Jeff Instone

A report on the first stage in the construction of a digital work.

Working title ‘The Pink Panther meets The Ruskin Master’1

A report on the first stage in the construction of a digital work. Working title 'The Pink Panther meets The Ruskin Master'1

A report on a stage - particularly a first stage - and especially as reported by the artificer rather than the archivist, is one which can easily become hedged about by conditionals such as “if…then…else…else if…end if”, and perhaps ‘if only’. Else, again, it may become a text devoted to ‘the things we know but cannot tell’ expressed using that suitable vagueness useful in the discussion of unformed ideas and essential for the accurate description of the kind of continuity which would be inaccurately defined were it to be expressed in precise terms. Subject to this handicap, however, I will try to provide a summary of the development of this work to date; one set within the appropriate context, which lies, as does all context, between the Universal and the Absurd, or in the sensible language of the modernist; between common generalization and common specialization.

May I begin my report by stating that a study of Stage 1 of the work under development might indicate that it could just as well have been carried out within my own rudimentary digital studio as within Loughborough University’s Computer Human Interface Research Centre Media Lab., and may I then add that, given as the work in question comes, as does all work, from something before, and has in one shape or another been in development for more than 18 months, the bursary allowed me to reduce an indulgent work down to its basic form, discarding a number of unwieldy components in the form of variations which had become attached to it over the period referred to. So, curiously, my two ‘in house’ stays have allowed me to not only dismantle a work, but to a degree to reconstruct it in terms of compilation rather than adaptation: small beer in some quarters perhaps, but one which has led to, yes, even more variations and reconstructions, but ones which cut mustard at the blink of an eye, even on my machine.

The work as it stands is primitive and was of course speeded up for display reasons; opportunities for the user to insert text were simply flashed up (and opportunities to insert speech blanked for the duration); the activation of text and of colour changes were written in as ‘serving suggestions’. Yet already there is interest in the screenwork itself and in possible extrapolations; Videonale 8 Bonn and LEA Pandaemonium 98 have asked to show the work in whatever state it happens to be; and I have accepted, in principle, an invitation to adapt the work for a social, or ‘ethnographic’ archive in SW UK.

No matter how many Laboratories or Centres for Advanced Enquiry are bolted on to Schools and Faculties of Art and Design, no matter how assiduously ‘theoretical studies’ attempt to define media in terms of a tradition of Beaux Arts already fading when Mrs Dalloway, worried about her party, paused to cross Conduit Street, a sanitized early to mid 20C form-functional toolbox mannerism; street-wise style, fails because all engaged refuse to address the essence, the core of electronic media, which is an appreciation of existential location, the base upon which the appreciation of Artificial Intelligence, a contemporary logic of sense, is founded.

Collaborative works drawn up to specification can prove disastrous: I am struggling with ‘Polyphilo: the dark labyrinth revisited (an erotic epiphany of architecture)’, Perez-Gomez A. Publ. MIT,1992 (based on Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - Colonna F. Publ. Aldus Manutius,1499), in which the latter liturgy of the journey thru Nature to Culture (Love and Architecture) is replaced by a curiously unerotic virtually impenetrable ‘understanding’ wrought via a deconstruction of Technology: fuzzy logic photographs supplied by Aerospatiale, no less. Nevertheless, with the support of those individuals I have met within Loughborough University’s Computer Human Interface Research Centre Media Lab. - ‘Your work is crap; I can help you spruce it up, let me know when you want to start’ - I remain confident, indeed I am as convinced as ever, that a fine art form is available to those prepared to abandon the nonsense of cliché, comfort and custom.

Jeff Instone, May 1998.