NetSnake

" The symbol of the snake is commonly linked with transcendence, because it was traditionally a creature of the underworld - and thus a mediator between one way of life and another."

"The snake was a symbol of energy - spontaneous, creative energy - and of immortality."

Our guide, Malaki, is is pointing at the painting of the snake. A long undulating red-brown wave against the sandy rock wall, it is the largest painting in the cave. The ancient painting has the body of snake, but appears to have the head of an impala. He explains the current theories about the painting. The snake is a depiction of a dream figure, as seen by the artist/shaman in a drug induced trance, then recorded on the wall. Malaki pauses in his lecture, not endorsing or rejecting the theory, then proceeds to tell us a story from his life.

Malaki was waiting for a bus, outside his village in the Matobos Hills, when he heard a sound. He recognized the sound as the distress call of an impala. Thinking the animal is caught in a snare, he runs through the forest toward the sound, hoping to free the impala before it is killed or maimed by the snare. He pulls up short as he finds a baby impala, firmly in the grip of an enormous python, the coils of the snake already encircling the terrified animal. It is the largest snake Malaki has ever seen. Fascinated, he watches the drama unfold as the life is crushed out of impala. He leaves to keep his appointment, but returns several hours later. The snake, now uncoiled and stretched across the forest floor, has swallowed most of the impala. Only the head of the impala remains visible, protruding from the mouth of the snake.

Malaki turns to the wall of the cave and points at the painting of a snake with the head of an impala. Like a switch closing a circuit, a connection is made across time and across cultures. An electric current of recognition, identification, and understanding flows from Malaki’s pointing finger, through the heart of a Bushman dead four thousand years, through my eyes and now, into the Net.

Here is Malaki, the Storyteller, keeping alive an oral tradition, and telling a story to tourists, to entertain, to enlighten, to explain. Telling a story about something different, and interesting and amazing that he has seen and wanting, needing, to tell others. "Listen!" he is saying.  "I have seen this amazing sight. I want to tell you what I have seen." And here, four thousand years ago, stood a Bushman, suddenly alive, who walked in the same forest, and had seen something different and interesting and amazing and wanted, needed to show others. "Look!" He is saying. "I saw something that filled me with wonder and amazement, and I want to show you what I have seen." He told his story in the medium of his time -- on the wall of a cave. And I, by listening to Malaki’s story, can see the Bushman’s story, and now I am writing a story about them both on the digital wall of the Web.

I have spent a month in Africa. I have seen interesting and amazing things.I want to tell you about them.

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone wants an audience for their work. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes. This basic human motivation is a primary source of fuel pouring on the firestorm that is the World Wide Web. Content is indeed king. But you don’t need Disney, or Time-Warner, or NBC to create content. The web has annihilated all barriers to creating and publishing content. Where there are no barriers to entry, and "entry" satisfies simple and basic human motivations, there simply can be no limit to supply. As a result, content supply already exceeds content demand. We are awash in content. The Net directories and Net indices cannot keep up with the content being created. It may still be possible to claim that high quality content remains scarce on the net, but that case is becoming increasingly hard to make.

Colloquy

Harlan looks at this page and says "I have always maintained that websites are today's cave paintings." He digs through his e-mail archives and sends me this note where he documents a discussion between himself and a confused visitor to the Web Wall:

Two cave people are sitting in a small valley in the south of France, about thirty thousand years ago. Their conversation goes like this:

"You know, you've been spending a lot of time down in the cave lately, so I went to see what you were doing, and I saw those things you've put up on the walls down there. Why do you make pictures of horses, when we can just look at them? you want to see a buffalo? look there's one right there!"

"Hey, chill, I'm creating a timeless expression of what it means to be human. I am making a stylized, partially abstract impression of my reality, as a way to interpret my existence, and perhaps make a statement that will live on after I am gone, something that people thirty thousand years from now will experience, and come to know me, and my time, through my work."

"You're out of your mind! You are just taking colored dirt and spreading it on the walls, look, even I can do that! In fact, I'll show you something, I'll take some of this dirt in my mouth and spit it out on my hand as I press my hand on the wall and I get a painting of my hand!"

"Cool, I'm going to go spit paint a bunch of hands down on the walls right now."

Now we go to a cafe in Midtown Manhattan in the early part of this century, where two cave people are sitting:

" I went up to MOMA yesterday and they opened up this gallery showing photography"

" Photography? In a museum? I mean it's not art is it? You just buy a camera and mix some chemicals, and that's it right? It's all a mechanical process that has no humanity, or personal vision, right? So who were they showing?"

"Some guys named Man Ray, and Steiglitz, and Steichen, and Adams. You know, just a bunch of technicians that bought a box."

So about 3/4 quarters of century later some cave people are sitting around their modems and one says:

>I've been looking through some of the new OTIS sites and so I launched
>Photoshop, Painter etc. trying to find some clearer understanding of what
>computer art is. This is what I'm thinking:
>Although computers can help you do everything from pastels to fractals, I
>think that the product that you get from "computer generated" art like
>fractals/filters is counter-productive to the artist, unless the piece is
>rather arbitrary (he doesn't care if he decides the particulars).
>Why not just do it by hand?

Well, the computer doesn't do anything, until I make it do it. I consider working on the computer doing it by hand. I also do not refer to computer art as "computer generated art", in the same way that I do not refer to oil painting as "linseed oil, ground pigment, and fiber brush generated" art. By convention we accept that the linseed oil, ground pigment, and fiber brush, are at the will of the artist, but when it comes to computer art, the computer is "the man behind the curtain" REALLY making everything happen. When I look at the Otis gallery, I can identify the work that people do, by the style of the image. We all use essentially the same tools, yet I can usually spot a Maier, Swartzbeck, Stastny, Mel, etc. practically immediately. Is it the computer that creates these separate, and unique, identifiable images?

>The computer is really effective as a collage tool. appropriation; the
>continuation of surrealism, post-mod associative stuff. But what if you
>don't like that style ?

For better or worse every age gets the art it deserves. You don't have to like it.

>I don't mean to be complaining, I just want to understand the
>medium a little better.

So do I, and that's what I attempt to do every time I sit down in front of my box with photoshop and my other progs. I think that I am making some progress.

Harlan Wallach
Traditional Computer Artist

© Copyright Mike Wallach, and Harlan Wallach 1995,1996 all rights reserved.