In search of the telephone opera: from communications to art.

I. The World Wide Web As Communication Art

Listen to me now or listen to me later... Gonna get it together, watch it. Gonna get together, Ma Bell. Like Ma Bell, I got the ill communication! -- The Beastie Boys[1]

It is in the process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of the equipment. -- Martin Heidegger[2]

When logging on to local Internet service providers, the first sound heard is a familiar one: the reassuring seven tones of a local telephone call. While not quite as homey as the clicks of a rotary dial (which are now to the ear as the lithograph is to the eye), these dial tones anchor explorations of the World Wide Web.

Links between the telephone and new media forms are not as circumstantial as they might first appear. One might begin with the oft-repeated maxim that "cyberspace is where you are when you're on the phone." It is hard to overestimate the impact of Bell Labs on the history of computing, and the net's nodal construction is based on the model of the interstate telephone system. The 1990s have seen growing pressures exerted by telecommunication companies like Nynex and Pacbell to determine how online environments will be billed -- which is one if not the defining issue affecting the next growth phase of the web. And since the advent of cellular systems, telephones are suddenly sexy again.

This present relevance of "telephony" prompts a reconsideration of the history of art as communication in the twentieth century, and the related issue of how technologies carry the weight of art. With the instantaneity of electronic mail bringing about a resurgence of epistolary culture, the Internet is -- like telephony -- a communicative medium par excellence. The web has excited cultural producers (a term both more expansive and less troublesome than "artist") as no technological development has since the arrival of video. From the start, people have been drawn to its communicative properties, its ability to create a dialogue between producer and audience, the first step towards the hazily grasped goal of fully interactive aesthetic practice. With the web, the computer becomes an instrument unique in the history of audio-visual media -- for the first time the same machine serves as the site of production, distribution and reception.

II. Telephone Art

Those looking for sophisticated strategies to transform the web into a medium capable of bearing the weight of the aesthetic object would do well to examine earlier communications media. Will the movement from communications medium to art form be more successfully negotiated on the web than it was over the telephone? One way to generate new questions, if not answers, is to investigate the history of how artists have utilized the open and responsive channels of other, earlier media to effect aesthetic interventions.

Has there ever been any important art created specifically for the telephone? And is this distinct from the issue of whether there has ever been any art on the telephone? A distinction is needed, because in its early era, telephonic communications functioned as proto-mass-medium distribution systems, along the lines of contemporary cable television. Media historian Carolyn Marvin has unearthed a fascinating history of the use of the telephone as a point-to-point conveyor of information and entertainment at the turn of the century. Starting as early as 1881, there were experiments in Europe and the United States using telephone lines to pipe news, sermons and entertainments from one place to another. Royalty had live lines installed from the opera house, heads of state from parliament and "nickel-in-the-slot" public telephone stations piped in the latest from the popular theater. The most sustained point-to-point telephonic distribution system lasted over three decades in Hungary, where Telefon Hirmondo was a fixture from 1892 to 1925. Targeted at the Magyar-speaking, nationalistic upper classes, Telefon Hirmondo offered a schedule of market reports, news of politics and foreign affairs, sports and nightly performances from the likes of the Royal Hungarian Opera House and the Folk Theater.[3]

The first proposal for a specifically telephonic art was an unrealized provocation offered by the Dadaists in Berlin in 1920. The Dada-Almanach proposed that an artist could call in an order for a picture by telephone, and have it made by an artisan.[4] In 1922, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy claimed to have indeed ordered five paintings in porcelain enamel by telephone from a sign factory. According to Moholy-Nagy, these Telephonbilder as he called them, were created when he sketched out his paintings on graph paper with the color chart from the factory in front of him and relayed his instruction via the telephone to the supervisor of the factory at the other end of the line. Moholy-Nagy wrote years later of the process: the supervisor "took down the dictated shapes in the correct position. (It was like playing chess by correspondence)."[5]

It makes sense that in the heyday of conceptualism, the telephone made its way back into artistic practice. In 1969, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) opened a show titled "Art by Telephone." The MCA asked over 30 artists, including noted conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth, to telephone in to the museum, or to answer the museum's call, and then to instruct museum staff about what their contribution to the show would be. The museum then produced the pieces and displayed them. A "record catalogue" was produced, replete with recordings of the telephone engagements between artists and museum.[6] My favorite proposal for this show was English Fluxus artist George Brecht's poll of public opinion on his plans to move the land mass of the British Isles into the Mediterranean Sea.[7]

In 1980, Allen S. Bridge founded the Apology Line in New York City. In a project that tested the boundaries between art and the mass media's evolving culture of confession, Bridge posted flyers around the city offering a telephone number that people could call anonymously to apologize for sins, real or imagined. These confessions were then re-purposed as installations, audio tapes and, after transcription, published in Apology Magazine.[8]

In the 1990s, there are also a few contemporary artists exploring the aesthetic possibilities of our most stable communication technology.[9] in Santa Monica, CA, Martin Kersels wired his dealer's telephone and fax to trigger a cacaphony of taped sounds so that anytime a ringer went off the whole assemblage would erupt in a frenzy, bringing any kind of discussion in the gallery to a grinding halt.[10] In 1997, Ian Pollock and Janet Silk organized "Local 411," a telephone project about the uncompensated displacement of 4000 people to clear the way for San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art and the Moscone Convention Center. "Local 411" featured sound installations and live performances, centered around an interactive voice-mail system, which played narratives about the area for anyone who called in. As the artists wryly noted, admission to "Local 411" was the price of "regular telephone calls, any local and long distance toll charges apply."(11)

Though this survey of art for the telephone is incomplete, its abbreviated nature is indicative of telephony's limited influence on the course of twentienth century art, avant-gardist or popular. This is obviously in stark contrast to the impact of film, radio and television.(12) Telephone art -- from Moholy-Nagy to Pollock and Silk -- has not developed forms or strategies specific to the medium itself. Telephony can not lay claim to a unique aesthetic practice, as sound recording has had with the pop single, the way television (and radio before it) can lay claim to the situation comedy or the cinema has the feature length narrative.

This essay's title invokes something that is not: there has been no telephone opera, no gesamtkunstwerk for this communication medium. This is not to imply that telephony is not important (the telephone has molded modernity at least as much as broadcast media), just that telephony is not a system that has generated sufficient discrete cultural objects to slot into the discourses of criticism and art history.

III. The Electronic Corpse & The Digital Questionnaire

So what do ruminations about telephone operas as yet unborn offer to an investigation of the web? Start with two default uses of the web as communication art: the Electronic Corpse and the Digital Questionnaire. The Electronic Corpse is the digital era's take on the Exquisite Corpse, that well known parlor game of the Surrealists in which paper was folded over and phrases or images were inscribed on the quadrants, each person unaware of the contributions of the others. The paper was then unfolded and the sentence or drawing was then seen in its splintered totality. The game takes its name from the first sentence produced using its method: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the young wine." Though created to take advantage of an unmediated communication between individuals in proximity, the Exquisite Corpse has been the inspiration for generations of experimentation and its extension into communication media has been inexorable.(13)

There are innumerable projects on the web that ship bits and bytes of art from one point of transformation to another, and artists continue to explore the potential of the Electronic Corpse as a discontinuous continuum. In the best of the Electronic Corpse pieces, Douglas Davis's web-based text project, "The Sentence: Breaking Out (of the Virtual Closet)," <math240.lehman.cuny.edu/art>, there is an interesting hypertrophy as the combinatory sentence has grown almost too long to read. Davis's pow is less about juxtaposition than the sheer additive mass of almost countless contributions from browsers of the site. While this strategy can be productive when text-based, things become muddier -- literally -- when visual images become involved.

In 1964, two years before his death, Andre Breton maintained that one of the intents of Surrealism was to "attain the point at which ... painting `must be made by all, not by one.'"(14) The web is circling around that point, in that images can be shipped so easily from one person to another. Bonnie Mitchell's group at Syracuse University has been pursuing on-line versions of the Exquisite Corpse for some years now with projects like "ChainArt" (1993), the "Digital Journey" (1994), and "Diversive Paths" (1995). "Chainreaction" (1995) was described as "a worldwide collaborative art project that involves digital image manipulation and networked integration of visual communication and the visual environment ... [artists] collaborate to build a structure of images that reflects the multiplicity of the experience." <ziris.syr.edu/ChainReaction/public_html/ chainReaction.html>

Mitchell is not alone in her desire to use the communicative potential of the web to ship images around the globe, but the question of whether this effort is effectively used goes unasked.(15) The problem with the Electronic Corpse is that the additive processes and multiple manipulations do not necessarily reflect a "multiplicity of experience," in fact too often end up in a dismal sameness of murky rasturbations. Artists (and site developers) tend to create Electronic Corpses simply to show that they are capable of networked collaboration, not because the collaborative effort will result in something richer or more complex than work done individually. Electronic Corpses tend to be demonstrations of creative potential rather than systems worthy of critical engagement.

If the central concern of the Electronic Corpse is shipping data from point to point, then that of the Digital Questionnaire is responding to data. The best known of the Digital Questionnaires is Komar & Melamid's "Most Wanted Paintings," <www.diacenter.org/km/search/index.html>. This site canvases individuals about their aesthetic tastes. Based on this empirical material the artists then paint and post different countries' most and least wanted paintings. The United State's Most Wanted painting is a large-scale landscape with deer standing in a lake under a blue sky with George Washington looking on. The Least Wanted (modernism be damned) is a small, reddish abstraction of triangular forms. With this play on the post-industrial West's obsession with polling and market research, Komar & Melamid explore and critique the utopian promise of the artist's direct response to the desires of the audience, without ever succumbing to that promise.(16)

The Digital Questionnaire is so obviously resonant with the communicative capabilities of the web that artists have created dozens of variations from the Techno-Ethno-Graphic Profile at Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Roberto Sifuentes, and James Luna's Cybervato site, <es.rice.edu/ projects/Rice_Gallery/Fall95/CyberVato/>, to Victoria Vesna's "Bodies[C] INCorporated," <www.arts.ucsb.edu/ bodiesinc>.(17) What artists want with all this information from their users is not a question to deal with here -- it is more important to ask what they do with that data. Specifically, if artists request data from their users, and in turn promise to respond to that data, are the artists obligated to follow through on these promises?

The correspondence logs of "Bodies[C] INCorporated" raise precisely this issue, which is perforce an ethical one. The site invites participants (Vesna prefers this term to user) to construct a virtual body from pre-defined body parts, texture maps and sounds. The participant's virtual body then joins the site's larger body-owner community. Putting aside the banal premise of the site, the possibility of creating a representation of the self (however modified or fanciful) has its appeal, and many people responded to Vesna's questionnaire in hopes of seeing their individualized bodies rendered at the site. "Bodies[C] INCorporated" promised a payoff for participating, but did it deliver? In the summer of 1996, one Borsi Tebroc posted the following messages to the site's communal bulletin board:

ATTENTION BODY OWNERS!!!! HAVE YOU WAITED OVER 3 MONTHS, SIX MONTHS, A YEAR!!! Do you sit expectantly at your monitor waiting for a response of some kind from the academics and tech heads that enticed you into this web site bodyshop?? Join the growing hundreds of body owners who wonder where their bodies are!! Horrors!!! ... Send us your testimonial, Send us your grief, tell us your tales of woe!!!! WRITE THE BODY CONSTRUCTION GRIPE LINE... It would seem, when first stepping into your website, that participation would render benefits to both parties. Yet, after several months of waiting and hearing from others having waited OVER A YEAR that concrete body is a one way street!! You have our data now what about your end of the bargain!!!

An integral part of communication is establishing a framework of reciprocity: if a work on the web requests input from users in the promise of some form of response, there is an impetus to respond. Yet like any generalization in art, this one is meant to be transgressed, especially if the piece is conceptualized specifically to frustrate users seeking this kind of reciprocity, if its very function as a communication art is to demonstrate the difficulty of communication.

IV. The Killer Ap?

Confounding this medium's ability to communicate is to challenge the very status of the World Wide Web as the "Killer Ap" of the Internet, The Killer Ap (short for "application") is yet another grail of the computer industry: the hardware/software combination that creates an entire market segment for itself. For the first generation of IBM personal computers in the early 1980s, the Killer Ap was the financial spreadsheet (specifically Lotus 123) that convinced millions of business owners that they had to computerize to compete. For the Apple Macintosh in the late 1980s, it was desktop publishing (made possible by the development of Postscript and other WYSIWYG -- "What You See Is What You Get" -- packages). For Silicon Graphics in the 1990s, the Killer Ap has been three-dimensional animation (accomplished via programs like Alias, Wavefront and Softimage). The web itself has been hailed as the Internet's Killer Ap, precisely because it added a crucial visual interface to a previously text-based medium.

Is conceptualism the Killer Ap of web-based communication art? The answer to this is contradictory. First, claiming conceptual art as a Killer Ap violates the very premise of conceptual art, at least as Sol LeWitt defined it in 1969: "The conventions of art are altered by works of art . . . Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions."(18) Therefore, if conceptual art were to function as a Killer Ap, it could do so for no more than an instant, because its very presence would alter the conditions of its production and consumption. On the other hand, Killer Ap or not, a rigorous conceptual phase could rescue the web as communication art from the worst failings of both the Electronic Corpse and the Digital Questionnaire. There is a link here to the telephone projects covered earlier: those few projects had a conceptual edge, because they were not simply about communicating. Instead, they interrogated the very idea of communication.

There is much that can be done on both the conceptual and the structural level with the web. Artists could explore the tyranny of the browser itself, the way that no title is presented in the dominant browser without having the word "Netscape" preceding it. In no other art medium is this kind of blatant commercial promotion permitted: at least "Printed on Kodak Paper" appears on the back of the photograph.(19)

Too many artists have posted homepages without interrogating what the proliferation of individual representation implies for representation itself. If we can read Douglas Hubler's project of the 1970s, "Photographing Everyone Alive," as a conceptual lampoon of August Sander's plan early in the century to photographically record every category of German citizenry, what are we to make of the web? If everyone with a computer is well on the way to his or her own home page, then the web is advancing towards Jorge Luis Borges's map as big as the world. With the web, Sander's catalog and Hubler's conceit are -- like Davis's "Sentence" -- hypertrophied, not in a metonymic but rather in a strictly representative way.

Other fertile areas would include features unique to the Internet's information infrastructure. Take the FAQ file, short for Frequently Asked Questions. The FAQ is a remarkable discursive invention, a generalized pedagogical tool designed to bring new users up to speed on an issue or topic of discussion, to prevent the endless repetition of on-line questions that have long been considered settled. Here is an ideal arena for conceptual work that could engage not simply with the web, but with the very notion of received wisdom in an ever more communicative era.

Who, then, is doing conceptually provocative work on the Internet? One answer is jodi.org, <www.jodi.org>. Like so much of electronic media, web sites should be critiqued along the lines of live performances (which are time based and not necessary accessible to the reader) rather than as discrete objects (which can be cataloged, recorded and presumably visited in the same state in which they have been described). That noted, Mm are some impressions of jodi.org at the start of 1997.

The first screen is simple: lines of green characters on a black screen, with a green highlighting function cycling down. Long-term computer users will find their experience tinged by nostalgia: for me, the font, colors and black background were reminiscent of the first portable computer I ever used, a little Kaypro with a tiny monochrome screen. There are no identifiers, no marks of authorship or ownership, no indication that clicking on this essentially meaningless screen will lead into the rest of the site. The next screen to appear creates a vaguely three dimensional, gridded space with variously colored directional arrows. Clicking on any element of this page simply rearranges the arrangement direction of the arrows. This section is indeed interactive, but to absolutely no purpose. There are other nodes of the site: they are independent, but somehow connected in their interrogations of the schematic: from the 2.5 dimensional mapping of the first grid, to machine age blueprints, to information era interfaces that mock the icon-happy, user friendliness of so much of the rest of the web.

As enigmatically satisfying as the site is, jodi.org's home page is truly the center of the project, for there is a secret there. The gnosis that opens up to the initiated confronts a central facet of aesthetic production on the Internet: the World Wide Web is a medium in which the creative coding -- hypertext markup language (HTML), virtual reality markup language (VRML) and whatever comes next -- is visible at the same moment as the audio-visual object. The web's visible coding is different than cinema, in which the frames are not visible when the film is running, or to video, in which the analog signal on the tape is never visible through the same equipment as the sound-image matrix.

[J]odi.org's pulsing green and black blankness is not so blank as it seems, that is, one just needs to know where to look. In Netscape's tool bar menu there is a command to view "Document Source." The source code comes up as a text document, and what is revealed is that there is a whole layer of pictorial, ASCII text art "below" the surface of jodi.org, This too is reminiscent of the early days of computer art in the 1960s and '70s, when Snoopys and Christmas trees composed of alphanumeric characters were spit out by teletypes in computer labs around the country. In referencing the "volksgraphics" of the emerging digital class, and in embedding this richly associative material in the site's HTML, jodi.org conceptualizes code as essential to the structure of the web as communication art. So, is jodi.org the telephone opera, the web's Killer Ap? Of course not, but what gnostic pleasure it brings.

NOTES

(1.) The Beastie Boys, "Get It Together," from the album, Ill Communication, (Los Angeles: Capitol Records, 1994).

(2.) Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofsteadter, trans., (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 33.

(3.) Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century, (New York: Oxford University Press; 1988), pp. 209-231.

(4.) Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Dada-Almanach, (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920).

(5.) Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, (New York: Wittenborn, 1947), p. 79. It is uncertain as to whether or not Moholy-Nagy, who was in Berlin in 1920, saw the Dadaists' piece. There is also a dispute as to whether he did actually call the Telephonbilder. Lucia Moholy claims that this story is, in fact, apocryphal. Lucia Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy / Moholy-Nagy, Marginal Notes, (Krefeld, Germany: Scherpe Verlag, 1972), p. 76. An attempt to syncretize the various claims and denials is found in Louis Kaplan, "The Telephone Paintings: Hanging Up Moholy," Leonardo Vol. 26 no. 2 (April, 1993), pp. 165-168.

(6.) See "Art by Telephone." Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1969. I gleaned much from Eduardo Kac, "Aspects Of The Aesthetics Of Telecommunications" in John Grimes and Gray Lorig, eds., Siggraph Visual Proceedings, (New York: ACM, 1992), pp. 47-57. It can be found on-line at <www.uky.edu/FineArts/Art/kac/Telecom.Paper.Siggrap.html>.

(7.) Maurice Tuchman, A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971), p. 56.

(8.) See the last issue put out before the artist's death: Allen S. Bridge, Apology Magazine: The National Confession, Issue 2 (October, 1995).

(9.) As for other telecommunications media art, there is On Kawara's series of "I am still alive" telegrams that he has sent on and off since 1970. The fax brought on its own art projects, like "The World In 24 Hours" in 1982 and pARTiciFAX in 1984. As we move into further hybrids between point-to-point communications and visualization technologies, there are the closed-circuit television happenings of the '60s and early '70s that Nam June Paik participated in, video letters between artists and Kit Galloway and Sherry Rabinowitz's famed hole in space project in 1979 (which established the still extant Electronic Cafe International.)

(10.) The piece itself was titled, "Objects of the Dealer (with Speakers)." See David Pagel, "Musical Chairs," frieze 25 (November-December, 1995), pp. 42-43.

(11.) Ian Pollock and Janet Silk's "Local 411" ran January 20-February 17, 1997, in San Francisco.

(12.) The linkages between film and art practice are simply too numerous to list here. One place to start is the recent catalog of the show "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945," organized by Kerry Brougher at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1996, edited by Russell Ferguson and published by the museum and Monacelli Press, New York. On radio, see Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). The most recent collection on the intersections of video technologies and art practice is Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practice, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1996). The linkages between art and television are argued less compellingly, but present nonetheless. Recent manifestations include Joshua Decter, "Deliver Me Into Reality? (Or It's All There on TV, Theoretically)," Art+Text 54 (May 1996) and the decidedly minor Bernard Welt, Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art, (Los Angeles: Art issues. Press, 1996).

(13.) Ray Johnson's mail art of the 1950s and '60s is obviously a derivative of the Exquisite Corpse, as was Craig Ede's "Exquisite Fax" of the 1980s. A comic book based on the theme was edited by Art Speigelman and R. Sikoryak, The Narrative Corpse: A Chain Story by 69 Artists, (New York and Richmond, VA: Raw Books and Gates of Heck, 1995). The Drawing Center organized a major show of collaborative work entitled, "The Return of the Cadavre Exquis" in 1993, that also showed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1994. Finally, there is a web site titled "Exquisite Corpse," organized by Jager Di Poala Kemp design, <www.jdk.com/elc_Home.html>.

(14.) Andre Breton, "Against the Liquidators," in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, Franklin Rosemont ed., (New York: Monad Press, 1978), pp. 351-354. Breton is, of course, recasting Lautremont's maxim: "Poetry must be made by all, not by one."

(15.) See, for example, Collaborative Internet Art Online (CIAO), <www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~andrewn/pages/research/ciao.htm>, which similarly leaves its precepts almost entirely unexamined.

(16.) "Most Wanted Paintings" began in 1994 as an off-line project. The artists hired the Nation Institute, an opinion polling firm, to conduct a professional survey, the results of which Komar & Melamid used for the first paintings. The Dia Foundation then invited the artists to move the project onto the web. For an extended discussion of this project see Laurie Ouellette, "Painting by Number," Afterimage 23, no. 5 (March/April 1996), pp. 6-7.

(17.) The text accompanying the Techno-Ethno-Graphic Profile read as follows: "The following questionnaire, conducted by experimental Chicano anthropologists, attempts to survey the inter cultural desires and artistic concerns of the Internet users. The results will be utilized as source of inspiration for a series of performances and `living dioramas' currently taking place at `Diverse Works,' Houston. Please answer the questions as fully as possible, and if you prefer not to identify yourself it's fine. Carnales, we are looking for innovative ways to utilize this technology."

(18.) Sol Lewitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in Ellen H. Johnson, ed., American Artists on American Art: From 1940 to 1980, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 125-127.

(19.) Fabian Wagmister raised the issue of the tyranny of the browser in his lecture in my "Digital Dialogues" seminar, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, May 29, 1996. See the way that his students at the UCLA School of Film and Television's Laboratory for New Media have played with the "Netscape:" feature in their works, distancing their own titles as fully as possible from the corporate identifier, <pixels.filmtv.ucla.edu>.

PETER LUNENFELD, founder of mediawork, The Southern California New Media Working Group, is one of the coordinators of the Graduate Program in Communication and New Media Design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He is the editor of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (forthcoming from MIT Press).