from Salon.com
This may be mandatory reading....
quote:Officially, Netochka is the public face of the shadowy arts collective NATOarts, which sells a software tool kit used to sample and morph digital video in real time. Netochka gives the interviews and makes the appearances at digital art and technology conferences for NATOarts. Except that when she shows up in person, she's frequently embodied by different women.
Is one of them the real Netochka and the others a bunch of understudies? No one but Netochka knows, and she's not telling. She explains -- sort of -- via e-mail in her inimitable hackerese: "NN's reputation is based on mouth 2 mouth adverti.cement. When something is very well konstruckted and designed with a degree of integrity it stands on its own ... All the cool girls wear NN."
quote:Whoever she is, one thing that we know for sure about Netochka is that she will not be denied.
According to artists and software programmers, she has threatened to sue Cycling '74, a San Francisco software company that produces Max, a graphical programming environment that is a prerequisite for using the Nato.0+55 software. When thrown off a mailing list, she once threatened to hold the price of her software hostage unless she was let back on. Her Web site even levies an arbitrary $10 tariff on all American customers, just for the heck of it.
Her antics go beyond threats. One programmer, who refuses to be named for fear of retribution, got so much Netochka spam when he angered her that he was forced to write a program to send it all back to her. She's revoked the software license of customers who publicly criticize her code on the Net. Practically, that means she's refused them routine updates to software they've already paid hundreds of dollars for.
quote:Electronic musicians themselves are all too aware of their showbiz problem. Their music may be transporting, but there's not a lot to look at onstage. The common joke, according to Joshua Kit Clayton, a San Francisco electronic musician, is that the musician is just up there checking e-mail or playing a video game.
Netochka's software gives the audience something to see while they listen. Behind the stage a montage of video samples mirrors and echoes the musical performance. And like the laptop music itself, the video is not just programmed in advance and then screened. It's edited live on laptops by video artists positioned in the balcony, lit by the blue glow of their monitors. At its best, the video and the music create a coordinated, improvisational whole.
Netochka makes the tool that artists use to turn video into a live performance. And for this contribution, she's celebrated. Last year, she was honored as one of the Top 25 Women on the Web by San Francisco Women on the Web.
No one came to accept the award. So make that 24 women and one something else. Beatrice Beaubien, a Toronto computer programmer who nominated Netochka for the award, defends her choice: "Even if she was a 53-year-old man who was pretending to be a 24-year-old girl, she still is a female entity that has had a huge impact on the Web and Net art."
quote:Netochka's messages, which appear sometimes by the dozens a day on a single list, range from the cryptic to the indecipherable to the inflammatory, much like her artistic statement. "Off-topic" does not begin to do them justice. She calls her style "English+." Her messages come peppered with ASCII word art, fragments and aphorisms that make an ethereal kind of sense -- sometimes. Her postings can be so frequent, disruptive and abrasive that at one point, there was a mailing list for list administrators devoted solely to the discussion of how to deal with Netochka's postings.
An appearance by Netochka frequently derails a mailing list, devolving it into a flame war about free speech vs. the rights of the community. Soon mailing-list members will be choosing sides: the defenders of freedom of expression at all costs! The fed-up denizens who just want her off the list! And the few who believe they see the brilliance in her indirection, the beauty in her sly, circumspect ways. All talk of anything else is soon abandoned.
"As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent." |
