DOC(K)S, 3: 21/22/23/24, ‘un notre web’ (‘a web of ours’), with CD-ROM

Artists: Annie Abrahams, Jim Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Dmitri Bulatov,
Augusto de Campos, Sylvie Ferré, David Knoebel, Station Mir, Skipsilver and others

Edited by Akenaton (Philippe Castellin and Jean Torregrosa)
Published by Akenaton, Ajaccio, 1999.
416 pp., illus. Trade, ca $ 50.
ISSN: 0396/3004.
Languages: English, French, Spanish
Interface for the CD: Mac and PC

Reviewed by Fred Andersson
Department of Art History and Musicology, Lund University, Box 117, 221 00
Lund, Sweden
Email: konstfred@hotmail.com

This quadruple issue is the ninth volume of the third series of the French project/magazine DOC(K)S. This series is edited by the artist duo Akenaton (Philippe Castellin and Jean Torregrosa). The two previous series, comprising over 100 issues covering experimental art and poetry in different parts of the world, were edited by the poet Julien Blaine between 1976 and 1990. In the history of Visual Poetry, Mail Art and related transgressions it would not be very easy to neglect these series. The present volume, called ‘a web of ours’, is an exciting collection of materials and projects, mostly web-based, from over hundred contemporary artists and artist groups. If one also counts the artists whose projects are in some way referred to in the printed volume or linked to in the CD-ROM, the number of participators will grow dramatically.

Internet, as well as the Web of possible connections between people and ideas, is, after all, potentially endless. The idea to document a social and digital network at a certain point in time, and to publish the documentation as a printed book, is very good indeed. The prime quality of this printed material, and the reason why it most certainly will prove valuable for future research, is that it represents a process rather than a finite standpoint or consensus. It consists of separate sections, in alphabetical order, for every artist or group. Each section contains an email letter from the participator to Akenaton, a screen dump of the participator's homepage (or the like) and the texts, poems and pictures that the participator has chosen to send.

Akenaton's own contribution is a short essay in French about ‘the situation of electronic art’, but it‚s not presented as an authoritarian introduction or statement, and there are also other insightful essays by people like Charles Bernstein, Jim Andrews and Fabio Doctorovich. Every single part speaks for itself in this ‘web of ours’. Note that the word ‘our’, just like the French ‘notre’, could be mistaken for ‘other’ (autre), and that this semantic shift might serve as a metaphor for a community that does not suppress the fundamental otherness of the members.

Given the rich variety of the numerous digital works presented on the CD-ROM, it‚s equally impossible to sum them up. The first prize I would, however, give to the pioneer and nestor Augusto de Campos for his five animated, polychromatic poems: ‘REVER", "POEMA-BOMBA", "IN-INSTANT", ‘F(J)(Y)EUX’ and ‘DOORS OF EYEAR’. To an half-century long inquiry into the polysemantic and multilingual interactions of verbal, aural, typographic and chromatic levels of meaning, he here adds a kinetic aspect. His play with the French words Jeu (play), Yeux (eyes) and Feu (fire) is maliciously dated ‘1965-95’. Maybe that‚s what really survives the test of time in memory: play, emotional fire, eyes.

(A new quadruple issue, nr 25/26/27/28, was published in 2001. The theme of this issue is ‘war’)