Download PDF - Institute of Network Cultures

Below is part 1 of the conversation we got to hear between Geert Lovink and Natalie
Bookchin, and adapted to include further information.
G: Youʼre teaching at CalArts, you worked in the 90ʼs with the internet, developed
games, and now suddenly youʼre working with online video. How did you stumble
into this?
N: I had also been very involved in thinking about online space as a site not only to
make work but to distribute and exhibit it.
In the 90s I had been working, distributing, and exhibiting my work online. In 2005, I
began to find the Internet too noisy and too crowded, and wanted to return to offline
space in my work. I began to collect images from private security webcams that I found
through a glitch in Googleʼs search engine technology which picked up thousands of
webcams regardless of whether or not they are intended to be public. The cameras
offered an unusual view of the contemporary global landscape mediated through
surveillance technology. I became interested in depicting the world as it was described
by the technology, and so rather than looking at the recording devices in the landscape, I
looked through the cameras, drawing attention to the formal elements of this
perspective, its odd and awkward angles of view and composition, its often fixed
perspective, the limited tonal range, the dirty lens, and the distance from and limited
contact or lack of relationship between the camera — which has no operator present —
and its subject. From this material I developed, Network Movies, a series of videos and
video installations that I made between 2005 and 2007, where I sampled data flows of
images from webcams from around the world to create portraits of global landscapes.
Limited bandwidth and cheap cameras produced jumpy, mechanical motion and grainy,
low-resolution images that revealed their technological conditions and were reminiscent
of early cinema. I began to make installations and videos offline, in order to provide a
more embodied experience, absent in the distracted online space –with its small screen
and potential for multitasking.
G: Your video work that uses online footage started with one installation didnʼt it?
When was the first one?
N: The first piece I made with YouTube footage was trip – a 63-minute single-channel
video I completed in 2008, in which I documented a trip around the world using clips I
culled from YouTube. From these clips, I pieced together a trip around the world from
the point of view of tourists, human rights workers, locals, soldiers, and many others.
The first point perspective put viewers in the position of a continually changing figure of
the traveler, driving from tourist destination, across borders, and through war zones.
G: Itʼs a gallery installation piece with the look and feel of a collaborative global
road movie. There you have your first experiences of making databases, how you
select the videos and put them together. Letʼs talk more about your approach.
Now that weʼve seen Laid Off, it appears that it really must have been an
enormous amount of work. It looks very complex. Technically, how did you do
this? The syncing?
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