Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
To see why Netochka matters, venture out for a night of laptop music at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Here, electronic music has evolved into a form that is literally performed on Macintosh laptops. It's sampling and editing taken to its logical extreme -- live sampling and editing!
Yes, in 2002, it has finally come to this: You will sit in front of a computer all day at work, and then when you go out at night to a club, you will watch an artist onstage sitting in front of a laptop bobbing his head up and down.
Electronic musicians themselves are all too aware of their showbiz problem. Their music may be transporting, but there's not a lot to look at onstage. The common joke, according to Joshua Kit Clayton, a San Francisco electronic musician, is that the musician is just up there checking e-mail or playing a video game.
Netochka's software gives the audience something to see while they listen. Behind the stage a montage of video samples mirrors and echoes the musical performance. And like the laptop music itself, the video is not just programmed in advance and then screened. It's edited live on laptops by video artists positioned in the balcony, lit by the blue glow of their monitors. At its best, the video and the music create a coordinated, improvisational whole.
Netochka makes the tool that artists use to turn video into a live performance. And for this contribution, she's celebrated. Last year, she was honored as one of the Top 25 Women on the Web by San Francisco Women on the Web.
No one came to accept the award. So make that 24 women and one something else. Beatrice Beaubien, a Toronto computer programmer who nominated Netochka for the award, defends her choice: "Even if she was a 53-year-old man who was pretending to be a 24-year-old girl, she still is a female entity that has had a huge impact on the Web and Net art."
But Netochka's greatest contribution to art may not be her software, but her posts.
Netochka's medium is the online mailing list. Posting as "antiorp" and, more recently, "integer," she capriciously takes over technical and artistic discussions in forums such as the European Net arts list Syndicate, says Steev Hise, a Bay Area electronic artist. "Nobody really knows how many real people are involved with this," he says.
Netochka's messages, which appear sometimes by the dozens a day on a single list, range from the cryptic to the indecipherable to the inflammatory, much like her artistic statement. "Off-topic" does not begin to do them justice. Her messages come peppered with ASCII word art, fragments and aphorisms that make an ethereal kind of sense -- sometimes. Her postings can be so frequent, disruptive and abrasive that at one point, there was a mailing list for list administrators devoted solely to the discussion of how to deal with Netochka's postings.
An appearance by Netochka frequently derails a mailing list, devolving it into a flame war about free speech vs. the rights of the community. Soon mailing-list members will be choosing sides: the defenders of freedom of expression at all costs! The fed-up denizens who just want her off the list! And the few who believe they see the brilliance in her indirection, the beauty in her sly, circumspect ways. All talk of anything else is soon abandoned.
"As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent."
Bernstein says his own license for the NATO.0+55 software was revoked after he critiqued the software publicly in a paper published on his Web site. "Netochka, whoever she and they are, has done a brilliant marketing job by making the whole thing this exclusive little mysterious club."
It's a club where admission is $550, and your membership can be revoked at any time. "As a person who has sunk $1,000 into this software over a period of time, there's nothing more irritating than having that investment yanked at somebody's whim," Bernstein says. For about eight months, he didn't receive updates to the software.
Netochka goes way, way beyond your average flame war. Perhaps her most epic attack was on the Max mailing list, a forum populated by academics, electronic musicians and computer music geek types talking shop about the programming environment. Netochka, then using the handle "antiorp," transformed the list into a screaming match about who was an S.S. sympathizer and a Nazi. Soon, Christopher Murtagh, the list administrator, became the target: "There were Web pages all over the place with swastikas and my name on it," he says.
He was mail-bombed with hundreds of messages a day. Even after the other members of the list voted antiorp off, supporters continued forwarding the entity's mail to the list. Murtagh, who'd previously defended antiorp's right to keep posting to the list, found himself saying a few things he now regrets, especially since they're still posted on one of Netochka's favorite sites, m9ndfukc.com.
Still, "most of the swastika pages are gone, that's kind of nice," he says.
Even Murtagh, though, as a student of music, has a certain grudging respect for what Netochka achieves. He points out that in the early 1900s, when a new Stravinsky piece was performed, fistfights and even full-scale riots erupted over disagreements about the music. "The antiorp thing is the same thing. Instead of actually writing music, they get onto a mailing list where people are talking about writing music and start pushing buttons," he says.
"And it has pretty much the same effect: You get a group of people who think this is genius at work and other people who think this is barbarism."
Get Salon in your mailbox!