that communication technologies could offer a dialectical response to individualizing processes that dissolve community relations, urban solidarities. Similarly, the net promises this reintroduction of a social and cultural dynamic into the experience of those who use computers to communicate from offices and detached suburban homes. But Williams was incredibly lucid. In his 1974 book Television, he recounts the welcome that young Europeans gave to the pirate broadcasters who set about breaking the authoritarian state monopolies: "The irony was that what came free and easy and accessible was a planned operation by a distant and invisible authority–-the American corporations." We know that the current forms of authority moving through the networked media are no longer simply about spectacle and consumption, but rather seek to instill a new productive discipline that integrates communication, desire, and intimate aspiration, reaching deeply into the embodied psyche to install new perceptions, new routines. It is in this way that the included subjects of the globalization process can be accounted for, administered from afar, and even better, "self-policed." You've described all this quite brilliantly in an essay called "Mobilization" which traces farflung circuits of data processing, surveillance, and economic collaboration back to one fragile but perfectly integrated site of routinization: a little girl's dance rehearsal studio. The economy of the world elite in the twenty-first century will be a dance choreographed interactively by all included subjects, according to productivist patterns which are offered as enabling norms. But what do you suppose we are rehearsing for right now?
I think the kind of political speech that Jacques Rancière describes, the words which do not fit in and cannot be accounted for, emerges only when one reaches outside the circuits of what you call the "privileged people." It is only by going outside the well-policed global civil society, by experiencing something of the violence of exclusion, that one can discover different aspirations, other desires which can be stated in political speech, whose subject is always somehow collective. That's why I'm so interested in the various popular movements which started to recognize each other through the Zapatista meetings in Mexico and Spain: constellations of groups like People's Global Action or Reclaim the Streets, which have already linked up with more bourgeois-reformist initiatives on occasions like the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998, or again at the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. You speak of "ventriloquizing" such efforts into the networks. Have you considered the possibilities of extending the urbanity of the forum exchanges out into the urban environment of concrete, of contact, of friction between people? Doesn't politicizing the tools entail this double movement: bringing in, but also stepping outside the dominant circuits? I think this is the way you could fulfill a potential that is deeply inscribed into your work, that goes all the way back to the encounter with Oiticica's Parangolés.

JC: Last week I attended the ISEA conference in Montreal. I walked into the opening panel, in the midst of Pierre Levy's introductory talk on "collective intelligence." His talk went something like this: we were once a disconnected species, but we are in the process of wiring ourselves together to form a meta-sphere of collective intelligence, in which all will share and to which all will contribute. Within this sphere, which soon will blanket the globe, everything will be connected to everything else and all borders will break down. We can now witness their gradual collapse, Levy says. Even familiar boundaries between realms such as economy and society will disappear. I could not believe my ears. I thought I had walked into a time warp. You could have gotten away with this eight years ago, but not today. When it came time for audience participation, I stood up and confronted him. How can one ignore widening income gaps, different levels of access and speeds of access, different levels of translatability, different levels of media literacy? Far from an equal sphere, it would seem that we are working toward a highly hierarchized one, with different zones of privilege. Regarding the dissolution of borders: what about the new kinds of borders and entrenchments that we are seeing in the rising network society? Dissolution always is accompanied by its opposites: concentration, fortification. Saskia Sassen talks about how the global economy is not decentralized but highly concentrated in a number of command centers, or global cities. We have new kinds of centers, new kinds of borders, new kinds fortifications in the name of religion, ethnicity, state, economy, individual identity, many in response to the rise of networks. At the San Diego/Tijuana border-–the busiest border crossing in the world–-they have recently instituted a fast lane, where, if you are pre-approved as a person beyond suspicion, you can speed gleefully past the checkpoint bottlenecks. Most people have to wait a long time, sometimes hours. And you know many people in Tijuana live there in hopeless years of fruitless attempts to get across that border. So we are talking about earning a privilege of crossing at a faster rate, which gives you a completely different experience of space than someone who has to wait in line for an hour. Is it even the same kind of space? The experience of someone who has a T1 line to the web is vastly different than someone who has a shaky 14.4 dialup. It is a different kind of web. The net itself is a tangle of Intranets and, increasingly, financial networks, many of which are firewalled. Everywhere you turn, there are hierarchies, exclusions, and attempts to limit, to contour. The people who are theorizing the dismantling of borders are elites who have no borders. It is a different space, a different language, for those whose lives are marked by lengthy delays, or forbidden crossings. The gap between the rich and the poor in the US is now greater than at any time since the Great Depression (there is a government report at www.cbpp.org). Far from a free-floating, even sphere of equal access and privilege, once could picture instead a stage set for a return to the class warfare of a century ago. It is a possibility that Levy's grand vision cannot admit.
I mentioned Sassen. She talks about the global city as both a command node in the world economy and an emerging site of confrontation, as global elites and immigrant communities–both having become increasingly transnational-–each move to "claim" it. It is something that we are going to find in the networks too-–and networks are never divorced from urban realities but deeply embedded within them. The confrontations and exchanges can be as "real" as those of the concrete urban environment that you speak of. Where does the network end and the city begin? By concentrating on network presences, one does not exclude the environment of concrete, of contact, of friction between people that you mention.

BH: The important thing is to construct tools for collective agency-–and to use the ones that still function, as in the public confrontation you recount. Such acts are small, but important. More generally, the problem of determining the proper scale for the use of communicational and organizational tools is one that we all face today. Global knowledge does not always bring a capacity to "act globally," nor is it sufficient to "act locally," as the old saying had it. For instance, the core preoccupation of media activism defines the range of a world-spanning formation like nettime, at once making it viable and limiting the responses it can produce. Is it better to enlarge the range of a single tool, or to attempt connections between different formations? By focusing her research on the common ground of the global city, Saskia Sassen is able to impact a variety of different networks (academics, municipal governments, officials dealing with transnational regulations, corporate strategists, NGOs and transnational activists ). No doubt this is a way to act politically in the contemporary environment--which does not eliminate the risk of becoming a "network hopper," not in any way subtract from the merit of those who devote their energy to maintaining viable formations on the ground. For an artist, I think, the problem of scale becomes particularly acute. Can you still describe something small, bounded, the outgrowth of your personal encounters, your skill and imagination? How does one go about creating something as unique, limited, even intimate, as an artwork, in the face of all the knowledge that the networks bring us, and in the face of the political urgency which any reasonable person must feel today?

JC: Much of what we have been discussing can be thought in terms of mapping out a vast technics of control–-a pervasive colonization of private life by commercial and state interests. And it is most urgent to counteract this, particularly with the kinds of political agency that the networks can facilitate. In my personal artwork, however, what I also want to do is to open up new vectors, many of which traverse new sites of intimacy, tapping into interior dimensions. In this sense they flirt with a different kind of responsibility.
When we were discussing the divide between private and public earlier, you said that the real issue was the divide between intimate and public. There is something incredible in this question of intimacy: it does not necessarily align with our earlier conceptions of the private, and what we can on the one hand mourn as an invasion into personal space can on the other hand be understood in terms of gaining new kinds of intimacy. For example, Jennifer Ringley, the girl who installed a webcam in her college dormitory-–opening up her most intimate life to the view of strangers–-is someone whose sense of intimacy involves new kinds of others being present. These others don't invade her space–-they activate it, fuel it. We know that the prying eyes of the media can open up new sensual pleasures and social worlds for people: witness talkshow culture and the excitement with which many new kinds of invasive technologies are met. It cannot simply be mourned as a loss of privacy. There is a certain pleasure one takes in one's ability to register on another representational system, that is bound up in the very need to be counted-–the very need to matter. This tapping into the intimate that I am speaking about is not simply a retreat into the subjective. It is about opening up more relays into it: relays between interior and exterior, near and far, seeing and being seen. These are helping to change the contours of the body, its desires, and its sense of orientation in the world. What are the relays between private desires, exterior movements, and public technologies of registration? I want to offer a route of escape from the straightjacketing of analytical formats, whether theories, statistical studies, or database compilations, which don't take into account this question of intimacy and interiority. The artwork is something that can do this like nothing else.
In the Drive sequences, there are actors who can definitely be seen as subjects of monitoring: in fact they are filmed with military tracking technologies, which signal a powerful, pervasive, armed gaze. But the subjects both succumb to and elude control, and there are new erotic worlds that begin to open up. They involve new couplings of humans and machines; new senses of intimacy and invasive pleasures that usurp private space; new forms of simultaneously seeing and being seen that mark both a "strategic seeing" and an exhibitionistic impulse ("seeing back"). The "seeing back" is bound up in a new process of identification and incorporation as a source of erotic pleasure.

BH: I think you're right that artworks have a unique chance to represent certain realms of experience, and to make them matter in our collective reckonings. Even if you take the traditional forms of intimacy, or erotics in the largest sense-–including sexuality and fantasy but also household life, child rearing, the relations of education and long-term friendship, care-giving and the sharing of convalescence and death–-all these involve temporalities which are impossible to quantify, which don't fit into the calculus of production and wealth, of expense and repayment. Such things could seem small-scale, and yet much of the political force of art in the democratic age has been to make them visible, and so to enlarge the public sphere, in order to quell its structural violence against that which it excludes. But the intimate realm is now increasingly tracked, scanned for potentially useful energies, and represented in very partial and distorted ways, whenever it appears that a representation can provoke a desired form of behavior. The forms of intimacy that come through the networks are much affected by such processes. You are certainly aware of them, in your videos which inscribe a green tracery of surveillance onto the erotic mobility of bodies. I'm wondering, though, about your own experiences of artistic creation, about your relationships with your models and also about the ways you experiment with your own memory and sensations. Does art give you a chance to replay some of these new relations of seeing that you encounter and invent in the networked world? "Seeing back" is an extraordinary phrase to describe the activity of an artist today. Who are you looking at? And out of which eyes?

JC: The question of who is doing the seeing is an important one, and I am not really sure where I stand within these staged visual networks. In track 4 of Drive there is a scene based on an obsessive fantasy that many of Freud's patients described to him. In each case, the patient witnesses a beating of a child by a father. It is the stage for a peculiar erotic compulsion. The place of the witness is an uncertain one. Where does she stand? Because what Freud articulates as the basis of this recurring fantasy is not only an external looking–-"a child is being beaten"–-but also a projection of the witness into the scene ("I am being beaten by the father"). There is a peculiar anchoring of the witness as internal and external to the scene, and a beat of exchange that fuels its erotic compulsion. I want to explore these new modalities of seeing as they are facilitated by new distributed visual networks, where the conditions described here are even exacerbated and driven according to new beats. For my own position, it involves wanting to discover a role and to reinforce a sense of physicality that can be lost within a network of dispersal. It is to see what could be considered a disembodying system as a re-embodying or incorporating one.

BH: This brings us back to the question of immersion, and of fiction. In Freud's understanding of the sexual-aggressive fantasy, the single individual occupies all the roles: active agent, passive subject, witness. And yet this distribution of the self is unconscious. The work of psychoanalysis is to bring internalized, unconscious relations back into the world of speech and of reciprocity, to re-embody them, in your sense. Which doesn't mean eliminating the fantasy, but bringing it openly into play between two or more people, so that it can be transformed. Could there be something similar happening in the world today, where mediated images of the other become the basis for a internalized, repetitious pulsing of the drives? Is there not an unconscious fantasy, and therefore a distribution of the self, at work in the obsession with televisual witnessing? I think there is; and I also believe the movement from the purely fantasmatic vision of the other to reciprocal speech is part of the dynamic that can be developed through the forums, for example. But this becoming-conscious must begin from the presence of the underlying fantasy structure, its visual-affective texture, and its permutations. Perhaps this is one of the things that "seeing back" could mean.

JC: That's the key–-how not to eliminate the fantasy, but to project it up from the "depths" into formatted space, into the world of speech and reciprocity. And at the same time, to understand how reciprocal speech and embodiment are "anchored" in this pulsatile realm below the visible: a space of desires and complex rhythmic exchanges that cannot be accounted for in database-driven realities and their encoding systems. My use of Freud's case in track 4 of Drive is by way of (Krauss's summary of) Lyotard's notion of the "matrix." The matrix is a form that figures recurrences. It blocks together incompatible positions and modes. Within it, nothing is resolved but things continually court their opposites-–beating turns into being beaten; active turns into passive; seeing turns into being seen; sadism turns into masochism-–and something peculiar like a spank that is also a caress, or a witness who is also a victim, can exist. There is a rhythmic regularity in which one's unconscious is "caught," manifesting in the realm of psychic compulsion. I want to understand this as a physicalizing force. Track 4 is installed as two large video projections, projected opposite one another. The action flips back and forth across the screens. We see an older man (the father), a young girl, and a woman. The action is filmed with an old hand-cranked camera, in high-contrast black and white. Sometimes the girl looks like the character in Cocteau's Blood of a Poet. But with the beats of exchange-–a beat that is both a spank and a technological rhythm-–the action flips between two other formats: a surveillance camera and a wireless, wearable camera concealed directly on the bodies of the actors. The wearable camera is as intimate as the surveillance camera is authoritarian. It is as shaky and erratic as the monitoring camera is composed and cold. The actors exchange roles, the formats change, the sound snaps, and the historic echoes of cinema beat through the obsolescent technology of the hand-cranked camera, where the light pulses in rhythm with the technological capacity. The cinematic beats are such that we can now feel them; the monitoring beats we cannot yet sense. They are too new. With the hidden, wireless camera, the hand that is strikingly present turning the hand-cranked camera is all but evacuated. We are in and out; the witness flips back and forth into and out of the scene; she is clothed and unclothed; she is old and young. The child catches the eye of the viewer; we turn away yet probe deeper. All of this revolves around the staging of a simple scene that holds a strong erotic compulsion.

BH: What are the other scenarios you are exploring in Drive? How does the technology involved in filming and viewing the pieces become part of the compulsions you are dealing with?

JC: Track 3 of Drive holds a similar investigation into cyclical obsessions, but the relation is between private compulsions and public technologies of registration–technologies of ordering, sorting, counting, compiling, accounting for. They are linked very specifically to the war machine, and the sounds we hear are gunshots and various explosions firing to a regimentative beat, mixed with heartbeats, footsteps, dial tones, and motors. This track uses such things as cars and telephones to explore the relations and fittings between human and machine. Many of the scenes are filmed in complete darkness with a night-vision video attachment from ITT, the company that has been the primary supplier of night-vision technology for the US military since Vietnam. It gives an eerie green image that you recognize from Gulf War footage. Some scenes are shot via satellite. This is combined with scenes shot in black-and-white 16mm film that look straight out of old Hollywood. There are computer animations that impose themselves on the field of vision of the actress in the film (Laurie Bulman), such that she begins to see out of this militarized perspective system. But her relationship to invasive technologies is ambiguous. The track is just as much about her erotic pleasures.
Tracks 1 and 2 use motion tracking technology that was originally used to track missiles to explore new formats of movement, referencing as far back as Muybridge's proto-cinematic explorations to suggest new rhythm/movement/machine clusters. In Track 2, the underlying database systems are ventriloquized into the image field as a form of speech. Track 5 is shot primarily with a thermal imaging camera, of the kind used by the military to track human heat signatures in low light or total darkness. The camera registers heat patterns. The scenes are intimate sexual scenarios between actors and machinic actors (pulleys, gears, and other industrial-machinic apparatus) where the heat exchanges suggest a complex choreography between bodies and machines in states of arousal and energy transmission. Track 6 is nearly entirely shot from the eyes of smartbombs, combined with found footage from a Lockheed Martin promotional CD where war apparatus (planes, tanks, bombs) are paraded and demonstrated for hungry clients as if they were a line of new cars. Track 7 is the only one in which actors speak. They sit across from each other at a long table in a mysterious dark room, their faces illuminated almost as if they were being interrogated. There is no bodily action. The dialogue suggests complex battlefield scenarios in which both are embroiled–-in mechanisms of analyze/violate/protect, what I see as the object of the war apparatus. But the conversation is entirely about people. There is no real territory outside of that determined by a complex web of human relationships. The rationalizing overtones quickly become unraveled as they are intensely colored by human emotions-–fear, longing, jealousy, betrayal, lust.

BH: As I understand it, Drive is an attempt to plunge the viewer into the distributed unconscious of a technologically mediated world, a world of passion, always poised on the brink of war. This is a social unconscious, which fascinates us by revealing fantasmatically what we cannot truly face, our copresence with all the others who are now so close, whom we can no longer escape or hold at a distance. Despite, and to a certain extent even because of the multitude of reconfigured borders in the world today, we are all increasingly being engulfed in the single, pulsating, affective-electronic unconscious of globalization, whatever our origins or social class. And this realm of fascination is traversed by the probing energies of surveillance technologies, gathering the psychic data required to shape and extend it as a shaky and uncertain means of control. In effect, we now know the extent to which military intelligence and tracking technology is used to produce the marketing tools which condition our daily environment, appealing to or even producing our most intimate desires. The films reveal the presence of such technologies; and their ghostly trajectory, their flickering signature, points to a yet undrawn map of power, real, situated power, even as the erotic-aggressive images gesture back to the press of bodies in the physical space of the earth which we share, and which will always impinge on us. Agency in this realm of manipulated fantasy, of manufactured unconsciousness, clearly involves direct confrontation with the abusers of the new technologies, even as it involves the most lucid, dialogical use of what remain, after all, means of communication, channels between conscious minds. You practice and facilitate this lucidity and critical exchange. And yet you also suggest with your artwork, all the way from the Blast collaborations to now, that the affective and imaginary experience of the emerging human community must continually be risked at new depths, opened up in new directions. Broaden the channels of communication, call out for transparency–and at the same time embrace the fictions, put on the masks. This seems to be your path toward the embodiment of electronic images and speech.