This month, Opinion is presented in conjunction with NOW99, Nottingham's festival of arts for today. The NOW festival is ten years old, and through a decade of bold and innovative programming, it has become one of the most exciting festivals of its kind in the UK today, bringing to Nottingham some of the most groundbreaking artists and commissions of the 90's. http://www.nowfestival.org.uk
Michael Atavar will be speaking on 'Intimacy' as part of the trAce Net Talk series on Thursday 11 November.
Webcam sites, chat rooms and seemecu cameras - these online phenomena continue to proliferate. I'm interested to know why. I believe it's because these places on the www offer an opportunity for intimacy that has not been exploited in any other area.
For me the computer is the perfect place to experience that intimacy - late at night, alone, dark, all the lamps in the room switched off, summer, the only source of illumination the computer screen, the sound of light rain coming in through the open window, mixing with the sound from my Mac.
It's not like a TV set or a radio that I can ignore or wander away from. With my finger on the mouse I'm actively engaged in a physical relationship with what happens on the screen. I'm transfixed in the light of the monitor's path. A one-to-one contact, a to-and-fro 'relationship' that is unique, personal and seductive.
In the bubble of noise that is the modem connecting you to the www (it sounds to me like a river flowing), the information somehow remakes itself, quickly reconstitutes. Listening to this noise late at night, it sometimes seems to me that I am the lone recipient of this privileged information, this complex translation process, this secret 'handshake'. And it's this remade-every-time quality, this coagulation, this just-for-me moment, this intimacy that makes me excited about being online. Quickly, suddenly, subtly I'm in a different place than I was before. And I don't know how.
But how do we exploit the intimacy that this medium offers? Especially in the fine arts? Perhaps by looking at the possibilities that the www gives us (global) and going in the opposite direction (local). Instead of inclusion, we should be moving towards exclusion.
For example why not use that www space as a place for something slow
moving, quiet or very still? Something that would run contrary to the
madness of the web. An intimate voice, a secret, a personal conversation.
Look at one of the months on my own site
http://www.atavar.com/jan/jan.html for an idea of how this might work.
Interestingly enough, the quality that the www is most criticised for, its remoteness, its separation from 'real' life, is actually the thing that will ultimately bring it the most success. With no immediate danger from the online world, its participants can enter into a complex, intimate dialogue with eachother, engaging in ideas that in the offline world might be damaging, dangerous or taboo.
The constituency that supports webcam, chat rooms and other of these web phenomena (I would call them the one-to-one community) can actually, perhaps for the first time, spend time talking to each other.
As well as archiving old art onto the www, creating libraries of
information, we should be using this complex medium to explore bold, new and seductive art forms of the future - human, subtle and intimate.
Developments in this one-to-one community are something we should
consider, take seriously and watch closely. They tell us something
profound about ourselves as human beings - our desire for contact, our
ability to engage quickly and willingly with others and above all our
need for intimacy. Our desire for a one-to-one.
We should think about intimacy. It might help us create the art of the future.
