WORLD ART MAGAZINE

One Friday in August 1994, the bank of telephone booths
behinds the destinations board at London's Kings Cross
station began to ring. And they kept on ringing all day.
Randomly at first, but as the day progressed, more and more
began to chime in. By mid-afternoon, all 36 phone booths
were ringing off the hook, attracting commuters and passers
by, and completely baffling a market researcher from British
Telecom who happened to be there. Those who were curious
enough to answer the calls (as well as those in the know)
found themselves talking to people all over the world, from
Johannesburg to Washington DC. And in the middle of it all
was Heath Bunting, the artist responsible for the event he
later described as "a massive techno crowd dancing to the
sound of ringing telephones."

To organize the event, Bunting sent a single message to
various mailing lists and newsgroups on the Internet,
outlining the idea and providing the list of phone numbers
to ring. "People just really liked the idea and that's how
it spread," he explains. About fifty of those who received
the message turned up on the day to answer calls. "Sometimes
these events can get a bit serious," he adds. "We just
messed around."

Behind his self-deprecating sense of humour lies Bunting's
fascination with bringing the world of high technology down
to ground level, bridging the gap between the global
information superhighways and the street -- to see what can
happen. "When you collide the global with the very local you
get interesting results," he says.

In 1995 Bunting took part in NTT's InterCommunication art
exhibition in Tokyo. Working with the theme "Communication
Creates Conflict", he set up a message service over the
Internet, inviting people to send email that could then be
printed as leaflets and handed out on the street, or
delivered to commuters at major subway stations. The results
ranged from the comic to the absurd, or both. In one
instance, a message from "Geoff in Derby", addressed to "the
suited man in Shinjuku station", reads; "I'm sorry about
yesterday. Perhaps we can try again. Do you think you are
doing the right thing?" The message was dutifully delivered
to the first suited man who came along.

In both his Kings Cross phone-in and "Communication Creates
Conflict", Bunting opens up gateways between cyberspace and
the street, creating temporary artistic spaces at the
intersection of the two based on interpersonal exchange.
It's his own form of object-less social sculpture, shaped by
adding an element of friction into the striated information
flows of communications technology. On another level, such
projects offer a playful gesture towards Marshall McLuhan,
the patron saint of the wired world, who defined art as
"anything you can get away with." But perhaps more than
anything else, Bunting's brand of network art speaks to the
human need for the unexpected.

The thirty three year old artist has been moving back and
forth between cyberspace and the street for a long time.
Growing up in Stevenage, thirty miles north of London, he
built his first computer from a kit at the age of eleven.
Meanwhile, according to his own cryptic CV, he spent a good
deal of his youth "surfing the hard edges of the street." He
once told an interviewer from the Guardian that he became
fascinated with communication after his sister was born
autistic. He admits he was only being half-serious at the
time, suggesting that the idea is a bit like the joke about
sociologists who study society in order to understand why
they don't fit in themselves. But, he adds, "if you come
from an environment of non-communication you'll probably end
up a communications expert."

His interest in technology lead him to train as a systems
analyst. But he soon dropped out, moving to London, where he
spent many years walking the streets and practicing that
most public of art forms, graffiti. It's something he still
does whenever he has the opportunity. He prefers using chalk
rather than paint.  Firstly because it is cheaper and also
because he enjoys the aesthetics of white on a black
background. Moreover, he says, using paint encourages people
to identify the activity as some form of rebellion: as
'graffiti artist' or a 'hip hop artist'. Using chalk, on the
other hand makes it harder for people to categorize what he
does. And Bunting doesn't like to be easily categorized.

This passion for graffiti lead to "Presence", otherwise
described by Bunting as a "global network graphity project"
(he has a habit of intentionally misspelling things). It
began in 1996 when he chalked a world wide web address on
the wall of Embankment tube station in central London.
People who saw the address and later keyed it into their
computers were taken to a web page which asked them where
they had seen the graffiti, why they thought it had been
written there and who had done it. Submitting their
suspicions or guesses using the form provided, participants
were then transferred to a second page which, rather than
providing the answers, listed the suspicions of everyone
else who had seen the graffiti.

Like many of Bunting's ideas, the network graphity project
propagated through cyberspace like a virus. While Bunting
continued to chalk the address around inner London, it began
to appear all over the world. Judging from the long list of
suspicions, people have since spotted the address painted on
a bridge in Philadelphia and scrawled on the wall of a
women's toilet at the University of Hawaii, among other
places. The list of individual suspicions also includes
anonymous submissions by Bunting himself. "When I first
started I didn't have a clue why I was doing it myself," he
explains, laughing. "So as it went along I contributed a few
ideas."

The artist likes to poke fun at his own work, but his sense
of humour belies the serious issues which he engages through
his art. "The street", he explains, "is still the most
threatening or potentially revolutionary space to operate
within". It's also the most heavily policed space, he says,
and an increasingly risky place to be.  He views the
Internet as a potentially new form of public space, and his
attempts to bridge the gap between cyberspace and the street
as a means to empower the street. A great deal depends on
access, an issue which provides a recurrent theme many of
Bunting's projects.  In one, he converted a British Telecom
skip (dumpster) into a "technology access centre" where
people could 'upload' and 'download' computer hardware and
parts. In another, "Tin LAN", he constructed a local area
network in Farringdon using tin cans, steel wire and cell
phones.

Dissolving the boundaries between art, politics and everyday
life, Bunting's approach seeks to create new forms of
communication, participation and subjective experience; an
approach that is reminiscent of the situationists. Indeed,
he readily acknowledges the influence of situationist ideas
and practices on his work, though he would never call
himself a situationist. "They were operating in a less
complex environment," he says, "so just to quote them and be
them now would be a bit silly". Nonetheless, references to
situationist theories and ideas form a common thread that
runs through his network art, his installations and also his
multimedia work.

Last year, "A Visitor's Guide to London" was selected for
inclusion in Documenta X, Germany's largest art festival
held in Kassell every five years. Bunting's playful subtitle
for the piece dubbed it as "an already out of date
psychogeographical tour of London, ideal for foreign
non-visitors, comes with over 250 sites of anti-historical
value. Incomplete without instructions, now available for
all (the rich) over the world wide web." The interactive
tour consists of a series of photographic images, spatially
arranged so that each appears on the screen in an order
determined by whichever direction the viewer chooses to
follow from one image to the next using a simple
navigational system.

The work was created "by accident", Bunting says, the result
of six months spent walking around London with no particular
aim, propelled only by the natural attractions of the
terrain. These are reproduced in the virtual tour, allowing
viewers to retrace  pedestrian routes determined by train
tracks, underground rivers and the remains of old roman
walls. The idea of locomotion without goal was the basis of
the de/rive, or drift, one of the key principles employed by
the situationists for their own psychogeographical research
-- research that was motivated by the desire to understand
and subvert the ways in which everyday life is conditioned
and controlled by the organization of an environment. The
reference to psychogeography in the subtitle of the work is
intentional, Bunting says, but he quickly adds that "if you
look at the context in which it's placed, you'll probably
see that it's a humorous reference as well."

The images in "A Visitor's Guide" are produced at very low
resolution in stark black and white, with a complete absence
of half-tones, and many look more like charcoal sketches
than photographs. The effect creates a highly subjective
perspective, one which Bunting suggests was, in part, a
reaction to the default thematics of contemporary
multimedia, , with its objective pretensions, animated
fly-throughs and rainbow colour palettes. As an added bonus,
the minimalist approach reduces image file sizes, allowing
faster download times across the web.

"Velocity" (1995), presented at the Hull Time Based Arts
Festival, employs a similar approach. Conceived as a
web-based slide show, the work pushes shots from the street
onto the screen in rapid succession. Here the focus is on
the languages of street signs, and the slide show works to
juxtapose the legitimate semiotics of road rules with the
illegitimate signatures of street graffiti. Each signifier
is rendered in white against a jet-black background, a
technique which provides a neutral context and serves to
heighten the comparison between tag and traffic code.

It's about the ideology of speed, as deduced from the
street, Bunting explains, and the way in which road signs,
markings and the layout of the streets themselves encourage
continued movement. In such a context, graffiti represents
"low velocity presence", inverting the semiotics of speed.
"Graffiti has a self contained movement," he explains, "and
often inspires stillness." Bunting's juxtaposition of the
two sign systems explores the way in which street graffiti
embezzles the conventions of the road, suggesting a role for
even the most indecipherable tag as part of a strategy of
de/tournement.

Another web-based slide show, "Pain of Existence" (1996)
continues Bunting's preoccupation with street-level
semiotics, this time focusing on his own de/tournement of
street signs. The work, first presented at the Next Five
Minutes conference in Amsterdam, offers an autobiographical
documentary of his street art. As well as providing examples
of the artist's highly stylized chalk drawings, the show
includes images of subverted street signs, newspaper
hoardings and advertisements. One image depicts a highway
billboard, the original advertisement blacked out and
replaced with the statement "most art says nothing to most
people." The context and the sentiment conveyed contains an
echo of Debord, who declared: "That which changes our ways
of seeing the streets is more important than what changes
our way of seeing painting."

Like "Pain of Existence", much of Bunting's art is connected
in one way or another with various conferences, art
festivals and events. In fact, he has spent most of the last
two years constantly on the road, travelling from one event
to the next. When I spoke to him, he was in Alberta, Canada,
enjoying a ten week residency at the Banff Centre for the
Arts. It's by far the longest time he has spent in one place
since giving up his London apartment in mid-1996.

Not all the events he attends are art shows. He also
receives lecture invitations from  the wider
techno-conference circuit, a result of the reputation he has
gained for some of his more subversive media stunts. Perhaps
most famously, Bunting set up a bogus home page for the
pharmaceutical giant Glaxo, which featured the Chairman's
portrait, signature and seal alongside pictures of animal
experimentation. The images were accompanied by a request
from the Chairman asking all Glaxo employees to send in
their pets to be cut up -- all for the greater good.  The
web site was eventually pulled down, but not before
attracting widespread publicity and forcing Glaxo into
making a public statement.

For last year's Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Bunting
created a web-based work that offered a critique of the
concept of 'visibility' on the Internet. "Pseudo Wars" was
based on the idea that the position of a search engine
listing had value, like virtual real estate. Using the same
techniques employed by pornographic web sites to achieve
high rankings in search engine tables, Bunting subverted the
web 'presence' of a number of major corporations, including
Nike and the retail chain Marks & Spencer. Type in the
keyword 'Nike' into a search engine, for example, and links
to Bunting's own site would appear at the top of the
results. The project appeared alongside the web-based work
of a number of other European artists, including Rachel
Baker, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Vuc Cosic, Pit Shultz,
Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk (jodi.org) and Andreas
Broeckmann. The works were presented together at the
festival under the title "Remote C".

"Remote C" wasn't the first time these artists had come
together. Many of them have been working together in various
capacities over the last two years, realizing projects under
the name "net.art". The projects are organized through a
number of virtual centers, including CERN, the "European
Laboratory For Network Collision" -- a web site maintained
by Bunting. (CERN is, of course, the French acronym for the
European Particle Physics Lab, which also happens to be the
birthplace of the world wide web). CERN maintains links to
other net.art web sites including the Moscow WWWart Centre,
the Ljudmila Media Lab in Slovenia and jodi.org in
Barcelona.

An early example of net.art is the WWWart Medal, conceived
by Alexei Shulgin and Tania Detkina, and involving the
collaboration of many of the same artists who appeared
together in Linz, including Bunting. The idea of the project
was to award artistic recognition to web pages that were not
created as intentional art works, but which conferred a
definite 'art' feeling. Visitors to the WWWart Medal web
site can follow the links to a number of "found" web pages,
each of which is singled out for qualities including
'flashing', 'valiant psychedelics' and 'research into
touristic semiotics'.  In the spirit of Duchamp, these
on-line "ready-mades" raise questions about traditional
definitions and evaluations of art, explicitly revealing the
challenge to such notions posed by the appearance of the art
work on the web. As the text that accompanies the project
asks; "What is www art - is it public art? Advertising? More
data noise? Does it have anything to do with galleries and
critics? Do we want it?"

These questions flicker across the screen of many net.art
works to date. Like the WWWart medal, most projects are the
result of collaboration. Even if they are conceived by a
single artist, they often depend on participation and
exchange from other artists. Projects are conceived as
systems in which the involvement of both other artists and
audience becomes a condition for the development of the
overall system. As such, a significant feature of such
projects is that they can be constantly updated and changed,
precluding any notion of a fixed creation or 'work'.

As unstable and open-ended as the networks in which they
appear, net.art operates as a species of anti-art;
challenging the idea of the completed and authoritative art
object, and by extension, the role of that object within the
self-contained economy of the traditional art world. It is
in this vein that Janez Strehovec has described such art as
'post-aesthetic' in Walter Benjamin's sense, and suggests
that its characteristics "are more amenable to conduct
consistent with direct democracy than those associated with
the dominance of gallery and museum capitalism."

Bunting himself describes net.art as an "invisible" art
form. "It doesn't proclaim or sign itself as 'art'," he
explains, comparing it to painting. The latter, he argues,
is no longer a viable medium, "except as a way to make money
and make other people's money." Instead, he says, "if you
want to do effective works they should not signal that they
are artworks."

In a sense, much of Bunting's work could be described as
'invisible art', from the anonymous traces of chalk on
concrete to the spontaneous ringing of a bank of public
telephones. As spaces for the production and distribution of
art, both the street and the web exist in tension-filled
relationships with both traditional media and the
institutions of elite art themselves, characteristics which
the artist clearly finds attractive. But that situation may
be changing.

As its inclusion in Ars Electronica suggests, net.art is
beginning to receive greater recognition from art
institutions. Such increasing visibility has been met with
ambivalence by net.artists, including Bunting, who are
determined to maintain control of their own meanings and
definitions. It's a situation which presents a clear choice,
Bunting believes: "Either we disappear or we have to take
control of the situation," he says. But which way it goes
remains to be seen.

Alongside the institutional recognition of net.art,
Bunting's own profile in the art world has risen, making the
artist more attractive as a good investment. In other
interviews, he has spoken of his opposition to being
professionalized, suggesting that he may "retire" in order
to remain outside the commodity art world. So I ask him what
he means by "retirement". He laughs. "It's like being a
boxer. Boxers go into retirement just to get trained again.
Then they come out of retirement and charge twice as much
money!"

Mark Nixon <mnixon@interdomain.net.au>