Not since the virtual sadism of Josh Harris have I been so enthusiastic to revel in the past. Seldom, as I age, do I look to the disjointed evanescence of memory for inspiration, for it is but a battered and despicable thing, this remembrance of things past, broken fragments of one's facade, its many shades of artifice once so ardently defended and justified, now painful shards offering nothing more than piercing flashes of debilitating truth among the ruinous rubble of one's own self-inflicted misery.
There was a time, or so I've been told, when the internet
promised a brave new world of aesthetic freedom; a depthless realm into which
our darkest and most exhilarated modes of creative expression would thrive.
Neither fettered nor governed by the archaic conventionalism of societal norms,
the digital cowboy, in all its craven anonymity and penchant for reckless
constructivism, thrust fingers first into an expanse of code if it so dared.
This was the matrix even William Gibson hadn't yet conceived. Of course, the
internet will always remain a work in progress, but the marketing agents and
crony capitalists have grown keen to the importance of establishing control.
They hire hackers and programmers en masse, purchasing their freedom in
exchange for helping them assert their dominance through the filter and reach
of algorithms designed to track our every post and purchase online. Pop-ups
lurk and abound, sneakily inserting themselves before our unwitting clicks, scrolls,
and swipes; blossoming plumes of iridescent advertising tailored to your most
treasured and most carefully guarded personal whims. Obfuscation is futile.
Talan Memmott's now defunct online literary journal, BeeHive,
offers us digital archivists a reminder of the promise many of us once shared (and rightly still do) about the creative potential of the internet. Beehive, a
hypertext and hypermedia journal, was first published in 1998, its last
quarterly issue is dated 2002.
Even when judged according to the standards of its time, the
layout and design of BeeHive's homepage is underwhelming. Centered against a
light, pinkish-brown background is a current issue menu inset with a running
list of thumbnails for each featured entry. Along the sides of the center table
are three additional panes, quaintly titled ArcHive, BeeMail and BeeHive News. *sigh*
What urged me onward after first glancing at BeeHive's
unimpressive homepage were the intriguing titles of its featured works: Landscapes by Bill Marsh, Viractualism by Joseph Nechvatal and Hyberbody by
Juliet Ann Martin, just to name a few.
Landscapes by Bill Marsh is a five part multi-media poem.
Its introductory piece, Desert Drive-in, presents an alien-shaped vessel in the
middle of a barren dessert. Within the neon blue and green shading of the ship,
and behind two rows of window portals, scrolls the phrase "my face I did not
hide" and below it the phrase "from insult and spitting". Initially, I was
struck by the simplistic absurdity of the piece, but the more I looked the more
I began to enjoy the deeper meaning the piece seems to suggest. Fanning diagonally
from the center of the ship are crudely rendered members of an audience subservient
to the cryptic message running across the belly of the ship. Although the
viewer is offered no more than a bright green circle to depict the heads of
each audience member, they seem entranced and in a state of blind worship, a
multicolored unison of arms upraised toward the alien ship poised as theater
screen. Before the ship, and in between the audience, are pictorial
representations of four separate theater screens, whose cursory position
alongside its intended audience subverts the viewer and screen relationship.
It's as if the pictures themselves are seeking to fathom the theater-audience
dynamic. There is also an ominous hum of sound that adds a sensation of tension
and anxiety.
The remaining pieces showcase several dystopian digital friezes;
Marsh's "Variation on a Summer Theme" depicts skewed images of children in a
trapezoidal frame, from which rainbow colored signals pulse across a forest of
bulbed nerves. This culminates with "Fog at Sunrise", where fog spews forth
from a crystalline city and tickers across a stretch of ocean. In the
foreground is a dock, two of its planks scrolling the phrases "I will bring
them back" and "from the depths of the sea", with a single boat moored at its
end, its passenger a flashing photographic gallery of ads, except for a single
image of a mother and her child.
At least for the sake of early internet nostalgia, take a chance to search this old site for the dreams and hopes of a collection of early multimedia digital artists.
