the interview

l'objet: RHIZOME_RAW: interview with Peter Luining
date: Wed, 3 May 2000 11:26:54 +0200 (CEST)
from: Josephine Bosma <jesis@xs4all.nl>
to: list@rhizome.org

Peter Luining lives and works in Amsterdam. His net art is rather
'stylish', in the sense that compared to most net art it does not
that clearly reflect on net culture and information. His work is
more easthetic. A few years ago he was called 'the next generation
Superbad', because of his particular use of imagery in combination
with sound. Peter Luining was asked to curate an exhibition for
a Dutch gallery called Planet Art, on the alternative artfair
Kunstvlaai. He has gathered an interesting collection there. This
interview concentrates mostly on his own work though.

Josephine Bosma: Can you tell me a bit about your early work?

Peter Luining: My first project was an HTML-battle between two
virtual opponents, at different locations, different servers.
People could access the work and change it, alter it, recreate it.
It got a lot of attention afterwards, even in Brasil. Funny detail
is that al people that wrote about it had not seen it themselves.
It is as if this work happened mostly in people's imagination:
it was appearantly something extremely beautiful, yet noone had
actually visited it or taken part in it. These kinds of effects
one sees a lot in net art journalism it seems.

JB: What on earth is an HTML-battle?

PL: You have to think of it as those dance battle which happened
mostly in the early eighties, from which breakdance came forth.
One party creates a work, another creates a work as well, and
people that stand around can intervene in the works as well. In
the case of HTML-battles this meant work was put at different
locations, all free website hosts: Japan, Saoedi-Arabia, a lot
of US of course.

After these events my work became more unpredictable. The type of work
where you enter a webpage and you don't know what will happen at the
next page. A lunapark like experience.
I sometimes tend to go into events again. I also regard the remixes
that I made in December '99 as one sidetrack. I don't like to be pinned
down to one style. I did not just remix sounds, but also kind of remixed
code then. For those re-mixes I for instance took something of Jodi, put
sound under it and changed the colour to purple. These are the FF00FF
remixes. FF00FF of course being the html code for purple.

JB: How do you feel about the discussions which happen from time to
time about the kind of work you do, the shockwave animation and so forth.
You know: is it web specific yes or no, is it net art yes or no...

PL: This I find such nonsense, because they are net specific. I know
what they mean by net specific though. In that sense it is of course
very easy to put my toys on a CD, if it weren't for the fact that
most of the things I made are dependent on the net. They are linked
to things on the server site. I have toys that change colour or
sound every week. This happens automatically on the server. Is that
net specific? If you put it on a CD, you loose this aspect.
Talking about net specific: I have also made a work in which I use
hijacked webcam signals. I put some frames in a row, with webcams
underneath. You can make your own composition. There is a refresh button
next to it so you can update it. All signals are on different servers.

JB: When I saw your toys at your place, they seemed a bit ..err..
lonely. They looked like abstract paintings, which you can move or
change, which also contain sound. Compared to other net art it looked
isolated and abstract. In the site however they give a completely
different picture, because of the way they are then ordered or
presented.

PL: I don't think it is exciting to always present my work in the
same way. By presenting the work anew often, by adding
variety, one gets a different experience. When you visit my site
in two weeks, you so to speak see the work presented completely
different. I think it is important to not always to present work
in the same way, even if the work is the same. This is something
specific of the net you can use. One thing I did for instance was
take someone else web page, take a piece of code out, and add some
of my material, which gives an alltogether different experience of
the work as well. It is so easy to take work and drag it somewhere
else on the net. You don't have to choose for the same fashion every
time. You can present your work in hundreds of ways, and I use the
net to do so.

JB: What do you think of large art institutions working with net art now?

PL: On the one hand it is good, this extra attention for net art
(or whatever you want to call it). I find it slightly problematic
though that a lot of curators know so little about what is actually
going on. You see many calls for participation on lists. When you
visit the sites that go with the calls you see the organisers
reaching for artists that are in their direct vicinity, without
knowing what or how really.
I am organising an exhibition myself right at the moment, called
Net Affects. It is partly for an Amsterdam alternative artfair, and
the online part is hosted by pavu.com. For Net Affects I wanted to
show the variety within net art. One so easily gets stuck in a few
styles in a lot of net art exhibitions.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~real

http://www.lfoundation.org

http://www.pavu.com/netaffects
opening offline saturday May 6th 16.00-19.00
Kunstvlaai, Westergasfabriek, Haarlemmerweg, Amsterdam, NL

*
I chose 9 people from the Netherlands and 11 from elsewhere.