New media and their possibilities: an artistic approach

An interview with Mark Tribe

By Israel Martínez

Mark Tribe is the founder of rhizome.org, which concentrates a large amount of new media art
projects; he is also co-writer of the book “New Media Art”, published by Taschen. Moreover, Tribe is
an important American artist who has used technological media as a bridge to develop socio-
cultural projects. During the last few years he has been focused on teaching in New York, although
he has also been creating new works.

Your early works deal with virtual environments and the Internet, establishing certain foundations in
terms of new media art. How important was the fact that the public could interact with them? Do
you think interaction continues to be vital today?

To the extent that my work has involved interactivity, it has always been at the service of ideas, but
I have never been particularly interested in interactivity per se. For example, in my first net art
project, Traces of a Constructed City1, people could click on a map of Berlin to view photos of
Berlin construction sites. I used what was then a cutting-edge technology, HTML image maps, to
enable this interaction, but the point was to get people from the map to the images, almost as if
they were zooming in from a bird's eye view to a street-level view, or shifting representational
modes from the cartographic to the photographic. I didn't set out to make a work of interactive
art, but to draw a connection between the virtual space of the web and the physical space of the
city, both of which were under construction.

In older art media like painting and sculpture, interactivity is pretty limited. In newer media like the
web, interactivity can be more extensive. But interactivity is by no means limited to new media or
digital media. Think about Alan Kaprow's happenings. Think about Rikrit Tiravanija's Untitled (Free), in
which he served curry in a New York gallery. I do think that interaction is vital, particularly in the
context of recent writing by Claire Bishop ("Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics"), Grant Kester
(“The One and the Many”), and Shannon Jackson (“Social Work”). What I find particularly
interesting are ways in which artists are involving communities in collaborative and participatory
processes of co-production.

In the action Carpark not a single computer is used, except in terms of editing the video
documentation, yet it reflects upon technology and our society. How do you link this project's aims
to the rest of your works?

1
http://www.marktribe.net/art/traces-of-a-constructed-city/
We made Carpark in 1994, in the days of 3/4" videotape and linear editing. Actually, we didn't use
computers to edit the video. I suppose cars and parking lots count as technology, but I think the
project was more about landscape and a social space-staging an intervention that transformed a
utilitarian space of competition (drivers vying for parking spaces) into one of cooperation and
aesthetic experience. I think what connects Carpark with my other big projects, particularly
Rhizome, Port Huron Project, and Dystopia Files, is an interest in the public sphere. I see the public
sphere not only as a discursive space (cf Habermas, Fraser et al) but also as a visual space and a
performative space. It is a space where people come together to form themselves as a public, as
a group of people with common interests. But it's not just about language. It is also about images
and bodies. By coming together and forming publics, we enable ourselves to resist institutional
power. I'm interested in how media technologies like the web and digital cameras inflect these
formations.

In both versions of Revelation, the texts and designs from websites such as Amnisty International
and CNN are eliminated, leaving only color fields and images. Is this an exercise in dissolving a
unidirectional institutional message? To allow the cybernaut to find new gestures/elements in sites
he was already familiar with?

Those are nice readings. Revelation 1.02 was a response to a commission from Amnesty
International to make a net art project. I wanted to make a project about the organization. I
thought their site was ugly, and thought of an algorithm to make it beautiful. The algorithm stripped
away the text and GIF images (logos and icons), leaving only JPEGs (photos) and background
colors. The stripped pages looked like some kind of web-based post-minimal abstraction. And I
liked the way you had to hunt around the page with your mouse, looking for invisible links.

Your latest projects involve actions and reconstructions, video is used as a medium to document
and eventually exhibit them via screening or the web. Have the current tools and strategies related
to new media ceased to be of use to you? Do you think that you have been working with already
assimilated or conventional technological media?

Not all of the technologies used in my recent work are already assimilated or conventional. For
example, in the Dystopia Files installations, I use Arduino, Max, and motion sensors. But it is true that I
am no longer myopically obsessed with new media. From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s,
new media art was an avant-garde movement. Today, new media art is just new media. I have
never been interested in media technologies for their own sake. I am interested in how media
technologies produce and are produced by social formations.

After reconstructing speeches from protests through the Port Huron project, how are those slogans
texts inserted into the present? I think there are positions that are current despite the passage of
time, how do young people react to them?

Reenacting the speeches is in itself a way of inserting them into the present. After all, the
reenactments were performances that took place in contemporary public spaces. And by
eschewing period costumes or props, I emphasized that the settings were not simulations of the
past. The speeches are strikingly relevant (or at least they were in 2006, 2007, and 2008, when I
staged the reenactments). Plus ça change...

Do you have a preference or passion in terms of electric guitars? I ask because in Star Spangled
Cover and Sweet Child Solos, let's say, the main character is a guitar player's sound gesture.

2 http://www.marktribe.net/art/revelation-1-0-2-0
I also incorporated electronic guitar performances in two iterations of The Dystopia Files3, a 2010
performance/screening at Cinéma des Cinéastes in Paris, and a 2011 performance/screening at
the Wexner Center in Ohio. But I first worked with a guitarist in Start Spangled Cover. In that project,
the guitar was specific to Jimi Hendrix, whose 1968 performance of the Star Spangled Banner at
Woodstock transformed the US National Anthem into a protest song. In some ways, Star Spangled
Cover was as spin-off of Port Huron Project. I continued to work with guitarists for reasons that I don't
fully understand. In American English, the guitar is sometimes called an axe--a tool that could also
be a weapon.

From the creation of Rhizome, which you founded, to the publication of the book New Media Art
(Taschen), which you co-wrote, ten years have gone by. How do you perceive the evolution of
these artistic fields? What do you think about what is being done today?

Artists play with emerging technologies; always have, and probably always will. The early years of
the web (by which I mean 1994-2000, when the web was becoming a popular medium) were a
time of tremendous, radical change. It was the birth of the Internet as a world-historical
phenomenon, and an inflection point in our relationship with technology. New media art,
particularly net art, was formed by those transformations, and it was uniquely positioned to reflect
them. The transformations continue, but we are now on the other side of the inflection point.

3 http://www.marktribe.net/art/dystopia-files

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