:: Monday, March 22, 2004 ::


NEW.WRITING: Interview with Jan Robert Leegte
BY: Peter Luining


Jan Robert Leegte is a Dutch artist living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His work combines a sculptural approach to digitalmaterial with a deep interest in browser and Windows' aesthetics. What makes it stand out from other computer or Internet art is that it breaks away from the computer related experience. Leegte's installation work isolates elements of Windows' interface that in turn are projected onto various structures. This alienates the elements from their original function and makes them into familiar but also indefinable aesthetic objects.


Peter Luining: You started as a sculptor doing installations. What brought you to the internet?

Jan Robert Leegte: The world behind the computer screen has always fascinated me. (Probably since my dad occasionally brought a primal desktop computer home from the office back around 1980, shortly afterwards followed by the inevitable Commodore 64.) My actual real 'hands on' experience with the net came much later, but as soon as I saw the effects of my first HTML code in 1997, I was hooked.


PL: What influence does / did your background as sculptor have on the way you made work for the net?

JRL: The fact that I worked directly in source code was very important. I had some earlier experience with WYSIWYG software creating HTML files but this hadn't inspired me at all. It wasn't until I typed my first lines of HTML directly in a text editor that I
got interested. It had a totally different impact on me. When typing a code and seeing its effects later you address an existing object and command it to act in a certain way, after which you yourself have to move to its space to see what has happened. By using code you give a validation of autonomy to the final work. And in my case I would say even a physical validation. Code introduced me to a new environment in which I could create sculptural installation as I had done previously.


PL: In your work you still use elements of the classic Windows interface. It is even so that you started to rebuild whole parts of the classic interface for certain net art works in Flash, why?

JRL: [laughs] As long as Windows supports its 'classic' interface my first action on a new computer will be resetting the interface! It's a small inconsistent flaw in my work. The Microsoft interface has, as Umberto Eco called it, a "Protestant feel" to it in reaction to the Catholicism of the Macintosh interface. I would consider Windows' classic interface to be modernistic in comparison to the ornamented 'design' interface of Apple (I'm not mentioning the horrific attempt at design of Windows XP!). It's the functional form of Windows, the naive sculptural beauty you find in utilitarian factory architecture that inspires me. Or to be more precise, it fully embodies my research in sculptural experience through its plain and simple embossed chrome elements. I should add that I have kept the HTML studies on-line in their original unadapted state. Apart from the design and the earlier mentioned coding, a third aspect is the status generated by mass use. Because of the interface being taken for granted by millions of users in their daily use, it also gains physical validity. Therefore I keep the old works in HTML in spite of the aesthetic torture!


PL: Recently you shifted back from the net to installations in real space, why?

JRL: It took me some time, but at a point I started noticing aspects of interactivity and net-behaviour which I hadn't focussed on until then. My main field was exploring this space in which I could build these 'new' sculptural experiences and placing them on the net. I had been adding interactive experiments now and then, but they were side-tracks. When I began noticing how people react to browser based work and the way the net is used, I decided my research would have to find a different medium. The sculptural feel of the Internet studies is fragile and demands the viewer to look mainly as if observing a
phenomenon in nature. The net is a highly impatient, click- based environment. Visitors would sometimes interpret my work as an intentional aggravation for the user, a form of crash-art, or even subversive. I decided that it was the effect of the medium Internet
that created these unintended connotations. Shifting back to 'real' space was a very effective way of dispensing with this problem.


PL: Do you see any future in autonomous artworks specifically made for the internet?

JRL: Definitely. All forms of research in art demand an optimal instrument with which to communicate. The Internet has a very specific character. For many fields of art it is the perfect medium. I myself haven't discarded using the net since I have started doing spatial work again. In my view, the work which I put on show at the on-line exhibition of 'Abstraction Now' in Vienna definitely belongs on the net. Projecting it onto a wall in an exhibition space would most certainly reduce its impact.

http://www.leegte.org

"... is appropriation of mass media images by the artist Jeff Koons who was the defendant in three similar copyright cases in the 2nd Circuit. In the best-known case, Rogers v. Koons, the defendant purchased a note card displaying a photograph of a group of puppies with their owners, tore off the copyright notice from the card, and hired an Italian foundry to make four sculptures based on the photograph. Since Koons admitted copying, the only issue on appeal was if his copying was a fair use.

Counting against fair use is that Koons added little to the original image except for changing the medium and adding color. Indeed, altering the image would have defeated his purpose of changing the meaning of the image by putting it in a different context. On the other hand, Koons' sculpture is not likely to damage the market for the copyrighted photograph. The products are in different markets and won't compete for sales. Yet the plaintiff's business was licensing photographs so upholding Koons’ fair use defense could potentially eliminate an important source of revenue to photographers and result in adverse incentive effects.

Koons' principle argument for fair use was that his work should be privileged as a satirical comment or parody. By appropriating an everyday image, he claimed that his work commented critically on a political and economic system that places too much value on mass produced commodities and media images. Not surprisingly, the court rejected his defense because his work did not comment directly on the appropriated image. As noted earlier, fair use requires that the parody be directed at least in part at the original work. When the parody comments on society at large, the defendant should be able to license the copyrighted work."

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