Abstract

Since 1994 the experimental art project, Paris-Réseau, has been a "(net)work in progress". Texts, images and sounds gathered in various ways before, during and after a performance by the group Art-Réseaux at the Paris Video Library form different layers in the Paris-Réseau Archives, a hypermedia database. Paris-Réseau assembles photographs, sound samples, videos and texts to form a composite image of the city, combining digitized traces of physical places and people with information garnered from individual and collective memory.

Paris-Réseau comprises at least five projects. It began very simply, gradually expanding to encompass different time frames and a very large number of paths throughout the city. Then in an effort to compose all this disparate information into a coherent whole, I began zooming in on selected itineraries. Here I will just sketch out the first phases of this project which have already been described at greater length in an article published in Leonardo. [1]

1. Paris-Réseau at the Paris Video Library

a) A virtual map of Paris

It was originally planned as a five-day event at the Video Library in Paris, a virtual map of the city drawn by moving bodies in real time. It was to show the itineraries of Art-Réseaux group members as they left the Video Library in the center of Paris (where the event was taking place) to go home toward the periphery. Each "reporter" would take a video or still camera to chart his or her trip; when he/she arrived home he/she would digitize and send the pictures by modem to the "ground crew" at the Video Library who would then integrate them into an interactive animation.

b) Paris as a network: memory maps

Before the event even took place this original idea was expanded. Elaborating on the network theme, I asked each member of Art-Réseaux (="Art Networks") [2]

to describe the places in Paris where he or she used to live as well as his/her most frequent destinations at the time. If that person had any old snapshots of these places, these would serve as a departure point. The itineraries would then be photographed --interpreted-- by someone else. The soundtrack would consist of interviews with the protagonists, as they pored over the "photographer's" pictures.

The approach was somewhat anthropological. How do we remember these everyday itineraries from the past? How does someone else go about photographing them? The resulting map also reflects our social histories. It was Flaubert who suggested this approach to me: in the " Sentimental Education " he represented his characters' social mobility, their ascensions or declines, by having them move from one neighborhood in Paris to another.

2. Paris Réseau goes on-line

Organizing the archives after the Video Library experience, I saw ways of enlarging the project's scope.

a) In order to transcend the physical boundaries of Paris and the limits of documentary, I used the all-text format offered on Arts Wire in late 1994 to post descriptions of our itineraries, asking members of the American network if they had seen one of us in Paris. They were invited to search their memories (if they had been to Paris) or to imagine fictive encounters. On the whole there was very little feedback. However network artist Judy Malloy, always a pioneer, did happen to sight Isabelle in a car sporting a dashboard web server on the German autobahn some time in the twenty-first century.

b) At the same time, several itineraries culled from literary sources were photographed and added to the archives: descriptions by Restif de la Bretonne, Nerval, Breton, Aragon, Duchamp, Hemingway, Queneau, Perec and others allowed us to imagine meetings in the same space between Parisian pedestrians living several centuries apart.

At this point I had accumulated an enormous mass of data: about 150 itineraries, most of which I had photographed myself. The presentation of this information however was too simplistic, too predictable. When you clicked on an itinerary, you invariably viewed a slide show evoking the atmosphere of each place as it looks today. The comments each person made were often rather disappointing, due partly to technical constraints. Since I was digitizing the sound directly using the computer microphone (a Macintosh LC), the statements had to be very short. People tended to repeat what they had already written. When I realized they needed time to elaborate on the original memory, I began to use a cassette recorder to tape longer sessions; the material gathered could then be edited afterward.

3. Elaboration of the original material: the Paris Réseau/Art-Réseaux CD-Rom

The next step was to further refine the material already gathered to shape it into something perceptible, comprehensible. We were aiming for what Duchamp has called a "transsubstantiation of inert matter" into art. Or to put it more modestly, we decided to make a CD-Rom.

Several people participated in this work, including two who had not been part of the original group. [3]

We chose to focus on a few itineraries, each of which would be given a more extensive treatment. Each person chose one and prepared an interactive scenario for it. Instead of following a general plan, as previously, each author was entirely responsible for structuring the itinerary he or she had chosen. So each one was set up differently, with its own rules and method of navigation.

For the first time too, we had a computer specialist to program the entire work, so the rest of us could concentrate on imagining what was to happen and when without being quite as limited by our lack of technical expertise. Up till then I had done all the programming myself in a very primitive way.

This piece was more of an experiment than a finished work. It marked a turning point in that here we began to move away from our original concern with process to address the issue of creating an object, of modeling reality and structuring it into a work which condensed or elaborated on an idea. This bcame more evident as we prepared a prototype to be shown in Brazil which would have to stand alone. We would no longer be there to show it to people.

4. The Paris Réseau / Paris Network Web site

As I became more interested in working this material into some kind of whole, I began exploring different ways of linking images, sound and text, with a view to developing a more effective screen-based interface which would offer users different possibilities for interaction. Since then the piece has incorporated more and more fictional elements. The first experimental work I realized alone was a very simply structured web site. The city was designed as a series of juxtaposed fragments: fragments of body parts, fragments of texts, fragments of itineraries you could explore by clicking on words. Sometimes the links were terms which appeared to be significant, such as place names, sometimes not. Why not follow the word "three "? Three knuckles, three times, three o'clock, three husky fellows...

5. The CD-Rom publication

The next step was "Paris Réseau / Paris Network", a sort of multimedia "artist's book" which will be published as an interactive CD-Rom. [4]

Here work and process come together. The object itself is a multiple, calling for multiple experiences.

The main screen shows Paris from four points of view. As you turn around in a spiral movement, going from one zone to another you seem to move in toward the subject: an aerial view of the whole city, a park, a courtyard, a billboard poster, but as you get closer you begin to lose your bearings, the image becomes less and less recognisable.

In each zone, you explore the city differently. Four entrances, four ways of looking, four structural devices. The same memories, sometimes even the same images can appear in other contexts, which transform them. You will always have, even as you move around in one of the zones, a fragmentary view, evoking a vast, more complete "hors-champ", which always seems out of reach. Sometimes the page layout accentuates this sensation, through vignetting or framing effects. And if you enter, it is as if by breaking in, by forcing the lock.

Each of the four zones has its own system of navigation. In one the focus is more on perceiving (perceptual effects: for example a "flicker film"), in another you are asked to imagine things you don't see (you hear sounds which may not seem to relate to the images), the third allows you to explore and the fourth to tinker with (transform) the objects shown on the screen.

a. Itineraries (the net)

The first entrance, the map, or the net, leads to six narratives with minimal interactivity. Each itinerary comprises a loop so as to describe an eternal return. It is based on the Surrealists' idea that objective details in the city echo our unconscious state of mind. [5]

We keep going back, retracing our footprints, returning to the same places, like Rest if de la Bretonne, the eighteenth century diarist, circling round and round the Ile Saint Louis:

" I was so very unhappy! Instead of trying to amuse myself, I fixed the pain; I was afraid the instant would escape from me; I engraved it in the stone! Far from going about my ordinary business, I was overcome with grief, devoid of energy: my outings were limited to sad strolls around the Ile Saint-Louis. Every time I stopped on the parapet, reflecting a painful idea, my hand traced the date and the idea which had just affected me. I moved away then, shrouded in the darkness of the night, whose silence and solitude had a horror I liked. "

However each time we return to a place, our experience of it is different. Is it we who have changed, or it? "We enter into the rivers, which always remain the same, however waters and other waters always arrive." (Heraclitus). One day Restif found that his wife and daughter had preceeded him, erasing the graffiti he had made the day before...

For this section I interpreted my own and several other people's itineraries. Two invited artists who teach at my university, Anne Charbonneau and Anna Guillo, represented their own daily trips from home to school.

The interface for this zone shows an animated sequence of colored dots representing each itinerary on the map. To get from one animation to another without returning to this map, you can move the mouse toward one of the edges of the screen. In this way you can create new transversal itineraries which connect points taken from the different sequences or itineraries.

We keep going back, retracing our footprints, returning to the same places, like Restif de la Bretonne, the eighteenth century diarist, circling round and round the Ile Saint-Louis:

" I was so very unhappy! Instead of trying to amuse myself, I fixed the pain; I was afraid the instant would escape from me; I engraved it in the stone! Far from going about my ordinary business, I was overcome with grief, devoid of energy: my outings were limited to sad strolls around the Île Saint-Louis. Every time I stopped on the parapet, reflecting a painful idea, my hand traced the date and the idea which had just affected me. I moved away then, shrouded in the darkness of the night, whose silence and solitude had a horror I liked. "

However each time we return to a place, our experience of it is different. Is it we who have changed, or it? &laqno; We enter into the rivers, which always remain the same, however waters and other waters always arrive. » (Heraclitus). One day Restif found that his wife and daughter had preceeded him, erasing the graffiti he had made the day before...

For this section I interpreted my own and several other people's itineraries. Two artists from the Université de Paris I, Anne Charbonneau and Anna Guilló, were also invited to represent their own daily trips from home to work.

The interface for this zone shows an animated sequence of colored dots representing each itinerary on the map. To get from one animation to another without returning to this map, you can move the mouse toward one of the edges of the screen. In this way you can create new transversal itineraries which connect points taken from the different sequences or itineraries.

b. Jogging in the Roquette Square (the maze)

Gilbertto is jogging in the Roquette Park. Where is that? In the prison courtyard or in the public gardens? Daffodils and concrete, narrow sinuous paths almost entirely walled in. In the distance you can hear, but not see, children playing. Other sounds are present intermittently : a runner's feet pounding the pavement, leaves crunching underfoot, a girl's voice scanding a nursery rhyme.

When I went to photograph this park, my first impression was of a rather forbidding space, in spite of the emerald green lawns, winding paths, and artfully laid out flower beds. There were concrete walls and iron fences, and the multi-leveled garden was complex enough to get lost in. Later I discovered that it had been built on the former site of the "Petite Roquette", a prison for women which was closed in the early seventies, although the only structure actually left from that period was the stone entrance with its guardhouse windows.

This made me imagine a set of characters the jogger could meet as he made his way through the maze-like park. Two of them are inmates who cope with being shut in. Another is a little girl telling tall tales as she climbs on the monkey bars at the far end of the park. The fourth character is the jogger himself.

You, the viewer, adopt his point of view, choosing your own rhythmn.You can either "gobble up asphalt" (as the French expression goes) as you click the mouse rapidly in one of the four cardinal directions (forward-reverse-right-left), in an attempt to get an overall impression in the shortest possible time, or move at a slower pace. If you keep clicking rapidly, the statements made by the protagonists will overlap; each time you come to a new sound it will cut off the previous one. In this way you get bits and pieces of their conversations (as you might if you were jogging in the park), whereas if you advance more slowly, you can eavesdrop, waiting till a sound has finished playing before going on. If you return to a place you have already visited you won't necessarily hear the same sound, sometimes it is even another character who is speaking. Although the entire soundtrack was realized both in French and in English, you can't choose one language and shut out the other; a given text might be heard in either one. Sometimes if you go back to an image you can hear the same (or nearly the same) statement in the other language. In fact each picture &laqno; contains » a series of sounds (between two and twenty), only one of which, chosen randomly, will play at each passage.

I wanted to set up a polyphonic structure in which sounds and images complete each other. This is why the statements themselves are often fragmentary, parts of stories or dialogues between characters. The different characters echo one anothers' remarks, each according to her own perspective.

Time passes as you explore the Roquette. During the day there is no way out. As dusk approaches the joyous Sunday afternoon crowd gives way to individual voices. Here Roquette inmates lie in their beds after lights out, discussing vacation plans. Summertime is approaching. One girl imagines a Sunday outing to the Fontainebleau forest while another recounts childhood trips to Tunisia and Guadeloupe (where a four-inch long cockroach flew into her face). Everyone evokes with equanimity the prospect of Friday night traffic jams on the expressways going out of Paris.

Night falls over the garden. Vague silhouettes appear here and there: bushes? park benches? Occasionally a prisoner cries out in her sleep. No one would dream of calling the night warden; she'll just have to sweat it out. Elsewhere, on the playground perhaps, a 4-year-old girl tells a story: "Little Brown Bear is afraid of the dark. I think I'll turn out the light anyway, he'll be afraid anyway. All right, said the Mommy, you turn it off. He turned off the light, and then he shut the door, and then he left Little Brown Bear all alone."

At various times you can view animations by clicking the middle of the screen. They bring a new rhythmn: most of them replay automatically, looping back to the beginning until you decide to go back to the park. They develop associated themes such as the &laqno; panopticon », a centralized system of surveillance first theorized by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, whose statements are put into perspective by tongue-in-cheek renderings of contemporary &laqno; panoptic devices ».

c. A Voyage Around My Courtyard

"He who looks in through an open window never sees as many things as he who looks at a closed window." (C. Baudelaire)

"It's very characteristic that it be the very intimate and very mysterious influence that the weather exercises on men that should become the subject of their most vacuous conversations" (Walter Benjamin).

While the rain falls in the courtyard, a drizzle at times which can turn into a flood, or a driving rain which weakens after a while gradually becoming a monotonous background noise, voices imagine different outings, everything we could do today (it's Sunday) but probably won't, since we remain at home. Perhaps we need courage to affront the "rotten weather" (rust, mildew, chipped paint, "vanities"). Colors : every nuance of gray, the courtyard walls were originally painted pink and pastel green, they now reveal the dirty tones of concrete underneath, the surface sometimes wet, sometimes dry. Time is dilated, the weather freakish.

The first image, which shows a Parisian interior overlooking a courtyard, contains a number of "clickable" elements: two windows, bookshelves, a globe, a wire sculpture, a small chair and table... A click on one type of object modifies the picture on the screen, on another it makes a new image appear, on a third type it causes a sound or a video to play. We hear bit and pieces of monologues, people remembering places they used to go, others discussing current movies which could be seen, exhibitions which could be visited ("but there are so many of them, and they are all interesting!" protests a woman's voice), messages on answering machines... The view from the windows shifts: we're looking out over the city of São Paulo, or hearing locusts sing as we take a turn in a garden somewhere south of Paris. Sometimes we approach the window, and open it to see the rain falling, the shutters batting in the wind. When each of these events has taken place, or we have chosen to stop it, we return inside once more, facing the closed windows. It is night. Everything is quiet.

d.Erasing a Billboard (the palimpsest)

The first screen is a photograph chosen at random among the twelve details of a billboard picture, so each time this "local menu" is opened, it will look different. To explore this zone the viewer must erase the image by holding down the mouse and moving the cursor over the screen. If he continues to rub a particular area even after the first picture has been gummed out, he'll begin to erase the second image in the series, which then reveals the third. If he keeps rubbing in the same place, he'll wear a hole all the way down to the last image in the series. Thus several images can be present simultaneously, like layers in a palimpsest. When the entire screen has been erased down to the bottom layer, a new fragment appears for the viewer to explore.

The subject of the billboard itself is minimal: three young women wearing bras stand together; one is looking down, two are looking at the viewer; all three are framed in a medium shot (from the head to the waist). Each detail covers up a series of other images, each series develops a different theme: for example, one ("two's company, three's a crowd") studies the implications of the models' relative positions in the picture; another embroiders on the theme of vanities, another develops associations around the idea of a hidden wound (in one spot the poster is ripped open and through the gaping hole we can see the wooden framework behind it). In still another the poster turns into a &laqno; living » character while real people, scanned, x-rayed or sonogrammed, become images.

6. Content or contents?

The last part of my paper was to deal with some theoretical questions raised by this project. Due to lack of time, I won't be able to do much more than pose them.

Is it possible to articulate a heterogeneous and continually changing set of images into a unified esthetic statement? Can a structure be found which would be sturdy enough to convey a strong artistic position, yet flexible enough to integrate new data capable of perturbing or modifying this point of view? What role is actually played by digital and electronic technologies?

If I were to begin to answer at least this one, I would point out that I have not yet found a structure which doesn't need to be overhauled periodically. New data constantly transforms the whole to which it is added. Digital technologies both simplify and complicate the process. By remembering everything, every little thing, they exacerbate the palimpsest effect. As we continue collaging together documents from different sources, different periods, bits and pieces of older files sit next to recent additions, original creations get mixed up with borrowed imagery, reproductions of paintings blend in with photographs from advertisements or comic strip drawings. It becomes very difficult to establish any sort of order, even chronological. File creation dates can be erroneous or misleading; when two or more files are combined, they become something new.

Does the city "inform" (give form to) the archive or does the archive inform the city (insofar as it shapes my experience of it) ? Is one a container and the other its content(s)? In what ways do (digital) images shape the content (our perception) of the city ? In what ways do networks, electronic or not, transform not only the content of individual art works, but the very nature of art itself?

Since this project was begun, the cranes and bulldozers have moved on and the Grande Bibliotheque in Paris is finally open to the public, road construction crews have put in over 50 kilometers of bike lanes (maybe a hundred by now), Isabelle has moved again, taking her mannequins with her (she designs stage costumes), Gilbertto has gone back to Brazil... All the while, Paris-Réseau continues its sedimentation, accumulating like Borges' labyrinth, "infinite series of times...a growing, vertiginous network of convergent, divergent and parallel times".

Notes

1. K. O'Rourke, "Paris Réseau: Paris Network », in Leonardo Vol.29 N° 1, 1996, pp.51-57.

2. The members at that time were Christophe Le François, Marie-Dominique Wicker, Isabelle Millet, Gilbertto Prado, Michel Suret-Canale and myself.

3. The authors of this work were Christophe Le François, Isabelle Millet, Patrick Bazin, Marie-Paule Cassagne and myself. It was programmed by Yves Cothouit.

4. I realized this work myself except for the two itineraries created by Anne Charbonneau and Anna Guilló. Yves Cothouit and Yassine Rafii (LocoMediaDub) were responsible for the programming. I used drawings made by Clara Teyssèdre and photographs made by Elvire Bastendorff, Sophie Coiffier, Anna Guilló, Christophe Le François, Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki, Isabelle Millet, Gilbertto Prado, Marie-Dominique Wicker and myself. The sound track features the voices and stories of Elvire Bastendorff, Giliane Bordère, Sophie Coiffier, Benjamin Dubillard-Teyssèdre, Anna Guilló, Maria Klonaris, Christophe Le François, Isabelle Millet, Gilbertto Prado, Anne Teyssèdre, Clara Teyssèdre, Marie-Dominique Wicker, Katia Zecevic and myself. It will be published by the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches en Arts Plastiques (Université de Paris 1).

5. This in turn reflects Freud's concept of "screen memory".

Bibligraphy

O'Rourke, Karen, "Art, réseaux, télécommunications", in Mutations de l'image : Art Cinéma/ Vidéo/ Ordinateur (edited by Maria Klonaris et Katerina Thomadaki) Paris, Astarti, 1994, pp.52-57.

O'Rourke, Karen, Untitled article, Co-incidences n° 11 "Art et communication technologique" coordonné par Mario Costa, Aix-en-Provence, pp. 70-73

O'Rourke, Karen, "Paris Réseau" (text and illustration) in Epiphaneia, N°1 (Recherches en esthétique et technologie), pp.42-43, Naples, Italie

O'Rourke, Karen,, "Paris Réseau", catalogue de l'exposition Art Tecnologia, Arte no século XXI : a humanização das tecnologias, Museu de Arte Contemporãnea (MAC-USP), São Paulo, Brésil.

O'Rourke, Karen, "Paris Réseau: Paris Network", Leonardo : Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 29, N° 1(M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.), pp.51-57.

O'Rourke, Karen, "The Paris Réseau Project", Acts of the ISEA Conference, Chicago (to be published)

O'Rourke, Karen, "Art et communication: pratiques et problématiques" , Cadernos Pos Graduacaos, Campinas, Brazil, 1999,

Prado, Gilbertto, "As Redes artistico-telematicas", Imagens, Campinas (Brésil), Unicamp, N°3, December, 1994, pp.41-44.

Prado, Gilbertto, "Arte e Tecnologia: Produções Recentes No Evento 'A Arte No Século XXI'" et "Dispositivos Interativos: Imagens em Redes Telematicas", A Arte No Seculo XXI (org. D. Domingues), São Paulo, UNESP, 1997.

Prado, Gilbertto, "Cronologia de Experiências Artísticas nas Redes de Telecomunicações", Trilhas, Campinas 6(1): 7-9, julho-dezembro 1997, pp.89-93, 97-98.

Prado, Gilbertto, "Estudo e Criação de sites de Arte Na Rede Internet", IX Encontro Nacional da ANPAP, ANAIS vol.2, 1997.