Julia Scher + Benjamin Weil


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A Presentation

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BW: The work process -
collaboration between technicians, designers, and the artist as well as the curator - reflects the way the web functions. It can be compared to a series of hyper-linked brains: from the reflection upon those links, comes the project. It is not so much the pages themselves, but more how those pages map out a specific approach to the thought process, the way ideas intermingle, and inform each other. It is about a progressive structure of interpretation. It functions like a magnifier/mirror of reality. It forces one to reflect upon the way one relates to information.

JS: It is also a post gender arena. Identity is defined by the user. I can be a teenage boy, mimic and behave like one, I can be in constant morph, I do not have to let my body dictate the way I am when I look at things, and interact with others. As much as I have entered the world of surveillance in order to understand the way it conditioned the world, and so that I could understand the world I live in, I have entered the web to figure out the way the world is changing, to get maybe a better grab on how the next generation will influence the world to come. The whole process is one of infiltration. It is also interesting to understand who is using the data, and how they are using it. Somehow, the process is much more evident on the web. There are processes which are invisible elsewhere which become obvious on the web. It helps me to understand the world I live in. Transparency is important. It is a world where anyone can gain control over data. No data can really be protected, or removed from public use. And this will become more and more the case. There are things you do not get to see, and yet they're there. The acuteness of the feeling again triggers an awareness that one does not have in reality. One never gets to see everything when traveling in the city. But for some reason, that transparency makes us aware of what we do not get to see when on the web.

BW: It also has to be an outline, rather than a finished product, because the way it is being viewed will vary according to the equipment used (cpu, screen, etc.) and speed of access. It will also be informed by what I have been looking at before, and this again cannot be determined by the producer. So the work has to reflect upon those conditions: the construction of a page as an environment is informed by the impossibility of controlling certain parameters. Curiously enough, I guess this preconditions exist in the open work of art. Hints, scores, are offered to the interpretation of the viewer. It's like listening to music; there are as many channels and as many interpretations that give a multitude of experiences based on the same piece. So in fact, the web is more about making us aware of an existing structure, than it actually is about inventing that structure; it reveals a thought process, it questions linear thinking, it flattens the progression to rearrange "data" in web-like manner.

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