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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?
Mar 1, 2002 | For someone who does not exist -- at least the way you or I do -- Netochka Nezvanova has a fearsome reputation. She's a gifted computer programmer and polemicist, an artist and a pain-in-the-ass, a critic of capitalism and fascism, as well as a capitalist and a marketer.
Artists use her software, Nato.0+55, to manipulate video for live performance and installations. But some see Netochka herself as a work of art, an online spectacle many years running that's one of the Net's great performances.
Netochka is the human face of a software tool kit used to sample and morph digital video in real time. Netochka gives the interviews and makes the appearances at digital art and technology conferences to promote the software. Except that when she shows up in person, she's frequently embodied by different women.
Is one of them the real Netochka and the others a bunch of understudies? No one but Netochka knows, and she's not telling. She explains -- sort of -- via e-mail in her inimitable hackerese: "NN's reputation is based on mouth 2 mouth adverti.cement. When something is very well konstruckted and designed with a degree of integrity it stands on its own ... All the cool girls wear NN."
The name Netochka Nezvanova is a pseudonym borrowed from the main character of Fyodor Dostoevski's first novel; it translates loosely as "nameless nobody." Her fans, her critics, her customers and her victims alike refer to her as a "being" or an "entity." The rumors and speculation about her range all over the map. Is she one person with multiple identities? A female New Zealander artist, a male Icelander musician or an Eastern European collective conspiracy? The mystery only propagates her legend.
Whoever she is, one thing that we know for sure about Netochka is that she will not be denied.
According to artists and software programmers, she has threatened to sue Cycling '74, a San Francisco software company that produces Max, a graphical programming environment that is a prerequisite for using the Nato.0+55 software. When thrown off a mailing list, she once threatened to hold the price of her software hostage unless she was let back on. Her Web site even levies an arbitrary $9.55 tariff on all American customers, just for the heck of it.
Her antics go beyond threats. One programmer, who refuses to be named for fear of retribution, got so much Netochka spam when he angered her that he was forced to write a program to send it all back to her. She's revoked the software license of customers who publicly criticize her code on the Net. Practically, that means she's refused them routine updates to software they've already paid hundreds of dollars for.
"If you say the wrong thing in the wrong context, they have no problem yanking your license, which is what happened with me, and with a number of other people," says Jeremy Bernstein, an artist living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Her code gives Netochka her power and makes her more than just a flamer or self-involved performance artist/Net prankster who could simply be enjoyed, deleted or ignored. She controls the software that the artists whom she amuses and hectors, taunts and plagues, use to do their work.
Netochka has something that they need.
