Visions.of.mouchette.org at ISEA

June 10th 2022 12:00

Lightning Talk – Screen Recordings and Reinterpretations from Archiving to Creation Visions.of.Mouchette.org

• Abstract: Mouchette is an iconic virtual character from the early net.art time. Fourteen screen recordings of her website have been found online on Youtube channels. These videos are documenting the viewing practices of some visitors, the way they browse the website mouchette.org the way they comment their visit, and how they embed it inside their own narrative, stories of horror, of magic or of seduction.These recordings are an exceptional archival of this website recorded by the viewers in very different ways.

• Biography: Martine Neddam is an artist who uses language as raw material. Since she began as an artist her favorite subjects always were speech acts, modes of address, words in the public space. Since 1988 she has exhibited text objects (banners, plaques, shadows on the wall) in museums and galleries. She has also conceived many large-scale public commissions in several European countries : Netherlands, France, Great Britain. Since 1996, she has created virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence where the actual author remains invisible, among others Mouchette (1996) and David Still (2001) and XiaoQian (2005) and Madja Edelstein-Gomez (2018). In 2013 she began to develop her own software MyDesktopLife, supported by the ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe). Her work has been exhibited at La Biennale de Montréal (2011), Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2016) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2018/2020).

Download the pdf here: ISEA2022_neddam

Relevance to the topic:
For a website like mouchette.org with much interaction and participative experience, screen recordings are a frequent practice. They are used for archival, due to the fast changing online environment, and they are used in art exhibition since museums and galleries rely mostly on frontal viewing and wall hanging. Screen recordings as I know them are simply functional.
But what if a trove of screen recordings of Mouchette.org, full of creativity and imagination is found on Youtube channels, videos made by young people browsing and recording this website to express their personality and feelings, hoping to gather interest, sensation, and a spectatorship of their own? When the public extends the narratives to their own fancy, rather than archival, we are reaching towards collaborative creation or fan-fiction. This is what happened when Nikos Voyatzis found all these videos recordings of young russian kids visiting mouchette.org commenting and telling stories about it. For me, the author of Mouchette.org, the participative aspect of the website is the core of my creation since the very early net.art period when interactive narratives were created with users’ participations kept inside huge databases, kept and maintained to this day, and reworked into new creations. So what a wonderful gift it is to fall upon a new generation of internet users who have invented their own practices to represent and share their own reactions to my website.
You can meet:
-Victoria in the ‘Viktory Show’ channel on Youtube who plays the cute teenager girl, a Mouchette personality, pretending to discover the website with surprise and bewilderment.
-Nikitos and Romanos, the young brothers presenting ‘Fears Show’, episodes of the scary and supernatural stories that stage and enact physically in their own room and where they digitally insert as screams, animations, gifs and other disturbing elements of their own making inside the website of Mouchette.org.
-You can also meet some very young kids who have difficulty in typing the URL of mouchette.org on the russian keyboard of their phone and still manage to record their screen and post it to a Youtube channel, with their own comments and mumblings and a tiny thumbnail of their face in the top of their video. Within mouchette.org, these are all valid collaborative creations, worthy of finding a place inside my website. In the same way that viewers reactions were and still are, kept and reworked into new pieces, a space inside mouchette.org has been devoted to these visions of mouchette.org, to host these films and give full acces to viewers through english subtitles from the comments in russian. I created a subdomain on the website mouchette.org, https://visions.of.mouchette.org/ where I host all the videos
First, together with Nikos Yoyiatzis who originally found them, I archived these videos on my archiving website, with all the comments and original technical data.
http://about.mouchette.org/category/archiving/by-nikos/
And then I started proposing them as online exhibitions in their full right.
Here is an online exhibition created within the context of The Wrong Biennale.
https://artsubstitute.net/index_en.html
https://artsubstitute.net/neddam.html
I wish now to show these works of https://visions.of.mouchette.org/ in the physical space in exhibitions as a part of the creation of mouchette.org.