What is the @SSEMBLAGE Art Project?

The @SSEMBLE Art Project is a playful experimental approach to the formal aspects of the digital media. A major part of the contemporary artworld have been more or less addicted to everything digital for quite awhile… images, manipulation, sampling, communication, video streaming, internet, virtual imagery, audio, installations… well, is there really any end to it all? Painting and traditional sculpture appears to be a practice of the past. In one way or the other so is the abstract conceptual formalism of modernism also. Modernism may be outdated, ok, but I think formalism as such is a tool of our trade. New media needs to be investigated, turned inside out, questioned… Hacking is formalism. Todays primary use (and fascination) of the so-called digital could in many ways be compared with the much older renaissance period. People today are demanding a realistic (virtual) 3D rendering of almost everything that comes out of digital media, and that regardless of form or expression. Is this Michelangelo all over again? Higher speed, more RAM, nothing but white and pure Carrera marble… actually, it is skill more than ever. Hardly anyone appreciate good drawing skills or excellent brushwork on canvas anymore. But if you’re an advanced user of software… if you can model a mediocre 3D (cartoon) figure or even animate him to take a few steps within a 3 Mbyte loop, wow… you’re damned good with the computer, can you put on a sound track, too? How does it work? The thing is to be an insider, a member of the digital priesthood. A creatively nerd. Hipping and hopping… all over. Rush it… I’m getting old (born 1953). Sorry, I got carried away. The thing is, nothing is like the feeling you have when you manage to dismantle something - and put it back again - into something else… and this something else works, revealing new aspects of what is real, possible, and right down entertaining. Turning the digital technology itself inside out appeals more to me, than building virtual cathedrals to fly over and through on 21" Eizo screens or by means of projected images on white painted interiors in trendy galleries. To tell you the truth: I don’t like HTML either, or Apple Computers for that matter… although there is two vintage models collecting dust in my workshop. The third is already stolen.

Hmm… how can we reveal what the notion of the digital is all about… limitations, possibilities… like the mechanics of yesterday’s pictorial space? Like Paul Cezanne, Larry Poons and all the rest of modern history that we will forget by the time we’ve downloaded the next version of our favourite software. Free of charge. From some FTP server run by a rebellious cracker totally ignorant about who even Boris Jeltsin was. I don’t think I should say what I just did.

Ok, so my project does not reflect much of what is just said, how does it differ from anything else… is it anything but pure technical fascination… like mastering window programming in C++. Like a sculptor having skill and knowledge about both tools and materials. I had to do it too. After being dedicated to Java for a period while programming a server software and putting together a piece of hardware to assist it… to serve as a linkage between a pulse modulated transmitter (Cybernetes at the Detox Exhibition) and the almost non cooperative Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server….

After all this came the questions, the doubts, the need to do pencil drawings of urinating cows, nude models, and landscapes with rock formations… to paint… to be a real artist again. The current project is nothing but one of the many attempts to find a way back into this arena. What is digital and what is not… what is purely technical and what is not… is, or can programming be art in itself? The thing is, I just had to start somewhere… actually, that is what I have been doing now for almost three years during my time here at the Kunstakademiet i Trondheim (Norway). Searching after a starting point for myself. By the age of nearly 50, as a retired oilfield worker, drilling engineer, and former technician in electronics… I have been curious all my life not ever knowing what profession to put my energy into. Everything that everyone else was and is doing looks extremely interesting, something just like one of the things for me to do. Often more so than what I was doing myself at this or that moment. So after being diversly concentrated throughout the second part of the last century I have finally come to a conclusion that my creativeness is at it’s maximum whenever I’m actually supposed (or paid) to do something quite different. That is how technology learned to live in the same head as art. In my head, at the office, in project meetings, or on a dirty drilling site.

Sorry, I was supposed to tell you about the @SSEMBLAGE Art Project - and not just bragging about myself. Actually, the project is about (no, not bragging… but) diversity, collage, haphazards, and how to assemble whatever comes into your work. That is why I started off making a text editor. Not that I needed one, but it is fun to play with when you have the source code easily at hand. Then it can be modified, rebuilt, and extended (as your ideas come… just for the heck of it: to find out what, why and how.

An editor is also called a word processor. A valid question could therefore be wether it is settled once and for all where the words should come from? Let say you are working on a short story. The text needs a fresh, unpredictable line, someones voice. If I had the option to send a few of the already written text lines directly from the editor, lines that somehow indicated what I needed next. I could highlight and mail those text lines to a friend. A friend I knew was sitting online by his computer working… and let his answer automatically be pasted into my text as and whenever it came… then the mechanics of digital word processing would act a little bit different from what it actually did for our secretary years ago.

That is why one of the features (so far) in the @SSEMBLAGE Editor is as follows: Whenever somebody cut and pasted something into it (provided they are connected to the internet)… these small text fragments (outside any real or proper context) are silently sent off, and out into the net. Send off to whom? Well, I have not yet decided. Maybe they should be filed somewhere and later compiled into something. I would like to do that, and use it in a seperate work, let say an art installation. By the way, feel free to download it whenever you like… and at whatever developing stage it might be in at any given time. There will not be any version numbers to identify it by… actually, how could we do that with art? Well, not me – at least not on this project.

Let me back up a few statements. As I said, these small independent text fragments, like the one I sent to my friend to lead him onto anything for him to send me back… these small pieces of text (mine and his) could very well be available to anyone else using the editor at that very moment. Or couldn’t it? This is the way my thinking goes as I work myself into one function after the other.