Martine Neddam

This conversation with Martine Neddan is part of the chapter de waarde van archivering (the value of archiving), in which we delve into the problems regarding transience, the urgency of originality, the responsibility of archiving, the legalization of artistic content, and the future for the preservation of digital knowledge.

(M) My name is Martine Neddam, I am originally from France but I have lived in Amsterdam for a long time now. At the beginning of my career, I worked as a visual artist who used language as a medium and I was mostly doing art in the public space. I became acquainted with the internet and the computer because I wanted to learn Photoshop. I am very bad at drawing, but I needed to represent my works visually for the public commissions that I did. So I started to use Photoshop to represent my projects as if they already existed. At that time, I didn’t have a computer because they were too expensive. Fortunately, I was invited for an artist’s residency at the University of Amsterdam in their department of computer science and logic, where I had the opportunity to use one of the university’s computers. I spent much time messing around on that computer, and that’s how I learned Photoshop without a tutorial. While working at the university, I met many other people that used the computer for logic and coding, but also for playing chess, and sending emails. Those people were very helpful in showing me how computers work. That was around 1992 or 1993, in the very early days of the WWW.

(M) In the beginning, the field that surrounded the new internet was ruled by geeks and political activists. It did not immediately feel like what I was doing on the internet was art. It was more of a space for experiments and discoveries for me. After a while, I gathered the money to buy my own computer, which meant that I could experiment with it in my own studio. I went to a lecture at De Balie, where I heard about people that met on MOO’s. MOO’s were social spaces that existed solely out of text, in which you could build a virtual space by describing what you wanted it to look like. I studied linguistics so those ‘spaces made out of text’ connected very well with my interest in language. On your computer, they popped up as a little window with text only (ASCII), and it was possible to interact with other users’ spaces by using text. You could even describe your imaginary space, and visit the spaces of others, and you could even code some text elements within the virtual space. Building a space in that context meant that you could write some simple lines of code to create your own room and that you could see what others had built in their own rooms. As such, MOO’s acted as public spaces, but also as fun-spaces where you could converse with others. In those conversations, you could adopt different personas. As long as your name wasn’t taken, you could be anyone you wanted to be. I decided on the name Mouchette because Martine was already taken. This is how Mouchette’s  identity originated: the MOO’s were located in universities where everyone had a good command of English. Because my English was poor at that time, I decided to say that I was 12 years old so they could not judge my language skills. I liked this idea of role-playing so much that I invented different characters in different rooms, and ultimately Mouchette became an entity of its own, with her own website.

(M) The MOO’s were used mainly as entertainment for the people that were affiliated with universities. You would go to a MOO as you would go to a bar, for socializing online. The people using them were mainly doing research in literature, philosophy, or coding and they were all very interesting so I loved talking to them, also in a playful manner. For me, it was the perfect place to play around and have pleasure in creating because my other works, the public commissions, and shows, were long-term projects that required a lot of designing, logistics, organizing, and some boring stuff. At some point, in Amsterdam, someone taught me how to do HTML. I am not very keen on writing code but this was pretty simple. I would do everything myself: web pages, sounds, GIFs, text, and pictures. For these different elements, I would use free software that existed in those days, which all did only one thing at a time. For instance, you had some freeware that allowed you to make a GIF given away on a cd-rom in a magazine. I wasn’t good at writing code but I could read it and recognize parts of the code, so I would use the free software and borrow code from other websites or online repositories and copy and paste them into my web page to create something new. I worked completely as a bricoleur. After a while, a web browser called Netscape came with a built-in editor, which made it easier for me to set up a web page. That is how I made Mouchette.

(M) Creating on the internet is much more complex than it used to be. Free software still exists, like server software such as Apache, for instance. But this software is much more entangled with other software, and they do a lot of different things at once, much more than you would ever need to, and they impose their methods onto you. Programs can be intertwined and you can use bits and pieces from various sources. Nowadays, you can also combine free software that you can find on Github or anywhere else, while also using proprietary software at the same time. A lot is possible, but creating a website or an internet work is much more complicated than it used to be, so you need more expertise, dedication, and time to figure it out because  you need to fit in a lot of different imposed standards. Creating on the internet, as I understand it, takes place in two parallel spaces: your physical computer, with your hard drive, and the server out there, your web host. For me, the web is a double space in which you can upload things, but you can have the equivalent on your desktop. When you upload your work and send it to the internet, you lose control over your work which is why I make my work on my desktop and not in the `cloud´. I am very reluctant towards the idea that my file is over there and not stored and organized on my own computer.

(M) Yes, it is exactly like that. For me, shifting between those spaces anchors me in the material. Besides that, we are under the influence of the propaganda that is presenting the cloud as some sort of abstract place where all your data is stored. Of course, it isn’t formally a cloud. It is nothing but a big load of servers, which is a very physical thing that exists in large buildings with enormous security. The major problem with the cloud is that you can store your data there, but you cannot decide how often it saves it again and again. Your data is copied and re-copied so often that you automatically participate in a system that consumes enormous amounts of energy. It is not by accident or for poetic reasons that such a system gets called a cloud and not ‘storage’ or ‘saving services’, that all happens because they would rather  remain fuzzy and not raise any suspicion. And we all settle for it because of the convenience it brings us. I am not against a storing service, but calling it the cloud and dispossessing people of control over their data is just wrong. This is just one example of a position in which we are made powerless and is also one of the major reasons why I do not want to use Photoshop on a distant server. I am aware of the fact that my conception of data is completely framed by the way I experienced it as an early user and how I saw it originate. When I started with the internet in 1993 or 1994, some people I met showed me personally how it worked. In Amsterdam, the internet was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm. There was a utopian atmosphere at that time, a very idealistic attitude of generosity and helping each other out. Many of the people that were early internet users were also politically active, so the internet became a place for people who believed in political action. You had people that did pirate radio for example, who strived for a space in which they did not have to be controlled by the state. These were the same people that started using the internet for their idealistic, utopian, and political ideas. This all created a community of people that shared their knowledge for free with each other and with the world. All of this might sound very utopian, but at that time it all felt natural. You can compare it to the invention of the HTTP protocol, this was also a natural course of action. HTTP was invented by chance by a researcher in Switzerland (Tim Berners-Lee), who worked at a physics institute (CERN). This researcher was working in various physics centers in Europe and was looking for a way to connect the different servers he used. The internet already existed so he created a protocol to connect photographs and texts from his different servers in different cities to his own computer. Because he was employed by a state university, he never even thought of asking for money for this small invention. Making it public domain was such a natural gesture to him, it never occurred to him to sell it as a commercial product. We can still see some traces of this approach nowadays, Wikipedia for instance uses the notion of free information sharing.

(M) The internet was uncommercial in the beginning. Many people were doing things for free. I noticed when I started working on the computer how helpful people were. They took the time to show me how it worked because they were interested in how the internet would develop. Some of the coders worked as researchers for universities and in their spare time, they would develop the internet. Many of them were so excited about what was happening on the internet that they gladly shared it with anybody. On the internet, everything relied on sharing, a very different atmosphere from today. I am still very grateful for how this all developed in Amsterdam. Amsterdam was the center of the new and free internet at that time. In the United States, for instance, the internet was much more commercialized. This probably had something to do with the free-thinking attitude that existed in Europe, and particularly in Amsterdam. It is no coincidence that Descartes came here to publish his work because he was censored by the church in France.

(M) Not for me. The practice of ‘bricolage’ does not work anymore and the coders that used to create free software and distribute it around do not exist any more. In the year 2000, I started a database for which I asked a programmer to help me with some difficulties. For me, working with a coder to make internet art was not different from working with technicians and constructors for the art I was doing in the public space. Every artist has these collaborations because there are so many things that you cannot do on your own. When you build a bronze sculpture you need experts in those specific techniques, and in large installations, you need many different experts to make everything work. A large part of being an artist is to have a dialogue with people who help you create your work. Nowadays, I see a new generation for whom this idea of collaboration is built-in and therefore natural.

(M) At the beginning of my career, I was doing public commissions and exhibitions as Martine Neddam. At that time, Mouchette was not yet seen as art, but it existed inside my studio and was something recreational for me. I had a mailing list on my computer through which I announced events concerning Mouchette to a hundred people or so, and platforms such as Rhizome would publish about it. I only had a small online public that recognized Mouchette as art. The real-life public responded differently. I remember that I was having a show about Mouchette in Tanya Rumpff’s gallery in Haarlem for which I made prints, objects, and an installation. I translated some internet experiences into objects, prints, and works of art for this show. For instance, I created pixelated images of things that belonged to the internet sphere. But, because this was 1998, nobody was interested in art on the internet yet. I, on the other hand, was not interested in selling objects, but the exchange and the interaction with the public were of much more interest to me. I didn’t earn any money with these public interactions, but I earned money with the public commissions I did as an artist and the generous grants that the Dutch government provided. At that time, the government had grants for which you did not have to justify what you spent the money on. This made them ideal research grants that helped internet artists flourish. The only thing you needed to prove was that you were active as a professional artist. I believe that these grants were the reason that online art flourished in the Netherlands. JODI, Peter Luining, and several other creators received them. Their works were all creative, provocative, and daring because they could devote all of their time to creating and experimenting.

(M) The problem with media art is that it is difficult to keep online. I spend a lot of energy making sure that my works are accessible and that they stay interactive. My view on preserving my work is not to change it too much, because I want it to function in the same way as it did when I created it. And I want to keep Mouchette running in a way that I can control from my own computer instead of using cloud-based interfaces which means that sometimes I have to repair interfaces for the database or upgrade them. I recently found a coder in Prague that can help me do that. He is also an artist which is very important when it comes to repairing internet art because he loves and respects art. When you approach a commercial company to do it, they wouldn’t have any interest in keeping the work exactly the way it is. I focus on repairing my work rather than rebuilding it. The ecology of the web and its coding changes all the time and it would be too costly to rebuild the whole work every time it doesn’t work anymore. At this point, my work probably looks like Frankenstein when you look at the code.

(M) I am interested in making works that exist within an interaction. The work of art is the online situation, and to a certain extent, the software enabling the interaction between the viewer and me. NFT’s are the complete opposite of what I am doing. They lock the work in a fixed form for a commercial purpose. When the internet arrived, online art functioned very much as something that triggers interaction. Online art is what happens between a remote server and a local computer. You create the work, put it on a remote server, and then the user looks at it while they fetch it from the remote server. It is all about the interaction between the servers, the computer, and the user, and in this process, there are a lot of elements that can change.  For me, the NFT is regressive compared to  Net Art, it fetishizes the object.

(M) For me, this dialogue is the foundation of every form of art, including literature. When I was younger I read books and I always wrote in the margins of the page, which was a reaction to the author. There was always a dialog going on with the books I read. The author enters your intimate sphere and you communicate with them in your imagination. The book becomes a dialog space of its own. In visual arts I was very inspired by conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner, for whom a sculpture exists inside the mind of the viewer by means of a written description or definition on the wall. My love for art is not necessarily triggered by the aura or the presence of an object. I can imagine that one can have an amazing experience looking frontally at a painting, but I always felt more of a dialogue with a sculpture than with a painting. For me a sculpture changes constantly when you move around it. The perception of the sculpture depends on how you position yourself towards the work and there is definitely a live interaction between the spectator and the work.

(M) Yes, of course, it has changed. You are always trying to catch up with the changes but that is almost impossible. When preserving my work I try to adapt it, so that it can remain the same, endlessly catching up with the internet. I work like that because I believe in the multiplicity, the dialog, and the interpretations that stay alive even if I have to update to newer software versions. I don’t want to re-format it to the latest versions and smooth everything over to suit our new devices. The base of the work stays unchanged and doesn’t adapt smoothly to phones and tablets. When preserving my work I also think about how people experience it, each person in a different way. Recently, I found 15 videos of screen captures made by young Russian people browsing Mouchette and making screen recordings. Some are captured on the phone, some are integrated into stories that you could call fan-fiction, and some are very plain and consist of a voice-over commenting on browsing the website. I had them all subtitled in English and I saved them on a website called Visions of Mouchette. You could say that these videos are an archive, but for me, it’s a part of my work, because I always relied on the dialogue with the user, and here the dialogue goes from a simple screen-recording to a total re-interpretation. I integrated this set of videos into the architecture of the domain by creating the subdomain ‘visions.of.mouchette.org’, connected in this way to the mouchette.org domain.

(M) Not almost, they are physical spaces, they do have a materiality. We should educate people about the materiality of data, how we should handle it with care who we trust with it. There are so many things wrong with our data storage and our online presence nowadays. When you realize how much you’re tracked, that you are getting  more advertisements than information, you see  how problematic it is that all our data is now in the hands of large companies.

(M) As long as I am alive I will take care of the work. I preserve it in a way that I call ‘generative preservation‘. This phrase sounds contradictory but what I mean is: data is alive when it can generate more data, and that data is being preserved because it can change. The concept of ‘generative preservation’ also works from one media into another. For example, Mouchette is inspired by a film by Robert Bresson. This film is inspired by a book by Georges Bernanos, written in the ’30s. A lot has been changed in my own version, but certain elements of the original works are kept alive through the online version of Mouchette. In a way, you are preserving elements by recreating them into a new medium. My favorite example of ‘generative preservation’ is the story of Frankenstein. The original story was written in 1818 by Mary Shelley and is still available as a novel. Many movies were made, and one specifically created the image of Frankenstein as the monster we all know, which became the official image of the monster, the one and only. However, in the original story, Frankenstein is the name of the scientist and not of the monster, the monster was unnamed and innocent in the original story. Certain key elements have been changed or forgotten, but transferring some elements into another medium kept the source alive in our collective memory. The story is now conveyed through a concept that penetrated our society, to a point where our ideas about Frankenstein are very far from the original book. This is how generative preservation works, you preserve art and ideas because they travel and find their way into society.

(M) That’s right. You cannot put internet work on a hard disk on a shelf because you will lose part of its meaning. Most internet works rely on interactivity so when you preserve it, the content should be able to circulate from medium to medium to make sure that it is accessible. Most people might think that preserving a work of art is like putting a painting in a depot. But if you remove the work of its accessibility and thus of its meaning, it dies.

(M) You can’t preserve everything. I was very interested in blockchain in the beginning because I thought that it would help me create a preservation community. But now, I see the issues with NFT’s. You are presenting something as an object and locking it up on a virtual shelf. This kills visibility and accessibility. You are producing work that will not be seen, but just bought by someone and used as an asset for speculation. That is not based on the artistic value of the work. The internet was thought to be the ultimate space for free circulation of information and an instrument of democracy, but now it seems it has become quite the opposite. I’d rather focus on things that can change this trajectory. Wikipedia is still a very healthy construction with very ethical principles, and so is the common garden platform Constant Dullaart created. They both use sharing principles and an open system, which is very valuable. It shows that artists are still concerned with what is happening in society and that it is still possible to gather on the internet and become a host to create platforms where experimentation and collectivity play a role. The art world does not solely rely on creating but also touches upon dedication, sharing, and belief in democracy.