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Art Intercom: featuring artist Jaka Železnikar
Paddy Johnson · New York (United States) · Nov 30th, 1999 12:00 am · 4 votes · no comments made
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| Jaka Železnikar, Letters, 2006, by Screengrab Paddy Johnson |
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Much like Robert Rauchenberg’s, Erased de Kooning Drawing Jaka Železnikar often begins with pre-existing work and then transforms, sometimes even destroys it to make new art. Such studio methods can create a wide range of works, a number of which I discussed with Železnikar over the phone last week. The majority of the discussion centres on what he will be making at the iCommons Summit and his online works, though he has an array of excellent offline pieces that can be seen here.
AFC: So you do a lot of on and offline work. To make the interview a little more concise I’m just going to focus on the online work for now, and go through a few pieces on your site. Your most recent piece Letters, that’s a Firefox extension right? Now I haven’t installed this in my browser - frankly I’m a little fearful to do so…
Jaka: (laughing) It doesn’t bite!
AFC: Well, I’m a little worried about adding any additional distractions to the ones I already have to my work… Can you tell me how it works?
Jaka: It’s an online visual poem in the form of an extension for the Firefox browser. If you look at the project page there is a rotating letter ‘A’. Okay so you’ve got the whole alphabet – actually a mix of the English and Slovenian alphabet in rotating letters. Regardless of which page you are looking at, it adds this alphabet over the page, and then you can move letters around or if you type, these letters will appear and disappear, and you can make them move around the page by themselves. Plus I made a little button so you can switch it off to surf normally.
AFC: [laughing] How kind of you! So do you work with this Firefox extension regularly?
Jaka: Yes and I intend to do some more work as a Firefox extension. Changer is also made as a Firefox add-on – and yes, it too can be turned off and on. Changer … makes a havoc out of web pages. It destroys the layout, it can change the text, it rotates the images, changes text sizes, it can surf by itself … basically it’s a nightmare of web usability. But at the same time you get very interesting visual structures based on a page original design.
Paddy: So with your work, is your main goal to create an object of beauty through transformation? I mean it seems like the objective is to make something that has visual appeal, though is essentially purposeless. Am I right?
Jaka: Uh yes you can say that. Still there is a message in
Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the Summit, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Interviews include MTAA (part one and two), Joy Garnett, Jaka Zeleznikar, and Ana Husman, Nathaniel Stern (part one and two), and Kathryn Smitha way that intervention is made or in the experience that is available to the user beside the work’s visual side. In these projects I’m kind of misusing different objects or tools to get an aesthetic or semantic effect out of it. Also I have many focuses in my work. One is visual and the other is language based, and a lot of the time I combine these two modes of expression. But I also do some pure visuals or poetry/language based work.
Paddy: Some of your work seems to have a lot of connections with the net art collective Jodi. Is this a connection you see?
Jaka: I don’t know. Partly. I think my tradition is different from theirs. They work more in the tradition of conceptual art, and I’m not that much. I mean I like this tradition, I even use it sometimes but basically the tradition I’m coming from, it’s visual and concrete poetry (I also relate strongly to the idea of Ergodic approach developed by Espen Aarseth). Part of Jodi’s and part of my work might be similar in a way. Maybe it can even looks similar, still I wouldn’t relate my work to their work strongly. But I do like their work.
Paddy: Well, I think your interest in poetry suggests an interest in a certain kind of fluidity to language that perhaps they aren’t overly concerned with.
Jaka: Yes, if they use language they use it in a different way. They used broken language or error messages or language mixed with under laying and otherwise invisible (x)html markup.
Paddy: Right, and you made a browser that breaks things so…
Jaka: Yea. I just think we come from different traditions that’s all.
Paddy: Fair enough I guess. Why don’t we move to the next piece ‘Napis nad mestom’ – as I believe it more specifically relates to the Summit.
Jaka: Well, the translation to English would be: ‘Inscription Over the City’ and it’s a book of poetry and an artist book at the same time. A pdf file is available for download (book is in Slovene language). It’s a bit funny that this book was exhibited in amongst other venues, the Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana which is the oldest Slovenian biennial for graphic art but they kind of further idea of reproduction and included also some artist books. Basically it’s poetry you know, but it’s done in a special way. The author of this book is a made up person … Me and a friend of mine, Sunč;;;;an Patrick Stone, we went to the library and took out 40 or 50 books of Slovene poetry and we took a couple of lines from one poem and a couple of lines from another poem from different authors and then mixed them up … and in this way we make enough poems for a book of poetry, but there is not a single word in there that would be written by us (still - the montage itself is the creative process :). And part of this idea I would like to take to Dubrovnik and work on. This time I will be working with traditional British poetry and poetry from the Republic of Ragusa.
Paddy: Will this be your primary focus in Dubrovnik, or will you be making other work too?
Jaka: I’m already creating this sampled poetry with Sunč;;;;an and I plan to bring it with me to Dubrovnik. There I would like to cooperate with other artist and create some additional co operations based on this work and other artists work. I also proposed to the Second Life team – part of the exhibition will take place in Second Life - to create a virtual statue-poem, a rotating three dimensional C – as a kind of visualization of transformation from copyright to copy left :) This basic idea can be still developed further … And a CC licence will be applied to it (still have to choose one, probably By Attribution) – and in this case I see this statement as an important part for interpretation (to be a bit silly: CC is somewhere between C and Copy left marked by C that is turned around on a vertical axe. Sometimes I like to play with minimal form with complex contexts).
Paddy: So, all the poetry you will be working with is old enough then to be in the public domain right? Assuming this is the case, it of course makes sense then that Creative Commons licensing be applied to such a project to ensure the remix remains available to the general public. Do you see other works you’ve done as being actively CC friendly?
Jaka: I’m more careful with the copyrighted content from the copyright fanatic states. In Slovenian copyright law there is something similar to the American term Fair Use. As a Slovenian artist I have more freedom than artist in USA – or at least this is my impression after reading the Free Culture book. Since my work is experimental and completely non commercial, I am able to avoid some copyright concerns (or I’m just lucky that in Slovenia an artist rarely ends up in a court.) I also don’t mind that the majority of my work is used for non commercial purposes or for educational purposes. I think it’s wrong to use works in public domain and later claim a copyright on it – a CC and similar licenses are a handy tool in such cases. Beside this I’m strongly convinced that some artistic practices might not be legal but they are very legitimate – copyright laws should take this into account.
Paddy: Agreed. Okay, well let’s move on to another piece: Ascii Kosovel.
Jaka: …There are three different works but to be brief, it’s done by making samples of Sreč;;;;ko Kosovel’s poetry and remixing it and putting it into different shapes. He was also using shapes as an important part of the expression in part of his work. (Sreč;;;;ko Kosovel is an early 20th century Slovene avant guard poet who died very young but made important corpus of poetry). I’m not directly copying the shapes that he used, but it’s in a direction that he went in. Parts of the project don’t relate to poetry but to Kosovel’s biography. Slovenian painter Avgust Č;;;;ernigoj made a really nice constructivist portrait of Kosovel in 1926, so I used this as the source and I turned it into ascii art, so when you go to see the page, the text in a shape of that portrait is written before your eyes. Basically text is made from samples of Kosovel’s biography but also remixed – by this I mean it’s not in chronological order, facts remain facts. That’s a work I am quite a fan of.
Paddy: Yeah, it’s really beautiful. Not to be overly specific but I really like the equals signs you’ve distributed. It’s a nice touch…
Jaka: I needed something to span the white spaces, because if they remained you wouldn’t be able to see the image.
Paddy: I mean also, it’s just a very nice visual and metaphorical linear thread so to use that as a structural element to the piece makes a lot of sense.
Jaka: Yes, it adds something extra …
tags: dubrovnik croatia culture artists-in-residence summit07 net-art art-intercom
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