Art in the Age of the Mobile Phone
Text Messages from Finland - An Interview with Marita Liulia
By Geert Lovink
The Finnish multi-media artist Marita Liulia
once described her country of origin as a one idea nation.
With one company, Nokia, now bigger than the Finnish state,
with one giant telecommunications firm, Sonera, and one media
company owning the only daily national newspaper, the Helsingin
Sanomat, with its one art critic, etc. etc. Having been isolated
and colonized in previous centuries, being squeezed being
Sweden and Russia, Finland is now going through its Golden
Age, with an unprecedented prosperity, at least for those
who own Nokia stocks or work for Nokia, which is an increasing
number of people. The process of urbanization and post-industrialization
is vibrant, with people and resources concentrating on the
South coast. Finland as a member of the European Union will
introduce the Euro. It even has an growing population of immigrants
and refugees. But Finland has still only five million citizens
who continue to suffer from cold, dark, lonely winters and
celebrate the long warm days in summer. Population wise it
does not amount to more than North London, as one critic used
to say. Or may be Greater Berlin. That is a small number of
people for a country of this size. How do these demographic,
political and economic facts effect the cultural climate in
this country? I met Marita Liulia briefly in 1996 and got
to know her better during my stay in Finland of altogether
two months in 1999 when I was working on the Temporary Media
Lab at the Kiasma museum (http://www.kiasma.fi). During the
winter of 2000 we did an online interview which developed
step by step into the collaborative text below.
GL: How do the economic and geographic condition
determine your work? It seems that you are being thrown back
and forth between the village type of cultural policies on
the one hand, and the unique opportunities of a five years
long state grant for artists on the other? Please introduce
us to your version of Finland.
ML: Finland is a nation where only one idea
rules at a given time. We are just 5 million (and not growing).
Our history is a long story of self defense. The Russian bear
has always been a threat, but the Swedes are not so loved
either. Finnish are not conquerors but defenders by nature.
So we turn the new millennium page as a pure white, deep clean
and nature loving, extremely well organized country with straightforward,
rather equal people who just have one big problem: long and
depressing winters. Maybe that is why we have such a bad records
in committing suicide. Since the Second World War Finland
has been culturally surprisingly Anglo-American. Before WWII
the third language after Finnish and Swedish, which was compulsory,
was German. Now as we are member of the EU and our standard
of living and degree of democracy is in top league worldwide
we could loosen a bit our "only one idea at a time"
policy. After the war we had proportionally the largest migration
from the countryside to the cities in Europe. Spiritually
Finnish culture has not yet arrived from the countryside to
the city. Our cultural people give look backwards. Just think
about those nostalgic Aki Kaurismaki films (the last one,
"Juha" was a silent one!). The 50s are still considered
to be the Golden Era of our culture. It doesn't mean we don't
have good and original artists. It is just difficult to find
(popular) art connected to contemporary urban life.
New media haven't (yet) brought very much
change. It is surprising. Finnish are not all that technophile
as they are made to be. They are just keen users. Exactly
as you told me about that other techno nation - Japan. The
generation which will slowly change this attitude is still
in its early 20s. But we are coming there. Mentally I am fitting
better into that generation than in my own. Therefore my audience
in Finland is rather limited. In recent years I have mainly
focused on issues in contemporary (fe)male roles and identities.
My work is not tied to Finland per se. I could have done it
anywhere. Actually I did. I am constantly on the move. At
the end of the 80s I was very frustrated about the art and
media world (I worked years as a journalist/photographer and
traveler) and - more than anything else -about my own ideas
of arts and the media. I grew up with Marx, Hegel, Kant, Dostoyevski,
Marcuse, Sartre, Nietzsche - thus in a company of rather gloomy
men. Plus artist bohemians, from Baudelaire to Burroughs.
Very inspiring for a young and passionate woman artist, isn't
it? Late 80s I started to study postmodern and gender theories
with great appetite and ended up combining my old skills to
new ideas to new technologies. It was a moment in my life
when I finished writing the concept of the "Jackpot"
CD-ROM installation in 1991. After discussing with technicians
I suddenly realized there is no other way - I had to start
to work with computers. I used computers in the 80s already
while making sound and light installations. By the early nineties
I had started to direct a team of professionals. Production
of large multimedia programs started. Now I have a fourth
one in process, new wireless platforms like WAP.
GL: Both of your CD-ROMs, Ambitious Bitch
and Son of a Bitch, deal with (female and male) sexuality.
ML: Sexuality is just one of the issues including
changes in feminine and masculine identities, excerpts of
recent discussions about (fe)male gender roles, psychoanalysis,
social relationships, biological discoveries and fashion.
Just to mention some. I am interested in changes. And I am
fascinated by the ways people express themselves, by words,
by body language, by thoughts, by clothes.
GL: I know you do not like to be identified
as a feminist, because of its limitations concerning the fixed
and narrow identity politics which go with this term. Still,
it would be justified to say that sexual politics of art and
new media are playing a dominant role in your work. Would
you consider yourself a cyber-feminist?
ML: Me a cyber-feminist? Why not! It depends
what you mean by this. Does it mean one is a feminist? For
me it simply means a person who wants equality. Even in cyberspace.
Let's add cyberspace to the list indeed (laughter) Some feminism
is needed there, too.
GL: How are these issues played out in Finland?
Your country is indeed well known for its strong women, and
perhaps also for its slightly tragic and disaster prone male
culture. How do you turn your explicit theoretical and political
(psycho)analyses into a sexual esthetics?
ML: The field of the new media developed simultaneously
with the high tide of feminism. Lots of (young) women got
involved - expecting to avoid patriarchal hierarchies typical
of the "old media" - like film. I considered studying
film in 80s but quickly realized I will be 50 before the guys
in power will allow me to make my first feature film - until
that I would have also run out of ideas, I thought. None of
my female film director friends ever made a feature film.
In the multimedia nobody knew so much how to play boss. These
days I think a female director is not a strange creature from
outer space...but you have to be "a bulldozer",
as you put it once. No mistakes allowed. Since this promising
start the number of female students in technology has declined
rapidly. The field of the new media is heavily engineer-oriented.
Even in Finland where the whole state (our new president is
a woman), the bank system and the cultural sector are run
by women, we have to be worried again about the fact that
girls do not find information technology a very seductive
perspective. I have worked together with engineers for about
12 years now and I take care that my teams are build up so
that both sexes feel comfortable and safe. It is a hard, sometimes
full time job but I enjoy it. The more the people are mixed,
the less prejudices there are. When I did the research work
and wrote the manuscript for the SOB CD-ROM (Son of a Bitch)
I wondered how I could realize it in rather homophobic Finland.
If a woman creates a work about men with such an outrageous
name, the consequences are obvious. I took a risk and operated
with sense of humor. I guess in Nordic countries women can
afford to laugh about dumb blondes jokes, but male roles are
surprisingly rigid. Male identity is not something to poke
fun at. It is possible that the timing for SOB was wrong.
It was too early. I had to do the work anyway. In general
sexual and gender identities have been a popular issue in
Nordic (cyber) art and culture over the last ten years. But
not so in popular culture. If I compare Holland and Finland,
our popular cultures are quite apart as far as sexual/gender
issues are concerned.
GL: Throughout your art career you keep coming
back to your own body, visualizing it, taking pictures of
it, morphing it through PhotoShop, dressing up, metamorphosing
into other faces, other personas. What makes you so fascinated
by this? Your biography seems to be full of big changes. You
have gone from journalism, through performances and installation
works to multimedia, and now onto the Web. With projects becoming
ever larger in scale. How would you describe these phases,
this drive to move onwards, the cycles in your works which
leads you into a creative crisis in order to reach the next,
higher level? Were does this capacity to change, to transform
into somebody else originates from?
ML: This is a very simple and therefore tricky
question. It is curiosity which is driving me. I want to see
what is behind things. I have always felt that the only real
limits I have are body and time. I have spend my childhood
in hospitals reading and making plans about what I was going
to do if I would survive. When I got better, around the age
of fifteen, my hungriness to life didn't know any bounds.
I wanted to see and experience as much as possible. I might
call that my artistic-intellectual role as a hunter of hidden
meanings behind self-evident truths. I am constantly playing
around with ideas and testing them. I play around also with
myself. In a way my body is material, a model and it is always
available. By changing styles and characters I find out different
attitudes. I also chance my character according to my work.
Projects grew naturally bigger because with more experience
I could handle more demanding projects. I need challenges.
I cannot repeat myself - I feel like dying and drained out
if I have to, so my next project always differs a lot from
the previous one. My art projects are research projects as
well. That is why it takes three years to finish a project.
GL: You have been part of the multi media
industry from its very beginning, in the early nineties. You
have founded your own company, Medeia Ltd., employing a flexible
number of freelancers, depending on the project. So far you
have very successful in this. Still there is this fundamental
problem of the distribution of multimedia titles, specially
when these are artworks. You are now setting up a Finnish
version of the Paris-based Moebius price for multi-media.
How do you look at the recent developments in this industry?
It looks like it is a though business for artists with ambitious
ideas about interfaces, complex content and non-linear ways
to tell stories. And where does the Internet fit into this
story? Much of the money these days is going into e-commerce,
not so much to (CD-ROM based) multi media. The CD-ROM production,
with its rather large budgets, somewhere in between a thick
catalogue and a film, might in the long run be too difficult
proposition, with so little returns on sales. Or do we just
have to be patient and speculate on the ever-growing number
of computer users?
ML: I am operating somewhere between the art
world and electronic publishing. My main problem during the
nineties - and I am not alone in this - has been (international)
distribution. The art world lives still in video time (even
today many big museums are not equipped to deal with computer-based
art!) and the electronic publishing companies are still building
up their systems. Also, high quality content is expensive
and demanding to create, thus it holds never very much appeal
to cash-crazed marketers. At the moment I am preparing my
next multimedia title called "Marita Liulia Tarot",
which will be produced for four different platforms: printed
cards, CD-ROM, Internet and wireless WAP. I am interested
in current developments in telecommunication systems. I believe
in multi-platforms at the moment. We go on working with CD-ROMs
and DVDs because Internet's development towards multimedia
is slower than I thought 4 years ago. And audiences want their
techno utopias to be fulfilled at a push of the button, just
because salesmen told everything was going to be possible...I
am dreaming of distributing my works for free - but who will
pay the high costs of production? It might be a nightmare
- or a real challenge for a producer. Somebody said that future
audiences will not be willing to pay for content. That would
be something the advertiser would take care of. Will commercial
companies control the content in future? Will a banner in
a website pay for the content? What kind of critical, intellectually
demanding, challenging stuff could that be? It raises many
interesting questions.(Noam Chomsky's lurking behind these
lines). The best solution for distribution problem is located
in the Net itself, those who produce content should build
up a network in order to distribute the works. First steps
into that direction are being taken these very days.
GL: Could you tell us something about your
way of working? To what extend do you think artists have to
become engineers and technicians? How is your relation to
the computer software and to the programmers you work with?
Do they influence the final result, or do you keep in control
over the whole process? How would you describe the digital
images and the interactive environments you design? It seems
that you are still 'drawing' images, in the handicraft way;
but this time with a computer.
ML: I am doing my best in order to bring such
members to my team who are going to be genuine contributors.
For years I been looking for an outstanding programmer with
also a degree in philosophy. Seriously. Many programmers I
have worked with tend to be too young, nerdy types with too
little experience in other necessary fields (those legendary
social skills...) to work in a team in long term. But then
I have worked with so many good ones recently that I should
shut up. In a team I am the director and sometimes also producer
so I always carry responsibility for the project as a whole
and I am the one that takes care if somebody's not able to
do the work or has problems in the team. And once you have
a team you've got problems too! I have written a mini-manual
of sorts for my students about the main problems they probably
will encounter. One has to foresee upcoming problems. Often
they are linked to the team members' personal difficulties
and are therefore difficult to solve but they're very disturbing
to the work atmosphere nonetheless. Male and female roles
are an endless source of problematic situations. Creating
a good, respecting atmosphere seems to be essential - and
that is my main job as a director. No wonder I feel like an
alien when the work period is over. I have to leave the studio
for some months and get really pissed off in Paris or Bangkok
or somewhere else far enough. I cannot afford to bring my
moods to work. All my works are based on photography, even
SOB, whose interface is realized with Quick Time Virtual Reality.
We manipulate digital photos or video images (we might even
paint them one by one, and there are 24 images in a second!)
The amount of stills I have to work out is so large, approximately
4 hours to browse in one program, and body and mind really
have their limits. By now my both hands had to be operated
upon. But I really adore to work with images. That's my greatest
enjoyment. I could perhaps manage without writing but I really
would suffer if I could not create images. It is a basic need
for me. My works are based on (manipulated) photos because
of the quality. And there's the prize aspect of it.
Maybe later on I will start to work with 3D
and artificial graphics. I like to combine real images to
artificial and the result should not be documentary. The way
we work in a team is as follows. First I present my idea (manuscript)
and my (philosophical, estethic and political) goals to the
team. I would also have prepared images and some examples
of multimedia realization. Then we start working together
and I do my best to motivate the team to bring their own ideas
or criticism to the fore. It is sometimes hard work especially
if people have been employed in companies where they are not
expected to have an overview of all aspects of the work. It
is extremely difficult to generalize but I have noticed women
have to be encouraged to defend their ideas whereas young
men... well, I mentioned the lack of social skills before.
What I like best is to work with multi-skilled, hard-working
people who are curious about their own capacity.
GL: Can you say something more about the relation
between the artist and the engineer? This relation does not
seems ideal at the moment. Is the only solution that artists
become technicians of sorts? If not, what are their skills
then -- to tell stories, draw imagines? It seems that artists
these days have to be more than ever project managers, administrators,
therapists and PR strategists in order to operate successfully
in the market.
ML: To be successful in market has always
been demanding. It helps a lot if one is multivalent - and
also an attractive person. Artists have always worked with
other professionals (though their names are hardly ever mentioned).
Also engineers. I am aware of the deep divide between artists
(or people from the culture field in general) and engineers.
The problem is how artists who are interested in technology/new
media will manage to find engineers who have a desire for
art and culture. It depends of one's contacts in general.
And of one's attitude. I think we have to co-operate and learn
to communicate with different professionals. Situation forces
artists towards that direction. One can not handle all the
professions which are needed for realizing the larger kind
of multimedia works.
GL: The relation between so-called contemporary
artists and so-called electronic or new artists seem complicated.
Over the last decades these tribes, or rather these universes
have come to be separated from each other. Due to the rise
of the Net and the arrival of computers in artists studios
and at the art schools, we are now heading towards a clash.
I am not sure if it will be a productive 'accident'. You are
active in both worlds. Would you like to see electronic arts
ghetto disappear? In the Kiasma event these two schools of
thought seemed to co-exist, and also elsewhere in the Finnish
arts world.
ML: In my surroundings - in Finland and in
France these universes are not so far apart. The number of
artists that have started to operate in Net is growing fast.
Like in any other professions. The computer is just the tool
of this epoch. I think zapping and personal presentations
of artists help to demystify the tool. The audiences and the
art people need a smooth guidance to the electronic arts.
the main problem is one of availability - how to distribute
and present the works in the art world. The time we live in
now is a time of images. Artists should benefit from that
instead of being afraid of the new professional tools. Then
again, younger generations have different attitudes but their
encounter with the slow and conservative art world has not
been a very successful one. They have to make their own rules.
I expect that the new crop of curators, organizations, exhibition
spaces, magazines, activities and even schools will make the
change - but it is a slow process. Partly because the commercial
image making, advertising business and TV has succeeded to
monopolize the pool of young talent for a long time now. With
money.
GL: What do expect of new media critics? Can
you remember a good piece you read recently which would indicate
the way to go? Should criticism be more based on hyper text
or should we rather works ourselves towards the level of the
"Tres Grandes Theories" ? (to become the Sartres
and de Beauvoirs of the Internet, as it were....)
ML: Maybe the speed of technical development
has been so breathtaking that grand theories are still on
their way. It takes always time to build up a comprehensive
view of a period in history but I'm eager to see it after
all the hype. In this era sociologists (Castells, Bourdieu,
Zizek) and linguists (Chomsky) seem to do the most interesting
job. Last years I have concentrated to gender issues in order
to understand what was happening to concepts like "woman"
and "man" but my need to understand rapidly changing
conditions in society and economics is growing. The consumerism
(which has replaced former ideologies) we encounter in our
everyday life doesn't hide a revolution which has been going
on for some time. Nokia´s year budget is bigger than
the government budget of Finland. Who controls Nokia? The
main shareholders. But who are they? What is their interest?
Who controls a country, we could as well ask. Intellectuals
has been surprisingly silent on these issues. For a long time
it has not been fashionable to criticize society, the media
- or individual companies. What was fashionable was to chose
between brands. there is so much to observe and analyze. Media
critics could offer some interesting views.
GL: How do you interpret the mobile phone
mania and where do you fit critical and artistic content and
interface design in the current explosion of telecommunication?
Everybody will be a WAP artists for the time of a telephone
call?
ML: I find interesting how our ideas of communication
are changing so rapidly. Availability and accessibility are
changing our "art of existence" faster than we care
to notice. We want to be anchored in time, that is why we
buy the latest tools. The drive of the market is absolutely
amazing. Wireless communication creates an odd combination
of distance and intimacy, which seems to be immensely seductive.
Especially among youngsters: SMS- text messages are extremely
popular in Finland, so are the mobile phone desktop images.
If it will bring new art forms, I don't know which but I am
interested in that code language too. Artists can use whatever
medium but the medium itself doesn't make art. It has been
always difficult for the art world to accept new mediums for
artistic expression. It is again question of power, like in
any human system. Those who have it, tend to keep it out of
reach of others. Newcomers have to prove their plausibility.
But if I were a poet, I would immediately start a Poem Phone
where one can get max 400 characters haiku's to the screen
of mobile phone and the money would go to the poets' own pocket.
No publisher between. I am planning to use wireless WAP/ 3G
as one of the four platform of my next work. My reasons are
merely experimental. If the manus I'm working on at the moment
fits to a new platform, I'm curious to see how it unctions
and what will be the response from the audience. The most
attractive thing in new media for an artist is to find new,
unexpectable audiences.
The works of Marita Liulia can be found at
http://www.medeia.com
(edited by Patrice Riemens)
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