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Because of the overwhelming content and references (Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire, Raymond Roussel, etc.) and because of the multilayered way in which she deals with this content in the self-made films, and the complexity of the navigation syvoice that she has developed, this cd-rom can, in many ways, be called complex. For, when you leave this part that explains the navigation commands, you arrive in an introduction film that shows old monochrome images of a large Zeppelin above New York. These are probably shots of the Count von Hindenburg, the famous Zeppelin that managed to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and reach the New World. This symbol of technological innovation was filled with helium, crashed and burned out completely, taking with it the dreams of a new world. A better known example that managed to create the same disillusion, was the disaster with the Titanic. Trust in progress was seriously damaged by both accidents. On a small scale, both these images set the tone for the journey of discovery made available by this cd-rom. Then you land in panoramas (360º) of deserted buildings and a snowy landscape, which contains 'hot-spots' that you can activate. You can navigate through this as you will using QuickTime-VR. If you navigate with your mouse, the sound reacts. And thus, at a certain moment, you hear footsteps in the snow, while a disconsolate snowy landscape passes by as long as your mouse indicates that. Hot spots are hidden in the landscape. A click on a hot spot starts the monochrome video which was made with a cheap Quickcam (QuickTime Video). Zoe Beloff made these herself, improvising in her studio. While the camera was running, she projected films from the beginning of this century onto the walls, films she had found in junk markets. She adds her own instructions to this, dancing in the light of the clattering projector, or she shows the camera strips of transparent material on which there are quotations or assertions. And so there arises a many layered aspect to the image. It is a carnival of references and connections which resonate in a nostalgic atmosphere which seems to arise from pre-war Europe. She has described this work as a playful philosophical inquiry exploring the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal, posed since the birth of mechanical reproduction. From around 1950 to 1940, there was an almost magical element in the way people saw these developments in technological innovation. She sees a parallel in how new media currently appropriate the desires of those now living. Her cd-rom is like a virtual alter ego who, as a medium, an ‘interface’ between the living and the dead, transmits ‘movies’ that record her impressions. The cd-rom is then a kind of time machine that brings to life the spirits of the past in the cathode ray tube. The beginnings of cinema were characterized by the fight to master the new techniques and the new medium and thus to be able to develop a new visual language. Beloff compares herself with the pioneers and tries a new articulation of space and time that both grows out of cinema yet goes ‘beyond’ it.
Willem van Weelden: As an artist you started with painting and independent film-making. When comparing that artistic attitude to that of a maker of interactive productions, what are for you the most striking and interesting differences?
Zoe Beloff: cd-rom is a very intimate medium, unlike film. My work is designed for an audience of one, sitting alone in front of a computer. That is why I speak directly to the viewer. It is a solitary experience, both for me making the work and also viewing the work. This I think allows fantasy to flourish. The computer is very much a space of fantasy on many different levels. But making it I never thought about an audience really. I made it in my mind, for myself, my own virtual world, to explore my thoughts. That's why I could be in it and use my own voice, something I would be normally too shy to do.
But structurally, working in digital media is very different, particularly the structuring of space. What is the ‘space’ of the computer? I wanted to construct an ‘imaginary space’ somehow behind or through the screen. Also the whole concept of non linearity and interactivity is fascinating to me. I had never been very interested in the beginning, middle and end structure forced on film and writing and was happy to leave it behind. I was interested in the idea of ‘mental geography’, creating a space through which one travels by linking ideas, each idea can go in many directions. Creating a world that like the real world is never quite the same twice, depending on where you choose to go and what you are thinking about. My work here is just a start, just a beginning for me.
Making a cd-rom, I'm creating a ‘world’, creating a film one is making, a route or journey.
Also, working on the computer allowed for a whole new kind of spontaneity. My QuickTime movies were improvised as little performances. Everything was done ‘live’, I projected the film, played the music and read the texts often all at the same time. I just spent the day starting from a rough idea, no notes or plans, setting things up in my house, trying things out till something somehow worked. I love to throw myself into something and surprise myself. It was more like ‘casting a spell’ than making a movie.
WvW: Your project Beyond, before you adapted it for cd-rom, ran first for 44 weeks on the Net as a web-'feuilleton' or a 'serial film' as you have put it. What prompted you to develop a work in progress, a work as a series of episodes in a non-linear and highly public medium?
ZB: I started the Web project in part because I was totally inspired by the little QuickCam camera. At the time I had no money, no one was interested in showing my work at all. So I thought, okay, I'll just forget about trying to get grants or interest curators or any of those things, because it is hopeless. Instead I thought I would just take the means of production and distribution into my own hands and open my own theater on the Internet. I did not really expect anyone to actually look at my work but it was more of a discipline. I decided to make a movie a week. Something really not possible in film. I worked with what I had at hand, in my house, projectors, film I had found (I have been collecting old home movies for many years now) and of course myself. I really believe art should be made this way, free from commercial considerations of any kind. Also I had been interested for some time in early serial films particularly those of Louis Feuillade, (I love the way he made up the episodes of his serial films as he went along) but these days it is impossible to work like this in film. But then suddenly the Web opened up a whole new opportunity to work this way.
WvW: Did you initially have in mind a synthesized version of the 'web-piece' in a cd-rom format? And if so, did this notion effect in any way your selection and presentation of the material you have put on the web? For what purpose did you want to use the web, and how does that purpose relate to the cd-rom version?
ZB: I came to the idea of making a cd-rom after I had started the web project. At first because I had so many episodes that it was getting out of hand, I could never afford to have more than 3 up at any one time. Plus it took so long for people to download the episodes, you needed incredible patience to see my work! (some episodes I could not show at all on the web because they were just too long).
Besides the episodes linked together in many ways, not just linearly as the web project had to be constructed. A cd seemed a natural step. Only at the time I had no technical knowledge of how to go about it. I had to spend an incredible amount of time learning computer programming to build it, something I knew nothing at all about before I started. I just taught myself from books and manuals. But I kept my web project going because it was a good discipline and also democratic, I liked the idea that people could see my movies for free, they could just stumble across them without leaving the house. It allowed people who would never normally look at experimental film to see my work. This was interesting, sometimes they wrote to me about what they thought of my movies. It allowed a new kind of dialogue with an artist to open up.
WvW: When comparing the two, which version do you prefer, and for what reason?
ZB: I like the cd-rom because it is much richer in its construction of space and also of time. One has the idea of ‘timelessness’ in a sense that one feels perhaps that all the episodes, different times, are held somehow, accessible at any moment, waiting secretly to be revealed, like ghosts.
WvW: I would like to pursue the question of the environment of the work of art; what kind of work is being done now; e.g. by you, where it is best displayed or given access to, apart from the museum, or its miniature counterpart, the gallery? And in what way do your notions on this issue conflict with the attitudes of the 'radical' artists of the seventies (like Smithson, Graham, etc.), who also searched for alternative ways to present their works?
ZB: I imagined people seeing my work like I said, at home. (This is funny in the sense that I have never been interested in video and don't even own a TV). But somehow I always felt my QuickTime movies were more like tiny films or something entirely different, hovering in a space not on the screen but behind it somehow. They owe nothing to video at all. If I want to make a large format work that is really about the image, in itself, I work in film, film is so much more beautiful than video. Actually I'm editing a film right now. My idea is to work both in film and digital media and create somehow, different kinds of dialogues between them. It is my ongoing project, of which this is the beginning. I have never shown work in a commercial gallery. My work is totally uncommercial, and I very much imagine it will stay that way. I have absolutely no desire to make objects for rich collectors! Actually a gallery owner was telling me recently that she thought artists should make very limited editions of cd-roms so as they could sell for a lot of money. I was horrified, this is commodity fetishism at its most perverse and makes utterly no sense in the digital realm.
Actually, much to my surprise Beyond has been included in a number of museum shows. It is nice that people can see it, who otherwise would not have access to my work, though it is really not designed for a museum space. I sell my cd for $20, which is not too expensive if people want to buy it for themselves. (Actually now I have access for the first time to museums, it makes me think of the possibilities of doing an installation, which would be great but I'm just thinking about it in the back of my mind). One thing about Beyond was that it ‘traveled light’, it is cheap and easily accessible and I believe in that.
As for the seventies artists, I agree with their desire not to make art for collectors and I like Smithson's writing very much indeed. But their work was also sort of heavy and macho and involved vast amounts of money and earth moving! Plus the fact that it was hard to see that land art, so it still ended up as photographs and things in galleries, very elite in its own way. They needed rich sponsors like the Dia Art Foundation. I don't need anyone really. Money is of course always a problem and it can be depressing not having any most of the time. I would love to pay for a little more technical help, but it is not possible. Museums by the way usually pay you nothing to show your work. It is all difficult. But a sound artist friend of mine, Ken Montgomery, says “Art is throwing money out the window” and I believe in that too.
WvW: Do you feel that there is a fundamental difference in the aesthetic distance to the medium, when comparing the effect a cd-rom or a website has on the reader/viewer? And what 'tactile' qualities do you seek in a medium?
ZB: Yes, I do want my work to be ‘tactile’, it is something that is totally lacking in almost all digital art. You sit so close to a computer screen that a natural desire is to reach out and touch it. And like Alice in Through the Looking Glass I really struggled to go through the screen to discover what lay on the other side. That is why perhaps you see a lot of images of my hands. It just happened, it seemed natural, this reaching out or through.
I'm interested in the idea of virtual reality. But I don't think it has to be a laborious contraption with head set and gloves etc. That is too literal to be very interesting. A virtual world should mentally absorb the viewer, transport them. My own tiny images try and do that. They are so small, fleeting and fragile that the viewer finds themselves peering at them, leaning forward somehow to grasp them before they disappear. But I've been interested in the creation of illusion and a space that you can almost touch for a long time, I've worked with 3D slides here. This creates a space that is both life like and utterly artificial and airless, both at the same time. Such paradoxes are interesting. Last time I was in Holland I went to see the 'Panorama Mesdag' in The Hague. It was build in the 1880's and to my mind was much more uncannily virtual than any contemporary VR.
WvW: In Beyond you refer to Walter Benjamin's examinations of the past as a way of revealing the mechanisms of our collective delusions regarding the phantasmagoric expectations of progress and technological innovation and thus stressing the circularity of time. What are for you, in this time, the main delusions in the way we deal with the high pitched expectations of the new technologies? And how can they be cleared and put in their proper place by historic insight? Are scraps and randomly picked items out of a long forgotten past token enough for revealing the mechanisms of whole eras and accordingly the collective projections forced upon these helpless items? What are your weapons in this battle against a-historicism? And what 'hell' do we have to relive in order to sanely project our technological aspirations?
ZB: I'm unfortunately not Walter Benjamin, I mean he was brilliant and I am not and he is sadly not around anymore so we can't ask him what he thinks. But he does really inspire me to try and think about some issues he raised. But people think about technology in such a limited way these days. They seem to have no historical perspective. That the new is always better, is just as much a buzz word as it was in the days of the 19th century world expositions. We live in a world of ‘experts’, technology is in the hands of experts, I want to get away from such fetishising of technology. Lots of people told me before I started that I could not make a cd-rom, because you had to have all these ‘professional’ programmers and it cost thoUSAnds and thoUSAnds of dollars. Well that's not true. I make my work in a way that I hope will inspire other people to pick up a QuickCam for $99 and express their own ideas.
I feel like now we live in a world of bigger, faster equals better. Guys always going on about the latest software and hardware but to no real end, without imagination. I'm interested in a time when technologies were born and ideas outstripped the hardware. Now as the hardware gets better it too often becomes an end in itself (digital artists are now called ‘content providers’). I felt this was worth pointing out in my work.
Actually I was just reading about Alan Turing who pretty much came up with the concept of the computer in the 1930's. By the end of the 1940's computers were being built out of what seems like odds and ends and soldered together with wires (my kind of machines really). It was a miracle anything happened at all, let alone getting the right answer to something and Turing was talking of machines that could think! Now computers are infinitely more powerful and they still can't think for themselves. It shows again that when a technology is young it inspires incredible flights of fancy. It is this the ‘dream life of technology’ that is fascinating, not the machines in and of themselves. This is what I want to make clear.
So my weapons are like I said, whichever come to hand. But to get back to Benjamin. I was interested in looking at history not through the big events but though its scraps and remains, whatever gets washed up at the flea market mostly (Benjamin, was also really into flea markets. Some times I think this mentality is very Jewish, being both abstract and intellectual and also making things with bits and pieces. My grandmother was a dressmaker. She could make anything with whatever lay around the house. I think I take after her).
Re-projecting these old home movies, so they speak again, With ideas that were perhaps hidden before, about psychology, philosophy about ideas that were there in culture. I don't know if it works. So my work is deliberately not conventional documentary. I specifically choose images to stand in for other ones. The texts and the images don't ever quite match but perhaps through that the viewer will discover new meanings emerge. When image and sound match there is tremendous redundancy of information and it is dull. In my work there is no space for that (digital media has to be brief and compact). I struggle to make images speak almost despite themselves. It is all I can do, and it is very intuitive. I don't know how successful though.
WvW: What are exactly the 'odd archaisms of form' that are attached to new technologies when regarding cd-rom technology?
ZB: Well, QuickTime VR is a revival of the idea of the panorama as entertainment. Real panoramas were very popular in the 19th century and then they died with the coming of cinema only to be revived in the virtual realm in the 1990's. Also making film for the Internet, it must be by necessity very short. A minute is about 5 Megabytes. It brings us back to the earliest films that were about 50 seconds long, by necessity because this was the length of a roll of film and the Lumière’s had not yet thought of splicing shots together yet. Other cd-roms are often picture books with sound, this is really primitive, sort of like magic lantern shows. I'm sure there are many other examples. It brings us back to the ‘new’ being in many ways an illusion.
WvW: In a way Beyond gives access to a recluse and austere mental, or even spiritual world dominated by resonance of the past. Hugo Ball writes in his Flight out of Time (1915): “It is impossible to envisage a spiritual association without an oath and solemn ritual, without a secret doctrine and without a sacrament. When it is a matter of last things, then life must be at stake, physically or morally. And it is a matter of last things only when this is the case.” What is the secret doctrine or sacrament that is embedded in Beyond when viewed in this light?
ZB: I don't know that the world of Beyond is so austere. It is full of all kinds of neuropaths having hysterical breakdowns and nervous fits. Have you visited the ‘Somnambulist’ room yet? They are really little melodramas in the form of case histories. Often times I find this world very funny and did things just to amuse myself. The ‘Seance’ room its pretty insane as well. I deliberately used my best 1930's BBC radio drama voice! I used to joke that the asylum depicted is really my ‘spiritual home’. But if there is any secret it is that I really somehow did live in this world for a long time on an emotional level. In a really crazy or childish way I believed in it and in the people I met there. It was my home for about a year and a half and I was really reclusive and shy at the time. Always staying home working till 2 in the morning in a completely obsessive way. Like I said making the episodes was more like casting spells than shooting film and magically something appeared, I never quite knew what it would be. It seems theoretical but in many ways it is a very emotional and private work. It was really strange for me showing the work to people at first, a bit like showing people my dreams, embarrassing!
WvW: Fleeing time has been for long a fascination of man. You described your production as a time-traveling device. Do you hold it a reality that we will be able at one time to roam the realms of time and space?
ZB: I don't know about real time travel. But I do think imaginary worlds can be real in their own way. An artistic description is just as ‘true’ as a scientific one. They are just different types of metaphors for understanding the world. I'm interested in expressing ‘thought at work’, ongoing process, in progress. The fluctuations and fleeting nature of memory is in itself time travel, that is always changing, it can only be fixed momentarily.
– Willem van Weelden
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