ARTS ONLINE
July 8, 2002
| The New York Times
After a day off, the Internet artist Eryk Salvaggio returned to the electronics superstore in Salem, N.H., where he was working as a television salesman. It was Sept. 12, and he was immediately immersed in a sea of TV screens — 126 of them, by his count — that were tuned to news reports of Sept. 11. Every few minutes, he was surrounded by scenes of a jet crashing into the World Trade Center.
Mr. Salvaggio said that the repeated showings of the video
inured him to its full horror. He became desensitized, he said, and "I had
this feeling that I shouldn't be feeling that." So he began to consider how
he might restore a sense of human tragedy to what, through media overload, had
been reduced to just another video clip for him. "There had to be a way of
connecting this image to what it actually meant," he said.
Mr. Salvaggio's solution can be found in "September
11th, 2001," a powerful digital artwork that he put online last month in
the Net-art section of his nonsensically titled Web site, www.salsabomb.com.
The new work is based on a sequence of 20 still frames taken
from a video of the United Airlines jet flying into the World Trade Center's
south tower. To reclaim the imagery's human dimension, Mr. Salvaggio has
digitally composed each frame not from tiny dots of color, as is usually done,
but from names culled from a list of the 2,800 dead and missing victims of the
New York attacks. For each video frame, the screen is striped with 55
horizontal rows of 10 names, and Mr. Salvaggio used computer software to color
segments of individual letters, recreating each scene.
While it may appear that the grid of names has been
superimposed on the video image, the tinted segments of each letter actually
rebuild the image for the eye. Thus, as the frames automatically advance, the
speeding plane, the smoking tower and the yellow flames of the underlying video
are readily discerned. But it is the victims' names that stand out.
This may sound like digital pointillism, but the overall
effect is closer to concrete poetry, in which words are arranged into shapes on
a page in order to augment their meaning. A poem about rain, for instance, may
be presented in the form of a water droplet. Here, though, the names emerge
from the twisted steel and pulverized concrete of the World Trade Center to
form a visual elegy.
Relatively few online projects have been inspired by Sept.
11, and Mr. Salvaggio's work is among those that are as much art as memorial.
As the nation's museums prepare to observe the first anniversary of the
attacks, Mr. Salvaggio demonstrates that it is possible for artists to respond
to these events without succumbing either to sentimentality or to
sensationalism.
Joy Garnett, a New York painter and editor of Newsgrist.com,
a new-media-art newsletter that has monitored artists' reactions after Sept.
11, said: "Eryk's piece is more about how we internalize things. It's like
a vestige, a hazy but definite reminder of a wound, like a ghost pain. It's a
short narrative dream, much like any painting or a short art film."
Indeed, Mr. Salvaggio's work is almost painterly in its
execution, and it functions in a way that is deliberately different from many
digital artworks. Internet pieces generally depend on their interactive
elements, which invite viewers to point, click and otherwise participate in
them.
But once a visitor enters "September 11th, 2001,"
the frames advance at a slow-motion rate that is determined by Internet
connection speed and the amount of traffic on the site, not by the viewer. When
the sequence is completed, it begins anew. Although video artists have often
manipulated footage of historical events to alter its impact dramatically, the
experience here is contemplative, as if one were standing before a painting.
Mr. Salvaggio's painterly approach is rooted in one of the
technologies he used to produce the work. The American Standard Code for
Information Interchange, or Ascii (pronounced ASK-ee), is a coding system that
assigns numbers to English-language characters. Developed nearly 40 years ago,
the system allows diverse computers to exchange textual data in a common
numeric language.
From Ascii's advent, computer jockeys also used its
characters to depict and transmit drawings, from a smiley face, :), made by
juxtaposing a colon and a parenthesis, to elaborate renderings of, say,
unicorns made from letters selected solely for their rectilinear or curved
properties.
In recent years, some Internet artists have used Ascii in
their work as if it were the raw pigment of the digital age. Some, like the
Barcelona-based duo Jodi.org, employ it as a visual reminder that their work is
computer-based. Others favor its crude aesthetic, which provides a counterpoint
to computer-generated graphics whose primary goal is to look as realistic as
possible. "Ascii works as a shortcut away from the usual traps," said
Vuk Cosic, a Slovenian artist who has a gallery of Ascii-generated works at www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii
Ascii-made works tend to be defiantly coarse rather than
hyper-realistic, and the characters from which they are made usually convey no
textual meaning. But Mr. Salvaggio has expanded the genre, making the names in
"September 11th, 2001" as important as the underlying images.
Mr. Salvaggio said, "I like Ascii because it represents
the form with a breakdown of language. Most of the time, it's just random
letters and numbers. You have this image made up of these meaningless symbols
that we use to communicate. But in this particular case, the language is
staying intact."
By the end of his workday on Sept. 12, Mr. Salvaggio knew
how he wanted to proceed. But he was concerned that, by appropriating the
images so soon after the attacks, he might appear to be trivializing them. So
he waited until May to begin to produce the work at his home in Ogunquit, Me.
Searching the Web, he found a copy of the video on a European news channel's
Web site — its logo appears as a blood-red smear in the lower-left corner of
the screen — as well as a list of the victims' names.
Mr. Salvaggio, 23, said there was another reason he had
waited to create the work. The attacks forced him to reconsider what he was
doing with his art. Many other artists did the same. As a result, online works
that were inspired by Sept. 11 have arrived in limited numbers, despite the
Internet's ability to deliver them to a worldwide audience as soon as they are
completed.
Ms. Garnett explained: "Emotionally there is still an incredible amount of material to confront and digest. Just because the medium of the Net is immediate does not mean that we should be able to internalize and produce in pace with it. As humans, we are slower than all of our technology."
Web Site: www.salsabomb.com
Web Site: Newsgrist.com
Web Site:
www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii
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