Iliyana NEDKOVA in an e-mail conversation with Klaus-dieter MICHEL about Porn Trapdoors, Blinkfaces and Other Webart Virtues
edited by Amos TAYLOR, March 1999

IN: While anticipating the launch of your VR webwork, called Global Porn Trap [working title], I was particularly impressed by your intention to explore the manipulative power of seeing and representing on the Internet or how virtual culture affects our vision. How did you arrive at this concept? Are you yourself getting over saturated and frustrated with browsing and viewing to turn towards this self-reflective, inward-looking topic?

K-dM: It's not because of the rise and glory of the Internet that I find myself exploring the diverse manipulative power of media omnipresence. You can say that my point of view is inward-looking as long as I am interested in the interaction between mediated culture and people experiencing with their interindividual perspectives. This is a huge field of experiments and artistic research in which I got involved since the early eighties.

IN: I have a feeling that your avatar's or artist's name Blinkface also reflects your anxiety about the life on screen and the preoccupation with one of the most favoured effects of web-authoring: the blinking images or texts. What is the story of Blinkface? How did it come about?

K-dM: Blinkface represents me as an image or a vision with unstable character. It emerged from a graphical ascii-logo that I used on a former net-art project some 3 years ago. Now, I call this a series of 'Lingo Blinkfaces' and 4 of them are still exhibited on my current site in the SubMessageBox. What you basically see there is a geometric grid of ascii-bits or some seemingly senseless letters evoking a pair of blinking eyes in reds, whites and blacks. With its complete orderly look, 'Lingo Blinkface' hides a challenging statement from the observer. It is about the impact of 'hidden' and 'obvious' meanings in art's performance/reception. Blinkface has evolved as one of the major models throughout my work. Blinkface is thus both outwards and inwards for one can look at its 'surface' but one can never see through. The 'blink'-ing effect further builds an impression of a periodically open space whenever the surface disappears for an interval or two. From a more practical point of view Blinkface offers this headliner three useful aspects. Firstly, nobody but me, uses this simple word combination in the entire Internet. Secondly, it is on the way to be automatically associated with those modern, as well as classical, forms of web- eyecatchers. And thirdly, it allows me to slip into a masking as a kind of a virtual entity.

IN: It seems to me that Global Porn Trap tackles interactivity - this much-speculated about virtue of webart - in a rare fashion. By inviting people to step off from the screen, rather than to stay glued to the regular mouse/joystick/keyboard operating human-machine interface, you are probably prompting people to get moving around the monitor as if it is a magic three-dimensional puzzle. I see also a bit of a wishful thinking here - paradoxically enough, in my attempt to get at a decent distance from the screen, I encountered a total lack of control over the imagery. Is that one of the traps you have mined the route of the visitor with?

K-dM: It would be of course a strange repetitive exercise, if somebody really tries to follow the instructions inside the Porn Trap and hits on the 'play' button and walks away urgently to the most remote location in the room to view the screen from a far for 30 seconds. That's the time limit and afterwards the basic screen will surface as if intimidating the observer to obey the set of visual 'instruments'. Certainly, I am driving the visitors towards doing a simple physical exercise. Then, if they get to do it, they will see their desk or place, wherever the screen is located, from another viewpoint. The regular web-consuming- behaviour, prescribing the eyes to be kept away from the monitor at approximately 60 centimetres, is thu ssubverted through viewing the attention spot from much further away. It is as if all of a sudden you would have grown much taller. So, imagine yourself sitting on your chair staring into that tiny illuminated rectangle, which is getting smaller and smaller. Here is where the very emancipative idea behind the Global Porn Trap lies, I think.

IN: I was also wondering about Global Porn Trap and its bizarre approach to the 'fleshy Internet aesthetics'. I believe that all anti-Internet headline makers would pick up your VR project title as the other substitute name of the Internet. In your introduction, out of political and artistic correctness, you have stated that the responsibility of turning around or exploring the sexually arousing images you have magnified, lies entirely with the viewer. Are you employing the same language of enticing this viewer with the sleek 'mechanon' [GR, a trick] of the web pornsites when welcoming people to get through the invitingly open doorway with the words; 'Now nothing stands in the way to enter the show. Play it. Again & again.'?

K-dM: 'And click Here to Enter!!!' Web pornsites often try to attract visitors with a flair of a virtual community of tolerant people with positive attitude to life. And they very well understand how to utilise any techniques and methods for virtual interactivity. What is very important in terms of sexual enticement , I gather, is to mediate the impression that the visitor will become involved in the presented actions. The observer is always assigned the role of the 'missing' performer in all the pornscenes. That's a basic point in pornography. The whole set of webporn instruments serves mainly to convey this type of impression. You find thousands of faces looking challengingly at you and headlines like "Be aware that you will cum on this site" or the pseudo-intimate messages of the models for the observers. But although pornsites are really keen in using the newest web techno-beats they are not creative in an artistic sense. They are rather like salesmen practising their business following one of the oldest rules of advertising: massive repetition of signs and messages. When I surf through a decent number of pornsites and ask myself afterwards how many different images have I actually seen, then the answer isn't easy because everything looks somehow the same, like ordinary supermarkets or gas/service areas by the motorway. They also have these repetitive illuminated sort of aesthetics. And all of them deal with products whose demand won't drop off. We need food for living, motorway drivers need petrol for moving and lots of on-liners obviously need sexual fantasies. Again & Again.

IN: Or perhaps, there is another trap round the corner because once inside the splash screen with the once-flesh images, one can get confused by the lack of any sexual implications in the formalised colour patterns of supposedly megamagnified naked skin? By employing a sort of visual hyperbole are you arguing that we could get back to our integrity only through over exaggeration, through hypersensitivity?

K-dM: Maybe, to me the mega-magnification delivers the fantasy of distance vs. the closeness to the object of observation. To blow it up, for me, means to deconstruct the whole context. The basic image of Porn Trap is the hotspot of one more or less typical porn photograph. If a pornsite would present the entire original in its normal size, only without that hotspot, what I have used seems like subverting the common practice of covering up the genitals on Non-Member pages. It is this hot zone that you can see in the Porn Trap but it is so massively blown up, which again makes it worthless for sexual stimulation. It is like someone rolling his/her naked body into pages of pornzines but the extreme closeness to the stimulating material wouldn't stir up any sexual thrill.

IN: I can imagine that there are people out there who have never been affected directly by the porn aesthetics as delivered on the Internet. What is your book of rules for not getting trapped in the porn netzones? What are your navigation tips for such non-experienced visitors to Global Porn Trap?

K-dM: Sorry, but I have no adequate answer available

IN: 'Touch is the most demystifying of all the senses while the sight is the most magical'. This is a quote from Roland Barthes's Mythologies, 1957. While reflecting on this clear-cut statement of Barthes, I realised that your Global Porn Trap seems to couple [at least in theory] our aspiration to see and touch despite the unhavable nature of the Internet flesh. Could we then pronounce the Internet as the most mystifying and magical in Barthes' terms?

K-dM: Barthes has probably meant that the capacity of our imagination is the highest in terms of mental mystification when you see 'things'. When we touch something we experience a high level of the physical reality, which prevents us from perceiving the 'things' on an imaginative level. I am not sure whether we can continue to maintain this equation nowadays. In times of mainly mediated knowledge, most often through visual media, touch seems to become an increasingly rare sensual experience. This particularly concerns the sexually oriented visual stimuli which presupposedly are there to provoke a sense of belonging or imagination of a real touch. I find that the hierarchy of senses in terms of mystification depends on the viewer's perspective. For example: How about freaked out pop-fans who try hard to get a touch of their idols? Or, disciples receiving a 'healing' touch from their guru? What is when somebody touches something in absolute darkness without knowing what it might be? Can't we argue that there is only light which enables the eyesight in our attempts to demystify the lack of knowledge?

IN: You are also sticking to the good old recipe for cooking up a webwork - make it playable, turn it into a game. What do you think will make people do it over and over again with Global Porn Trap?

K-dM: Oh, that is just an grain of irony. Global Porn Trap is more of an absurd electronic board game for 'adults' where they will not find what they may expect under this subject. Years ago I went to a fun-fair and there was a very shabby sex-show. This experience is comparable with the attitude of the Porn Trap. Outside of a tent a man was trying to entice the potential audience by shouting out slogans of thrills to be seen inside the tent. Once inside I should admit that the show was absolutely revolting. No sexual or erotic thrill whatsoever. Think about the floating editable words and the bare skin spots with anti-aesthetic illumination inside the Porn Trap. This is like mute yelling. In my post-porn trap reflection this is the 'trick', the 'mechanon'.

IN: There was another striking thing about the doorway of the Global Porn Trap. It is set up as a sort of Star Trek starship environment with two identical adjacent doors from each side. In terms of its formal simplicity, this door image bears some predictable techno-beat which is recurrent in the digital minimalism of your other VR work, called Virtual Heatwave. Are you an ardent adherent of the heavy techno visual culture? I think one can also attribute some serendipity to the way the new VR frontdoor came about with the screen of doorbells. However, what I value most in this buzzers-dominated navigation of the VR WEB is the archaic image of the doorbell. Isn't it the pre-Internet means of communication - everyone seemed to be only a buzzer away. Just drop in, press the doorbell and you will be received?

K-dM: It is a wellknown fact that the modern multimediated forms of communication still use signs, icons and symbols of the empirical spheres of traditional life. The entire Internet is full of these associations. Plazas, digital cities, virtual sculptures, offices and info-desks are coming upfront at you, wherever you look around the entire WWW. Even the term 'site' has been borrowed from the physical world. Obviously, this is the reason to invoke the atmosphere of a natural neighbourhood. The usage of these physicalities highlights the lucidity of the creation and provides some orientation/navigation for the audience. Each emerging 'medium' was first seen in terms of the experience from 'outside' the new communication technology. For instance, think about one of the first public performances of cinematic films by the Lumi¸re brothers at the end of the 19th century. There was a scene where a train arrives at the platform, photographed from a diagonal half-frontal perspective. The first audiences have tried to jump away spontaneously from their seats in a self-protective way. They were scared of the possibility that the train would crash into the cafe where the film was shown in 1895 in Paris. They have judged the scene in terms of their ordinary knowledge and relation to the environment.

Concerning my Global Porn Trap, it is important to realise that this imagery of a somewhat Star Trek design - trapdoors inviting you to step in - transports my entire idea to dig a virtual tunnel between close websites. Within the tunnel, there are trapdoors which lead the visitor inside a certain room - another analogue from the physical world. Global Porn Trap is one of three rooms that I have installed already. There are also the 'U-Boat Chamber' and a preview of '17 Anonymous Kids' which is currently in progress. My plan is to include more websites in the future and to open up a trapdoor to certain room-installations on each site. I call this 'Cubic Capacity/Hubraum' and the visitor can 'walk underground' through my corridor from site to site. As you see, this is full of analogous meanings from the pre-Internet world.

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