Perl is My Medium—An Interview with Lisa Jevbratt

Alex Galloway: Your work "1:1" (http://c5corp.com/1to1) was recently acquired by the Altoids Collection and is now owned by the New Museum in New York. How did the piece come about?

Lisa Jevbratt: 1:1 came out of a project by C5 for "Shock of the View" at the Walker Center. We realized for that project that we needed a database of IP addresses. We need a numerical way of accessing websites. You can't just pick a number, an IP address, at random, and see if that address corresponds to a web server because it will take forever to find something. So then I started to make this database, and realized that the database itself was interesting.

AG: Do you do all your programming yourself?

LJ: I do all my programming myself. I've never collaborated with a programmer. There's an enormous shortage of programmers too, so I don't know if I could fine one if I needed one. For me, that's my medium. Perl is my medium. I love Perl. I wonder why I fought all these years to make an interesting picture or an interesting installation—I'm such a romantic when it comes to these things. And then I found Perl and it all fell into place. I recall something that Friedrich Kittler said once in an interview that to understand contemporary culture you have to know one natural language and one artificial language. I was excited because I thought to myself "I understand Kittler!" It's so true. It's disappointing to me when I see artists who think that they are only responsible for the "visual" elements, and then have a programmer do the programming. But programming *is* the language. For me it's not every interesting to have other people producing my code—other people can help me with that, but I have to know it too.

AG: So a robot makes the art for you?

LJ: The *system* is the art, not the output, not the visual screen, and not the code. I want to let the data express itself in the most beautiful possible way.

AG: Is your work political?

LJ: Well yes, I think so. I think it's important to show the back drop or the infrastructure of the network. To empower people, I think. To show people that the Web is not about corporate web pages; it's not about pornography. But that it's a very open environment that you can use. In that sense I'm very utopian—political in a utopian fashion. It's important to act as a counter weight. You can do something utopian that shows the possibilities. So much of the work on the web uses it to define one's own personal identity, focusing more on the individual. Which is a strange thing to me because if you look at the network protocols it's all about the little autonomous parts where each packet knows it's own way across the network. It's not a singularity, it's not about identifying one entity. Some years ago people were very concerned with identity politics and the Internet and how you can find and express yourself or selves there. Luckily that does not seem to be a major issue anymore. When I did the "Stillman project" (http://cadre.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/stillman) it was very much about showing that it's not about *you*. What is interesting is to look at what everybody is doing, the collective behavior. So I think my work is political in that sense. And then with "1:1," I didn't even care about the individual at all. It's just a network. I only care about the network, nothing else. There's no narrative. There's no attempt at an expression outside the network. This, I think is political. The Internet was developed as an autonomous technology that works by itself, it's non- hierarchical, and so on. But then you have a nation (the US) that's completely absorbed by the dream of the individual. There's a contradiction there. It's import to continue to show the possibilities of the network, the way the protocols work, as the part of the network that makes it interesting. The human factor in the network—the corporations, the government, people wanting to express themselves— makes it not so interesting. Someone here, in this country, came up with this infrastructure which goes completely against the American dream in all kinds of ways, and I think it's extremely important to continue to focus on that. So that's why I think it's political—I'm *not* making my homepage.

AG: What's your favorite color?

LJ: Right now it's bright green. Just plain green—like "255" green.... You know, 00FF00.

http://www.c5corp.com
http://cadre.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/
http://c5corp.com/1to1/
http://cadre.sjsu.edu/jevbratt/stillman/