Collections GRAMMATRON

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Title: GRAMMATRON
Artist: Mark Amerika
Date: June 26, 1997

Location: Online

Object Details

Type: Media Arts (Internet Art)
Technology Used: HTML
Credit Line: Linked project from Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.
Object Copyright: Copyright retained by the artist

essay From the Sacred to the Profane , 1998

Not too many people may have noticed the Holy name at the start of Amerika’s Grammatron narrative. Not too many people would even have thought about how Aloni incorporates one of the most sacred of Jewishicons, the Tree of Life symbol. Both web projects take us down similar routes however, from screen to screen from the sacred to the profane.

Abe Golam, legendary info-shaman, cracker of the sorcerer-code and creator of Grammatron and Nanoscript, sat behind his computer, every speck of creative ore long since excavated from his burnt-out brain, wondering how he was going to survive in the electrosphere he had once called home. His glazed donut eyes were spacing out into the vast electric desert looking for more words to transcribe his personal loss of meaning. “I’m Abe Golam, an old man. I drove a sign to the end of the road and then I got lost. Find me.
–Mark Amerika

Enter Grammatron at your own risk–you will be pulled through more than 70 consecutive running red screens incorporating Amerikas' personal life philosophies and his lurid virtual passions. Or in Amerika’s own words: "an interiorized landscape posing as a dream–narrative application”.

A Golam is a mindless creature from Prague from traditional Hasidic stories, here Amerika relies on Abe Golam to act as a kind of spontaneous writing machine using HCT, (hypertextual consciousness) a kind of creature, or e-criture.

HTC is not necessarily new, it existed before books, before the scriptures, before the invention of God, it’s just that reading a printed book bound HTC to the page and the page has been a way to enslave the reader who, bound by the spine, was conditioning their nervous system (and thus their intuitive ability) to respond to the book’s false heirarchy. Artifically restrained paginality can now give way to organically disseminated vaginality as the cyborg-narrator becomes more feminine in character (HTC is a transgendered performer whose feminist rhetoric sees virtual reality as the perfect bind).

Udi Aloni reiterates the de-humanising , anonymous face of the web, where man is a non-human, a de-human or gender-less anti-human. By combining visual midrashes (Talmudic commentary) with political, cultural and theological commentaries, and woven into the all-incorporating Kabbalistic web of the ‘Tree of Life,“ Aloni has created a digital vessel for his ambitious and prolific imagery.

I found it quite fascinating, the similarity of the Dionysus myth and the Jehovah myth. In both, the divine body is torn to pieces and spread all over the world. One of the main Sisyphean projects of the Jewish people, according to the Lurianic Kabala, is to re- collect the pieces of the divine body, or the sparks, try to separate them from the dirt that had merged with them, and reassemble the pieces into the original whole. Even though they never succeed in creating the original God they manufacture mutations of God. Some are funny, some monsters, but all fascinating.

The Re-U-Man structure is an attempt to build a protocol that will help me merge the scattered pieces of the "I”, the “I” that is torn by late Capitalism, by the old Marxism, by the sham of Modernism, and by the vagueness of Post-Modernism.
–Udi Aloni, 1996

Aloni’s canons of the secular and non-secular, combined with his powerful erotic imagery, create a compelling protocol that flows in virtual space and requires severalhours of the visitor’s time to travel, retrieve and combine.

In post-modern tradition, Aloni electively incorporates text, gnostic writings, the New Testament and the Bible, combines and blurs sexual identity, and calls on personal and collective mythology.

Through the presentation of digital information, imagery, and audio narrative, both Aloni and Amerika have found efficient vehicles to help them/us try to understand this digital Golam, or to come face to face with the Re-U-Man.

Susan Hazan, From the Sacred to the Profane, 1998.

Susan Hazan, 1998. First published by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center for Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.

essay Net Art as Theater of the Senses: A HyperTour of Jodi and Grammatron , 1998

As though French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud had just time traveled into the future to the early days of Net art experimentation, two of the ground-breaking projects on the web today, Jodi and Grammatron, revel in an intoxicated celebration of the senses with a new form of interactive-networked-experiential-transcendental-poetic-theater.

While theater begins with the notion of the suspension of disbelief, interactive art picks up where theater (and film) leaves off with branching, user-driven non-linear narrative. The letting go of authorial control has been the big dilemma in the development of interactive works as an art and/or entertainment medium, games being the exception. Both Jodi and Grammatron energetically ignore the warning signs and head unabashedly into the danger zone of audience interaction / participation. Both works gain enormously from a kind of breathless urgency and surreal sensory distortion that might have been inspired by the performance art of Artaud, the poetry of Rimbaud, or even the transformative work of such contemporary digital artists as Laurie Anderson, Char Davies or Perry Hoberman. “cyberspace is creating a new form of narrativity to get lost in” Mark Amerika, mercurial author of Grammatron, editor of the web magazine alt-x, and a prodigy of Brown University where hypertext innovator George Landow spearheaded the hyperfiction movement, has expounded on the narrative possibilities in hyperfiction in his web-based article HyperText Consciousness (HTC). “HTC as experienced in cyberspace is creating a new form of narrativity to get lost in. This narrativity may be more hallucinogenric or clickual to the reader/participant, but it still has the feel of a narratologically-mind discourse.” The branching discourse eventually alters our sense of the authorial center, a dissolution of self. Mark Amerika’s mantra, “I link therefore I am,” aside from the Cartesian allusions, seems strangely reminiscent of Rimbaud’s own attempt to transcend the boundaries of self with his famous statement, “Je est un autre” literally, “I is an other.”

Grammatron takes off with the curtain rising, an ominous soundtrack accompanies an overture of flipping pages with texts and animated images that have a frightening quality in their mechanical automation. The cyborgian credo “I am a writing machine,” flashes across the screen followed by passages of delirious prose, the authorial voice now dissolving in the hypnotic sequence of turning pages. We sense the voice of a newborn automaton (further transformation of the authorial voice) attempting “to gain control over the movement of the letters, their meaning strung together here in this electronic writing space.”

When the overture ends we find ourselves on the brink of hyperspace, a clearing where the branching tentacles begin connecting fragmented lexias (chunks of fiction) in the form of: ruminations,satiricims,datacisms (or dadacisms), eroticisms,declamations, singular nodes within the sprawling storyline. Gradually, we are introduced to the tangled web of the Grammatron world: Abe Golam, “legendary info-shaman,” Nanoscript, “desire’s own language..a forbidden data that had been permeating the electrosphere,” Golam’s avatar-sweetheart Cynthia Kitchen, the self-alienation of Digital Being, and the quest for creative immortality.

Like William Gibson science-fiction novels, including the legendary Neuromancer, the synthetic world of Grammatron, with its de-centered narrative, meandering story-threads, and immersive chaos, confuses and intertwingles (to use hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson’s twisted language) real life, virtual sex, and the “search for God.” “we love your computer”* “We are honored to be in somebody’s computer” boast the Jodi authors Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans (hence the Jodi title), who have not only gone beyond the interface, they have abolished it. Jodi pages flash and burn, scrolling and displayinguncontrollable computer code, fragmented shards of interface elements (menus, buttons, etc…), code stripped bare of its functionality, a once symbolic language now transformed into a surreal magic theater of the absurd.

Heemskerk and Paesman attended Silicon Valley’s electronic arts laboratory CADRE at San Jose State University, which is headed up by a master of subversion and parody, media artist Joel Slayton. According to the Jodi duo, “The computer presents itself as a desktop, with a trash can on the right and pull down menus and all the system icons. We explore the computer from inside, and mirror this on the net. When a viewer looks at our work, we are inside his computer. There is this hacker slogan: ‘We love your computer’… You are very close to a person when you are on his desktop. I think the computer is a device to get into someone’s mind.” Jodi forces us to question the representation of data, its translation, its mapping, its conventional application for visualizing and decoding the language of programming into metaphors and signs we can interpret and utilize.

Trying to make “sense” of Jodi is a daunting if not impossible task, it is its fearless attack on the functionality of information, interface and interactivity that sets it apart from the remaining 100 million pages found on the World Wide Web. But Jodi is dazzling, hypnotic, subversive, ironic, and breathtaking at the same moment. Your experience with Jodi might include such misshapen encounters as: a “not found 404” breach in the website that resounds with a warning beep; an interactive user-submission form that strips entries of their vowels; a repository for those filtered vowels funneled from the previous page; a fractured browser interface; fields of numbers endlessly displaying; “good times” complete with corporate icons; more “good times” infected with virus warnings; news of “a 14-year-old sociopath” that “brings my company to its knees”; a virex scan of your computer data; and

ASCII characters as pure art…

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Ultimately, Jodi is Code stripped of all functionality, Code for its aesthetic value, Code as abrasive language, Code as hallucination, Code as theater. “the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live” Jodi and Grammatron demonstrate that Net art has become the latest stage for artists to construct experimental forms and narratives, challenge convention, initiate dialogs, introduce new strategies, threaten old paradigms. This work is brazenly altering our perspective of an emerging medium, just as had been done with previous new media including photography, film, and television. The medium of interactive networked computing has clearly captured the imagination of artists in the 90s.

Artists such as Mark Amerika, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans are searching for meaning, truth, poetics and magic in a medium that until only recently has risen from its military-industrial roots and transformed itself almost overnight into a mass phenomenon. Perhaps that is why the Net is so pregnant with possibilities. With its global interactivity, collective tendencies, rapidly evolving technologies, and free exchange of ideas all demanding constant change and renewal, the medium is revolutionary by nature.

Now more than ever, the words of Artaud taken from “No More Masterpieces” in his legendary “Theater and its Double,” resonate in these millennial times when the whole world as one planetary audience seems poised in front of its glowing cathode-ray tubes, staring into the abyss, waiting for the walls to crumble…

“One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy, and in which we all share, even the most revolutionary among us, is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin fresh.”

* This and other quotes from an nterview with Tilman Baumgaertel, “The Aesthetics of Crashing Browsers,” published in Telepolis (http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/ku/6187/1.html) and also available in the nettime archives at http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/1056.html.

Randall Packer, Net Art as Theater of the Senses: A HyperTour of Jodi and Grammatron, 1998.

Randall Packer, 1998. First published by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center for Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.