On the Upgrade WYSIWYG

190 180 170 160 150 140 G W Y Safe 200 Area 130 120 I 110 100 A6 90 W Y S 80 70 50 A7 60 40 30 A8 20 10 on the upgrade or-bits.com On the Upgrade WYSIWYG May 2013 or-bits.com Artworks by: Jamie Allen, Renee Carmichael, David Horvitz, IOCOSE, Michael Kargl, Sara Nunes Fernandes, Julia Tcharfas, Maria Theodoraki and Richard Sides Front cover images (clockwise): damaged book, image sourced from the web; edited portrait of Ángela Ruiz Robles, Spanish teacher and inventor of the Mechanical Encyclopedia (1949) which was intended to make reading more portable and accessible to students, image displays results of editing code using WYSIWYG text editor; book screening concept (anonymous, 1935 ca), image sourced from the web where is disseminated as 1935-ebook-sm.jpg; metric ruler. Back cover images (clockwise): on screen example of luminosity using Ángela Ruiz Robles portrait; The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the error screen displayed by early versions of Microsoft Windows operating system upon encountering a critical error; punched card, also known as IBM punched card, a data storage device widely used in the 20th century until it was gradually replaced by magnetic tapes around the 60s; text editor displaying image code for Ángela Ruiz Robles portrait on back cover; pixel ruler based on a 1440 × 900 resolution Macbook Pro screen, 2011. Published by or-bits.com Designed by Studio Hato Proofread by Jennifer Hodgson ISBN 978-0-9576741-1-0 Part of the content of this book (foreword, editorials and interviews) is licensed under CC licence (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Creative Commons License and it may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the publishers for educational and non-commercial use. However, the contributors and publisher would like to be informed. www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0 All artworks are protected by copyright and have been licensed by the authors to or-bits.com for publishing. Contents Foreword 6 Michael Kargl 10 Renee Carmichael 17 Maria Theodoraki 24 David Horvitz 31 Sara Nunes Fernandes 41 Jamie Allen 51 Richard Sides 67 IOCOSE 73 Julia Tcharfas 79 Interviews with the artists 87 Foreword On the Upgrade is a publishing series that launched in September 2011 with a customised A3 postal box containing a collection of unbound printed artworks. These works were produced by six artists in response to their online counterparts,* that is the artworks featured in the online exhibitions at or-bits.com.** It is with that postal box that our exploration of print publishing, of other modes of production and distribution across the online and offline, began. With On the Upgrade – September 2011, we looked at the concept of moving from the online mode of display to that of the print support – specifically from the web page to the loose printed page – as sites of production and presentation. This led to the creation of six artworks encompassing different print processes and formats, simulating the richness of mediums which can be simultaneously employed when working with a webpage: the folded poster, the oddly-sized digital print, the postcard pad, the booklet, the multilayered print and the stickers on a square page – all to fit and be contained into one shippable cardboard box. The note, Dear Reader, of On the Upgrade – September 2011 stated: ‘But this space [the postal box] is different: it’s physical and tangible 6 – you can hold it in your hands – it is not programmed to respond to one’s action, and it does not have hyper-links and pages that open within pages. It is not a medium comprised of [all] media, an all-embracing medium: it is a site that hosts a collection of mixed printed works which have moved between different spaces and formats. Yet, there are some similarities or commonalities of intention between the two [the web page and the printed page], or, better to say, possibilities, that offer a reflection on the relationship between the idiosyncratic characteristics of a medium (or, medium comprised of all media) and a site.’ We did so with the aim of suggesting a way of engaging with an artwork that would combine a physical interaction, with a support in the present, with the act of browsing a website as an extension of that interaction, as a complication in the reading of the artwork itself. This is why we stressed the concepts of coupling sites, of a dual mode of engagement and of ‘works [existing] in response to their online counterparts’: ‘You are going to be looking through this collection of works and, ostensibly, link back to the site from which On the Upgrade has originated: or-bits.com. You will not be doing that by using hyper-links, but you will most probably be physically moving between sites and formats: between a box and a website, between the offline and the online. You will be shifting to and from these two spaces hosting artworks, two sites that have had an impact on the conception and production of these very same artworks, modifying their inherent “condition”.’ This time, with On the Upgrade WYSIWYG, our exploration has taken a different route. The starting point was that of conceiving the book format as an interface and reflecting upon the tensions that might exist between this holdable interface and the web interface along with that of the computer. Thinking about reading patterns, the specificity of engagement with the material presented in a book and about what site-specificity might be when moving between online and offline modes of presentation are some of the aspects we considered. Also deliberated upon was how to devise a method for arranging material which came from various exhibitions on display on or-bits.com: from Superposition, which was launched in September 2009, to Accordance, the latest show featured on the website at the time of the making this publication. All this has led to the nine artworks by Jamie Allen, Renee Carmichael, David Horvitz, IOCOSE, Michael Kargl, Sara Nunes Fernandes, Julia Tcharfas, Maria Theodoraki and Richard Sides featured in this publication. Furthermore, a reflection upon Soren Pold’s definition of interface (Interface Realism: The Interface as Aesthetic Form, 2005) seemed necessary in order to set a common starting point from which to explore the correspondences and divergences between these two sites of display, presentation and consumption: ‘What is an interface? The purpose of the interface is to represent the data, the data flow, and data structure of the computer to the human sense, while simultaneously setting up a frame for human input and interaction and translating this input back into the machine. Interfaces have many different manifestations and the interface is generally a dynamic form, a dynamic representation of the changing states of the data or software and of the user’s interaction. Consequently, the interface, is not a static material object. Still it is materialised, visualized, and has the effect of a dynamic representational form. […] Instead of focusing only on functionality and effects, digital art explores the materiality and cultural effects of the interface’s representationality. What are the representational languages of the interface? How does it work 7 as text, image, sound, space and so forth, and what are the cultural effects, for instance of the way it reconfigures the visual, textual or auditory?’ From here we moved on to thinking about some of the characteristics that a book might have when conceived as an interface, namely in terms of its structure in comparison with that of an online exhibition display. Some of these characteristics can be simply summarised as: the linear reading that a bound book might offer rather than the hyper-linked organisation; the support itself which is made of fixed size, margins and binding, for example; the print processes available, such as the number of colours or the type of print; the kind of relationship with the material, which is often that of flicking pages rather than clicking on links leading somewhere else. These are just some of the structural aspects that have been taken into account and employed to provide the artists with a specific context, or better still, site, to work with. Because each of the artists featured here had worked with different mediums on the website or for the online radio broadcast,*** and very often with the merging of text, sound, HTML code, found images and video, they have been invited to ‘follow’ a set of guidelines when rethinking their work for this new display: 8 • The book will be an A5 size bound book • The work should take up 5 consecutive pages • The work should be presented as material that spreads linearly across 5 pages • The work should be monochrome or black and white with the option to include 1 full-colour page out of the 5 The responses gathered in the following pages are varied and multiform, which in part might hint at the ‘struggle’ with following the guidelines in the process of translating the artworks while keeping to their original intentions. From this comes our decision to accompany each artwork with a brief introduction, outlining the relationship between that which is presented here and its online counterpart, and also the decision to publish short interviews with each of the featured artists, with the intention of contextualising their artistic processes, and what the movement from the online to the offline might have entailed for them in terms of production and choices of presentation. On the Upgrade WYSIWYG is a book exhibition, or an exhibition in a book. It is a new configuration of selected material that was first presented online or for web broadcast, and it ranges from artworks to excerpts of editorials and interviews. It operates as an artistic, curatorial and design re-alignment of material originally compiled for online consumption for the book interface. And as for WYSIWYG, it stands for the What You See is What You Get, the slogan for the GUI (graphical user interface), which was widely distributed on the computer market in the 80s, a product of the experiments conducted by Ivan Sunderland (SketchPad) and by Douglas Engelbart (Online System NLS) at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park California, USA, in the 60s. These experiments were made with the idea(l) of offering a more ‘real’ and user friendly interface for computer users; an interface that would not be too intrusive, moving away from commandline interfaces (CLI) which required users to type commands on the computer in order to ‘get to something’. The clickable icons, the progressive ‘hiding’ of the limitations and the control exerted by interfaces started from there. * On the Upgrade – September 2011 contains works by Patrick Coyle, Benedict Drew, Jamie George, Tamarin Norwood, Damien Roach and David Rule. More details available on our website. ** All artists featured in the On the Upgrade publishing series (now on its second instalment) have taken part to previous or-bits.com shows by responding to the themes of the exhibition they are in, and engaging with the aesthetic and structural characteristics of the web page within a group exhibition online, or of the web streaming within an online radio exhibition. All exhibitions since or-bits.com inception in 2009 are archived and browsable on our website. *** In October 2012, or-bits.com presented a week-long radio exhibition, 128kbps objects, in partnership with the online radio basic.fm (Pixel Palace programme at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK); an exhibition which was also presented as an edited version at The Metre Room project space, Coventry, UK, in February 2013. More details available on our website. Marialaura Ghidini Founder director of or-bits.com 9