Net Art in the Bermuda Triangle / Net Arte no Triângulo das Bermudas

An exhibit and catalogue of three decades of Portuguese Net Art and literature curated by Sofia Ponte

By titling the exhibit she curated, Net Arte no Triângulo das Bermudas / Net Art in the Bermuda Triangle, Sofia Ponte is being explicit about the dark hole into which much of the work produced and displayed online disappears. Describing Net Art is more like making an inventory of events than of objects. The issue is multi-faceted, not simply a matter of the usual historical oblivion into which things fall as time passes and attentions shift with the rapidity of swipes and clicks across the ever-changing landscape of the screen. But the very character of work created or even hosted online has complexities to its identity over time. Does it matter if things vanish? What should be saved? Content? Platforms? Interfaces? These are crucial questions for archivists as well as artists, and Ponte engages both communities in her discussion. But before we get into the details, it is important to acknowledge the hard work of compiling an exhibit covering more than three decades—tracking projects and facing the challenges of obsolete platforms as well as obscure works. Also, it is important to look at their substance, not just their technical profiles.

Net Arte no Triângulo das Bermudas / Net Art in the Bermuda Triangle, Sofia Ponte, ed., catalogue of an exhibition. https://www.caaa-net.art/

Ponte is very clear about the difficulty of defining a category of “net art” as a mode or genre. Does it include anything that has been hosted on a networked platform? Static as well as dynamic pieces? Does it have to be interactive? Generative? For most of us, the era of networked communications through desktop interfaces began in the 1990s. While I knew a handful of adventurous pioneers who were using the internet in research institutions, I was woefully under-equipped to deal with even a simple email when a colleague at Berkeley tried to send me one in the mid-1980s. The entire system eluded me—what was sent? Where was it? How did one get an account to access a server and under what name or address? The whole concept was so unfamiliar that I felt I was searching for a phantom in a world that eluded my perceptual grasp. Yes, the Bay Area artist Jim Pomeroy showed me how to load a floppy disk with a program into an Amiga computer in the 1980s, introducing me to the idea of software as an aspect of art production. But I was just a spectator to that sport. My first computer, acquired in 1986, was a rehabbed IBM with a command line interface in which I struggled to understand the hierarchy of “shell” and “path” configurations for files. Then, the WWWeb appeared, hatched at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, made publicly available around 1991. While I was not an early adopter, many around me were and I watched as various friends and colleagues began to create hypertexts, linked works, dynamic-interactive projects and put them into networked environments.

Computer-based work with its combinatoric, multiple forking paths, and dynamic features was already part of art practice—visual, literary, musical—but networks introduced new levels of complexity to production. The idea of a “web address” was still not intuitive and until the GUI was established, connections had an eerie disembodied electronic OUIJA board “are you there?” feel to them. Command line typing went into the elusive void and then you waited to hear something back. Basically, it is barely more than three decades since work conceived within a networked environment has been technically feasible and conceptually developed even if combinatoric and forking literature had already existed in analogue formats. But Net Art is ephemeral at different orders of magnitude and the task Ponte set herself to document this shifting history was enormous, as is her accomplishment.

Ponte’s focus is on “Net Art in Portugal,” and thus she also notes the challenges specific to that setting, in particular the scarcity of resources for archiving and preserving Net Art. But she also calls attention to the fundamental problem of identifying and inventorying these often short-lived works that are mostly produced outside of institutional frameworks. By contrast to book publications, which can be tracked to publishers’ lists, or art exhibitions that appear on a gallery or museum program, net art is distributed, scattered, and very varied in location, audience, and duration. No unified index or collection keeps track of these works and in this regard the issue is quite similar to that of digital humanities projects for which there is no central registry or official repository. The intellectual and creative effort that goes into making these sites and/or works is considerable, and yet they often go unnoticed, languishing in obscurity. No equivalent to World Cat (for library contents) exists for digital projects.

In addition to Ponte’s ruminations on these difficulties, as well as on what defines “net art,” she poses the question of “how the internet has shaped creative process, artistic production and the consumption of art in the contemporary world.” This, of course, is when things get interesting. How do we think creatively in these environments? Have they fostered a distinct aesthetic of computational approaches? Produced with the support of the MEO Foundation, which has an emphasis on the historical dimensions of telecommunications, the catalogue includes descriptions of the artists’ projects along with documentation, an overview of Net Art in Portugal and as well as an extensive chronology.

Reviewing a catalogue without seeing the exhibit it documents is an iffy undertaking, but reading through the descriptions of the fourteen selected projects gives an idea of their wide-ranging thematics and formats. Ponte lists “cyberpoetry, digital radio, programming, generative art, web design, audiovisual performance, digital games, and electronic music” among the genres. The themes include “identity, Portuguese culture and literature, institutional critique, globalization, authorship, the notion of the artwork, the concept of the ‘cyborg,’ and the amplification of sensory perception through computing.”

Catalogue entry on OLHOS by Beatriz Albuquerque.

The extent to which these self-reflexive approaches dominate the selected projects is striking, almost as if the investigation of the new mode called for continual feedback loops of critical reflection. A few examples make this clear. OLHOS, created in 2003 by Beatriz Albuquerque, “records the constituent elements of the artist’s identity through successive and overlapping animations” thus linked self and process through the computational approaches. The device is not depicting, but participating in the construction of, an identity that is computationally produced. Art Room, by Susana Mendes Silva, performed in 2005, was an online conversation in real time that posed, in part, the question of what the difference between offline and online might be even as it focused ostensibly on topics in contemporary art.

This emphasis on the meta-dimensions of these works threads through Ponte’s commentary in insightful ways, placing the pieces in critical context as well as providing a description of how they worked. Calling attention to the material and methods of production is not unique to Net Art, but was a feature of its activity in these initial decades. Feedback loops, contingent circumstances, participatory networks all feature as in Daniel Pinheiro and Annie Abrahams’ Distant Feelings, originally produced in 2015. Participants were online but sat silently with eyes closed trying to sense the connection of energy across the network. The concept of “real time” plays a role in many of these works, as if this first generation were in thrall to the simultaneity of networked experience. Rui Torres produced Estou Vivo e Escrevo Sol (2016) as poem generator that “provides a dynamic and changing poetic experience that emphasizes the ephemerality and renewal of poetry.”

Glimpse of the timeline compiled by Ponte and collaborator Luis D. Rivero-Moreno.

Analysis of these works could expand, but the point is clear. An additional gallery and list of publications related to Portuguese Net Art and another of posters for events/festivals give a sense of the rapid proliferation of projects. Ponte offered “A Proposal for a Chronology” along with her collaborator, Luis D. Rivero-Moreno. This is followed by an long timeline that begins with Antoni Muntadas’s milestone 1990s work, File Room, and includes listings up through 2024. Interesting to revisit Antoni Muntadas’s File Room, with its database of censored texts and its excruciatingly bureaucratic aspects. Information management in its repressive dimensions is a subtext of networked environments in which what can be disappeared, altered, reintroduced in marked and unmarked records of transformation is an order of magnitude more effective than in material archives.[1] The prescient character of Muntadas’s project, its ongoing-ness as a recognition that it is unfinishable by definition, and its anticipation of AI-assisted censorship is clear. So is the difficulty of archiving and preserving a constantly changing work. Which iteration is definitive?

The effort involved in putting all of this together is, of course, enormous, particularly because of the framing premise of Ponte’s project—that there is no official or institutional repository that is dedicated to this work or its preservation. Her attention to these issues helps shape her concerns throughout, even the analyses of the meta-dimensions of the projects on which she focused.

In the early 2000s, literary scholar Manuel Portela was involved in creating a digital edition of the canonical work by the great modernist Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.[2] A collection of manuscript materials in a trunk after Pessoa’s death (in 1935), the work has no single fixed form but was a hyper-text project before electronic literature existed. Various editions of the work had been produced in print formats, each sequencing the texts differently. Portela set out to design an environment, rather than an edition, in which the reader could construct their own array and order the pieces in accord with various identifiable factors. This vector-based approach was unique, and allowed for a constellationary presentation of Pessoa’s work. This work of “fragmentary logic,” to use Portela’s terminology, seems paradigmatic of the literary productions Ponte is addressing. She does not include digital humanities projects in her exhibit, nor would that makes sense. Still, though his work was neither networked nor computational, Pessoa’s approach to composition seems to anticipate the modular structure of much net art—as well as to echo its many bureaucratic themes and concerns. Portela’s visionary production was necessarily a net-based one, and one of many digital editions conceived in the late 1990s and early 2000s to take advantage of the features of this technology. Not surprisingly, it aligns with many of the intellectual and aesthetic goals of the artists in The Bermuda Triangle.

These works share a concern with the management of literary form, which remains a curious subject, both for composition and for reconstruction as well as preservation. What to preserve in a complex project whose shape is constantly shifting and where the platform and the project have an relation without fixed stability. The question remains. Also included in the catalogue is a reprint of Annet Dekker’s significant article “Networks of Care” which outlines a community-based approach to preservation of Net Art. Dekker’s suggestion that a community is required for works to endure raises issues of cultural value, resources, and continuity that are not easily solved. Sustainability over time takes more than good will and many community archives fail for lack of institutional support and technical/social infrastructure. Still, without a community, these projects will certainly not survive.

Ponte has done an amazing service in compiling this resource and its bibliographical as well as chronological materials. She has made visible a history that had fallen into that cultural Bermuda Triangle into which history mysteriously disappears. My only quibble is with the weird pixel-based typeface used for titles and subtitles which is utterly unreadable in the PDF on screen and looks more like needlepoint than electronic incunabula. A minor matter.

Reading through this material produced some nostalgia for the excitement of innovation we felt in those early decades, the thrill of being able to create a file then open it in a browser, see something move, interact in real time. I was left with several takeaways from Ponte’s work. One was that new habits of thought arose from novel behaviors into which we were trained by our experience with the networked interface. Another is the useful reflection on the speed of change in these environments as a challenge for any stable historical record. In addition, I am struck by how quickly we become oblivious of the extent to which infrastructure becomes invisible through ease of use. The fact that Net Art continues to pose challenges for preservation and sustainability, in spite of the efforts of many individual and institutions, continues to be a useful provocation to critical reflection and thought. Just as I am finishing this essay an announcement from ebr: Electronic Book Review of a celebration of Joe Tabbi and his many contributions to electronic literature arrived in my email.[3] Among the many accomplishments listed is Tabbi’s connection to the Biblioteca Joanina to the University of Coimbra in Portugal. How fitting. The international networked connections and relations built in communities of electronic aesthetic activity are still reimagining literary form and experience in vibrant ways.

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[1] https://anthology.rhizome.org/the-file-room

[2] Portela and Rito Silva 2017 Portela, Manuel, and Rito Silva, António, eds. (2017). Arquivo LdoD: Arquivo Digital Colaborativo do Livro do Desassossego. Coimbra: Centro de Literatura Portuguesa da Universidade de Coimbra. URL: https://ldod.uc.pt/

[3] https://preview.electronicbookreview.com/gatherings/celebrating-joseph-tabbi/