JUNE WEB ARTIST :
MILLIE NISS / USA
ENGLISH:
1- BIO AND INFORMATION:
Millie Niss was born in New York City, USA, but moved to France at the age of two months, and has grown up bilingual French/English. She returned to the USA at age 2 1/2, then spent summers in France. Later, she spent a year doing her last year of French lycee, where she obtained her baccalaureat C (in math & physics) in 1990. Millie then went on to study math at Columbia University in New York City, obtaining a BA in math in 1993 with magna cum laude and admission to Phi Beta Kappa. She spent the next two years studying for a doctorate in mathematics at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA, but had to quit due to illness. Later, she did a year of graduate school in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, MA, USA, but also had to leave before finishing.
Millie started programming computers when her father bought a Commodore VIC-20 in 1983. This was a computer with a whole 4K (!!) of RAM and it worked on your television, with only 20 characters on a line... Millie (then age 8) and her father learned BASIC together using the VIC, and later they both moved on to machine language (6502 Assembler). Their biggest project together was re-writing the word processor for the Commodor 64 (a slightly more powerful similar computer), at first just to add French accented characters, then to add many more features.
Millie has been making web-based computer art since 2000, when she discovered Flash and HTML. Her work has been published on wordcircuits.com, bannerart.org, Rhizomes/hyperrhiz, The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, trAce, thirdplacegallery.org, and others. A list of her publications on the web is at http://www.sporkworld.org/webpub.html. Since 2001, Millie has been maintaining her website http://www.sporkworld.org, which focuses on web art and poetry (although the poetry on it is old). Themes of work on Sporkworld include cities (especially New York), mental illness, contemporary poetry, politics, and more. Millie presented a workshop on Sound Poetry in Flash in 2004 at the trAce Online Writing Centre's Incubation3 Symposium in Nottingham, England. In 2004, a drawing from one of her animations appeared in Rachel Greene's Book —Internet Art — in Thames & Hudson publisher's "World of Art" series.
Millie also enjoys writing poetry and prose, and her poems and articles have been published widely online and some in print, including in The Buffalo News, Artvoice, The New York Times, Friends' Journal, New York City Voices (print), and futhertxt.org, unlikelystories.org, Beehive, poetz.com, Big Bridge, sidereality, poetrysz, m.a.g., and others (online). She loves to read poetry and novels, especially contemporary experimental works and some classics, and enjoys literature which is postmodern and does not make sense and/or is written in nonstandard styles. Millie is also very interested in science, medicine, mathematics, and computer science, and likes to base her work on scientific and technical ideas and algorithms.
2- WORK (s):
Spork, the Schizophrenic Skua
At the Museum of the Essential and Beyond That:
Spork's Toilet > It is one of the restrooms of the museum.
To learn more about Spork:
The Spork Web Site by Millie Niss
http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/
Spork the Schizophrenic Skua* is a cartoon bird created by Millie Niss to critique the way (U.S.) society treats people with mental illness. The Spork cartoons are also meant to evoke the literary theme of the Absurd, and to touch on other sociopolitical themes (for example the theme of racism is addressed through Spork's status as a bird in a human-dominated society).
The character Spork is a skua (a kind of arctic bird) who has the illness of schizophrenia, a mental disease which causes people to hear voices which aren't real and to have delusions (false beliefs about reality, often of a paranoid nature). The first Spork cartoon strip (in The Spork York Times http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/sporkread.html ) illustrates Spork's illness and society's response to it. In the world of the Spork cartoons, Spork is genuinely ill and suffers from his illness. The site's critique of the mental health system is not based on the Szaszian idea (see the wrong-headed book by Thomas Szasz, "The Myth of Mental Illness") that mental illness does not exist or that it is a social construct which oppresses people by labelling them as ill. Spork actually has psychotic symptoms, caused by a brain disease. But the System's response to Spork's illness is oppressive and Absurd.
The representatives of the System do not see Spork for who he really is (on a basic level, they cannot see that he really is a bird and they think he is acting crazy when he acts like a bird), they lock him in nasty hospitals and they try to control his life by manipulating government benefits and pushing him to participate in stupid treatment programs and take harmful drugs. (However, the viewpoint of the site does not disapprove of psychotropic medications in general, it merely emphasizes that they can be harmful and that doctors should pay attention to the dangers of drugs.) The System is represented in the cartoon world through the person of Miss Meddling, who reappears in many roles: social worker, nurse, case manager, etc. Any time Spork must be "treated" and controlled by a mental health worker who is not a doctor, that worker will be Miss Meddling. (The name Miss Meddling was suggested to Millie Niss by a patient in a mental health residential treatment center where Millie worked as a counselor.) Spork is much more than his illness, as all mentally ill people are, and he is portrayed as an intelligent and talented bird, whose particular interest is computer security. The System sees Spork only as disabled and fails to recognize his worth.
The heart of the Spork site is the cartoons (and secondarily, the articles) in The Spork York Times. Try clicking on various words in the headlines of The Spork York Times, the articles, and the cartoons. These tell the basic story of Spork's Adventures. The pages on Spork's Living Room, Miss Meddling, and Peter Pong the Bipolar Pelican provide background information. Spork's childhood history is told on the page "Spork's History" ( http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/origins.html ) It explains where Spork came from and describes the onset of his illness, which had both biological and psychological causes.
Millie Niss has experimented with creating Spork merchandise, hence the forthcoming Spork Store. She has made and sold notecards with the Spork cartoon adventures printed on them, Spork T Shirts, refrigerator magnets, and more. The merchandising aspect of Spork was intended as a semi-ironic and semi-real example of transforming art into merchandise.
* Any of several Artic and Boreal sea birds of the genus Stercorarius that harass smaller birds and snatch the food they drop.
THE SECOND COLLABORATIVE REVIEW 2005
WORKS:
SPORK, THE SCHIZOPHRENIC SKUA
http://www.sporkworld.org/spork/
http://arteonline/museu/bathroom/toilet.html
AND
OULIPOEMS
1- Millie's Spork Stories
by EDWARD PICOT
It can be quite difficult to find something to say about Millie's work, because at first glance it seems deceptively simple. The Spork collection doesn't make a great show of technical accomplishment. Most of it's in HTML rather than Flash, Director, QuickTime or whatever. It's heavily text-based, and the text is presented in a very straightforward manner: the words don't move around on the screen, there are no changes of font-family or font-size, no layering, no randomising of the text, no requests for wreader interaction. Even the hyperlinks are relatively few and far between. In other words, many of the usual New Media strategies are absent, and what we have instead is something which seems almost startlingly straightforward and accessible.In this context, one of the first things you notice is the humour. "Spork" is a funny name, and the picture of Spork at the top of the home page is funny too - goggly-eyed, apparently leaning forward to fix us with his stare. Then there's the little animation at the bottom of the home page, entitled "Spork's Stage", which depicts Spork walking up and down a sloping strip of red carpet, apparently talking nonstop without ever pausing or looking at his grainy-looking audience. The text below informs us that "Spork risks arrest or commitment as he addresses the masses of hippies and homeless people in Washington Square Park on the conditions of the mentally ill today. He has not obtained a permit to do a public event nor is his carpet regulation size and height..."
One of the interesting things about the humour here is that it's absurd, but the absurdity points in two different directions - both towards Spork and towards the authorities which threaten to have him locked up. The idea that there should be a "regulation size and height" for a speech-making strip of carpet is ridiculous, of course, and suggests the slightly Kafkaesque nature of the bureaucracy against which Spork finds himself pitted because of his mental illness. But the way in which he struts compulsively up and down his strip of carpet, babbling away without paying much attention to his audience; and the fact that he is there without a permit, running the risk of arrest or commitment either because he's too disorganised to cope with the relevant paperwork, or because his overwhelming need to unburden himself is forcing him to behave like this whatever the consequences; these little details are highly suggestive about Spork's inner life; and they also tell us that, even though Millie is clearly on Spork's side, she doesn't feel inclined to sentimentalise him, to make out that his craziness either doesn't exist or is really some kind of gift which "ordinary" people are too dull to understand.
In "Spork's History", Millie tells us that Spork's mother rejected him when he was born because he "was about twice the normal size and his feathers were colored in Crayola-primary yellow which would do nothing to camouflage him in the snow ... and that antenna-- ugh!" Spork's colour is important because it separates him from the other Skuas: Millie humorously links from "Spork's History" to another web page entitled "Spork Compared with a Normal Skua", which shows one of her bright yellow drawings of Spork next to a photograph of a dowdy-looking grey-brown bird. Spork can't blend in: his difference from the rest of his kind can't be camouflaged. But the phrase "Crayola-primary yellow" also suggests a couple of other things. Firstly it hints at a childlike quality. Crayola is a famous brand of brightly-coloured wax crayons commonly used by very young children who are just learning to draw. Spork's primary yellow colouring labels him as eternally childlike, eternally naive and compulsive in the way he thinks and the things he does, eternally unable to repress, mediate or disguise his thoughts and feelings for the sake of conformity. Secondly, the phrase can be related to the apparent childlike simplicity with which Millie draws and animates Spork - always in bright colours, always in simple flat shapes without any shading - and through that to the apparent simplicity with which the different parts of the Spork story are presented. If you look at other parts of Millie's website (which is called SporkWorld, after all) you will see that her sense of design is always offbeat and individualistic - but nowhere more so than in the pages devoted to the Spork story - and in those pages it has a particularly intense quality which reflects Spork's personality.
Then there's Spork's antenna. "Spork's History" makes it clear that his antenna is virtually the same thing as his identity, at least in his own mind: "My antenna is ME!" he screams when his teacher, Ms Meddling, explains that it will be a disadvantage in later life and ought to be surgically removed. But the fact that the curious wobbly-looking appendage on top of his head is always referred to as an "antenna" seems to imply that it allows him to pick up information which other people (or birds) cannot hear. At times Spork hears voices - "The voices continued even when he plugged his ears. From that time on, Spork was tormented by cruel voices..." - and the mere use of the word antenna leads us to wonder, without anything explicit ever being said, if these voices are coming from somewhere outside him rather than being purely delusional. But the antenna doesn't just convey material into Spork's head: it grows out of his head like a mad idea - oversized, brightly-coloured, wobbly and eccentric. It seems symbolic of Spork's thoughts, his compulsions, his inner life. It makes him what he is, it gives him his peculiar abilities, but it also marks him out, like the mark of Cain.
It is Spork's dread of losing his antenna which gives rise to one of the most fascinating passages in "Spork's History":
"Spork ran away from home because he could not bear to have a piece of his body removed. It was part of his identity. He started flying back towards the arctic, wondering who his biological parents were and whether they looked like him. As he flew and walked uptown through neighborhoods he had always known, he discovered something he had never suspected: Everyone wanted to cut off his antenna... He also began to hear people insult him... From that time on, Spork was tormented by cruel voices which insulted him and commented on his life. They sounded like real people talking about or to him, but other people said the voices were 'all in his head' and doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia."
Spork's attempts to protect his identity drive him to strike out on his own, and the effort of doing so leads him to a moment of insight when he suddenly realises how other people feel about him. But this genuine discovery shades into delusion. Part of the power and ambiguity of the passage derives from the fact that Millie never makes it clear where Spork's insight stops and his delusions begin. But his delusional state leads to him being labelled as a schizophrenic, and this label allows the authorities to pigeonhole, manipulate and medicalise him. He manages to preserve his antenna, in other words, but only by damaging his already-precarious relationship with the rest of society.
What Millie manages to do in the Spork stories is to make him a sympathetic character without sentimentalising him, and to show us the unfeeling and often wrongheaded nature of the social and medical authorities with which he has to deal, without attempting to minimise or conceal the fact that there are times when he genuinely needs help. Probably only someone with first-hand experience of mental illness could have written these stories. They are not perfect works of art. There are times when Millie's anxiety to make her points leads her to speechify at the expense of her narrative -
"Pong does not argue that there should be no involuntary commitment. But he does say that current laws make it too easy to commit people and too easy to keep them for long stays. 'Think of the taxpayer money [from Medicaid funds] that is wasted,' he said, 'At over $1000 per day it's a real scandal!'"
Millie has certainly done more formally perfect work elsewhere. But there is a sense in which a more technically correct collection of stories would have been unsuited to the subject-matter. Like the wacky simplicity of Millie's cartoons and illustrations, or the offbeat individuality of her page-designs, the eccentricities of her prose style seem perfectly attuned to Spork's personality. In any case her style in everything she does is as individual as a thumbprint, and we should be grateful that the Web is allowing one-offs such as Millie to find niches and make themselves heard, whereas conventional offline publishing would undoubtedly have either ignored them or tried to remould them into imitations of somebody else.
2- Millie Niss thanks Edward Picot
Dear Edward:Thanks for the generous and lengthy comments on Spork...
The reason the work is unsophisticated technically is because I was very technically unsophisticated when I did it, and the whole thing is old work (although I just uploaded the third, "bonus" cartoon strip). So your criticism is well-taken. I hope some day to make some more polished Sporkisms (and I in fact have an animatable Flash model for Spork, in which one can issue Actionscript commands to make each body part move individually, but I haven't used it yet in a piece), but I haven't worked on Spork for a long time.
We also should remember that web art itself was pretty new in 2001, when I did this. The drawings were done in Flash (and some Freehand), and at that time, client-side image maps (the technique where you click on different parts of an image to get different links, as in the newspaper pages) were actually fairly new. Many people did not have the Flash player installed (which is why I flattened my Flash images to gif and put them on HTML pages, rather than having buttons in Flash to page through the strips).
It is a little disturbing, though, that work may be unacceptably simpleminded if it "just" uses HTML rather than fancy webisms, because that is a little like saying ordinary prose is too simpleminded because it isn't hypertext or paintings are too simpleminded because they aren't film. I think HTML is a genre like any other, and that "accomplished and polished" plain HTML should be as acceptable as any artwork in any medium, now and forever. That said, Spork is my really earliest work, and it isn't fully accomplished and polished. I imagine that is really what you are reacting to rather than the fact that it is HTML. I have some plain, unadorned hypertext, some on similar subjects, which I think is more polished (at least I hope so) because I did it when I knew more how to do web stuff (e.g. http://www.sporkworld.org/bedlam/ ).
I really appreciate your explanation and analysis of Spork's character. I think you've got him spot-on. I am glad that you understood that Spork - actually is - sick, but that that doesn't let the Authorities off the hook. The mental health system is Kafkaesque and Absurd, but Spork isn't a sane bird miscast as a mental patient, he's a mental patient miscast as a mental patient (or miscast as how society views mental patients). I think you really picked up on how the humor (and also the political point) of the thing depends on this understanding. (Incidentally, Kafka's characters aren't realistic, rational people translated into a bizarre and unfair world, they are products of the bizarre and unfair world they are in, for example Gregor Samsa spends half of "Metamorphosis" seriously concerned about how to catch his train to work even though he has been transformed into a giant beetle and can't possibly go to work.)
MillieP.S. I guess the work itself isn't organized exactly the way I see it, in the sense that I know that I did the three cartoon strips first (and I've made print versions of them), and for me, the web site was a vehicle to display the cartoon strips. I think the strips (and the backstory about Spork's history) are the only fully realized parts of the thing. For me the other pages were just background material, which someday I may want to improve. This may therefore be a lesson to me on what happens when you post work of mixed quality--- you can't count on readers to focus on what seems to be central to the artist. I wonder if I should have limited my site to just the page which leads to the newspapers and cartoons. I don't know...
3- Edward Picot answers Millie Niss
by Edward Picot
Dear Millie -I don't want to leave you with the impression that I think the Spork stories are "unacceptably simpleminded" - quite the contrary. What I was trying to say, in a nutshell, is that although they seem simple and accessible on the surface, there's actually a lot going on in them once you start to delve. And the words "simple and accessible" are by no means criticisms in my vocabulary. One of the things I like about your work is that you don't make it look all complicated just for the sake of astonishing your audience with your technical prowess. If anything you go to the other extreme, and make it look simpler than it really is.
I'm very well aware, of course, that you've done other work since Spork which is far more technically advanced. In the Spork stories you use HTML and a little bit of Flash in a way which is always attuned to what you're trying to say - in other words the technical stuff is always at the service of the subject, instead of getting in its way - and in your later, more technically-advanced work, as far as I can remember, the same thing always applies. And that, to my mind, is what's really important in a work of art, whether it's technically primitive or technically advanced: integrity, coherence, a sense that the means of expression are thoroughly in tune with what's being expressed. From this point of view there's a real unity of feeling between a painting by a cave man and an interactive new media work by Jim Andrews: they're both doing their thing to the utmost of their ability with the means at their disposal.
-Edward
4- Spork's World (1)
There is a lot of time that I know the site / project
http://www.sporkworld.org and I visit it frequently. Among other many works, I have always admired the cartoon Spork, which gives the name to the site / project. The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That is very honored of having one of the Spork cartoons in permanent exhibition at the Gallery WC - If you visit this "toilet" you will meet a Spork's adventure that Millie Niss created specially for the restrooms of our institution - "Toilet" relates the Spork adventures on an american beach.Since my childhood I have admired that kind of cartoons with not complicated drawings - "The Little Lulu" was one of the heroines of my childhood. I had lots of fun with her adventures and with the constant guilt of the Little Lulu's father while investigated by "The Spider" (Tubby). It is interesting to tell that the "Little Lulu's" creator, Marge Henderson Buell - was a pioneering woman in cartoons - she created "The Little Lulu" in 1935.
As well as "The Little Lulu's" creator only could be a woman, I believe that only Millie Niss could create Spork. I admire Spork's cartoon not only for what I told in the previous paragraphs but also for two very special reasons: the sense of humor - a characteristic of Millie Niss - and the way Niss uses the humor to denounce very serious subjects related to mental health. Spork was planed by the artist for being a cartoon for adults and everything is very well explained on the website Sporkworld:
"Why Spork is a cartoon?
I wanted to make a site about a mentally ill person going through all the troubles with the system and with the illness that mentally ill folks have to endure -- hospitalizations, trouble with Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, voices, depression, mania, paranoia, stigma from friends, employment discrimination, etc., but then it seemed that the story would be either horrendously depressing (not in the clinical sense, of course) or nastily uplifting (if the character successfully surmounted all difficulties). I wanted humor in my website, and yet needed a place from which to launch serious ideas. Also, I didn't know how I would get a non-mentally ill audience to read the story."
Since Bosch with "The Cure of Folly" and "The Ship of Fools" until our days, the madness has been occupying many times the plastic and literary imaginary and "The Ship of Fools" was not only imagination.
In the scenery of Renaissance, the "Narrenschiff" - a literay piece appears, it was certainly based on the "argonautas", a mythical theme resuscitated on that time. After that piece more ships appear, always with the navigators going in a symbolic trip, searching for the fortune, which many times wa not found but, other times, it was permutated for the meeting with the DESTINY or with the truth. Those imaginary ships had their representative in the real world: they were ships that carried their human load from one city to another. The fools traveled on them - the truth was that the cities did not want them - expelled them, let them ran through the distant fields, they trusted them to merchants or pilgrins or as frequently occurred, they were trusted to boatmen. However, they were not expelled from the cities in a sistematic way. In that time, in some regions they were already received in hospitals and they were treated as crazy. One can imagine that the ships had the symbolic sense of the reason's search. Trust the fools to the seamen was the certainty that they were not near the cities' walls - they would be prisioners of their own departure.
"A prisoner in the middle of the freer, of the openeder of the highways: solidly chained to the infinite crossroads. He was the passenger for excellence - the prisoner of the passage" (Michel Foucault)
It seems that much little has changed since "The Ship of Fools" and Spork denounces that. Today we can say that there are institutions to take care of people that are considered a menace for themselves and for the society: hospitals for mental patients. Those institutions habitually build a barrier to the social relation with the external world, through closed dorrs , high walls, barbed wire, ditches... Generally the people that live in those institutions keep little contact with the owter world.
They also do not have none knowledge of decisisons regarding their destiny. The begginer arrives to a stablisment of this kind with a cultural background and with a conception of himself / herself. But as soon as he /she enters those institutions, a series of lowerings and desecrations of the Me starts - he / she is reprogramed through a set of prescriptions and prohibitions and of a small number of prizes and privileges obtained in obedience to the rules.
"Mr. Spork told our reporter that he was being penalized for not brushing his feathers. The nurse who ordered him to brush was aware that birds do not brush their feathers, and yet she insisted he do so and got a doctor to order an extra dose of medication when he refused. As every one should be aware in our multi ethnic society, birds groom themselves by taking dust baths and having their partners pick off bugs with their beaks. Making Mr. Spork use a comb or brush would be forcing him to suppress his identity as a bird."
Reading Spork's Stories and knowing previously some texts on madness, one verifies that Spork's cartoons own a strong theoretical basement. Niss offers that knowledge in an extremely creative and well humored way, so that it becomes easy to anyone understand Spork's Problems. Then one realizes that the Spork character is made of Millie Niss' thoughts and dreams and humor and that the madness of Spork cartoon is extreme lucidity.
Bibliography:
FOUCAULT, Michel. A História da Loucura. São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 1987.
GOFFMAN, Erving. A Representação do Eu na Vida Cotidiana. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1985.
5- Millie Niss' comment and Regina's answer:
Regina,Thanks for your commentary, which I really liked..
The Goffman text is really relevant I think. Is the book you cited the
one which is called in English simply "Asylum"? He has excellent points to make
about how institutions transform their inmates.
I am glad that you understand Spork so well!Millie
-------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Millie,
I am so happy you liked my text about your work! ;-)
The Goffman book is: "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" - really excellent!http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/curric/soc/symbol/goffman.htm
The Spork's World (2) will come soon!
Regina
6- Spork's World (2)
Although Edward Picot has done a perfect analysis of Spork, here we are again trying another look at this "funny" and tragic character created by Millie Niss. In our opinion a truth is built through multiple looks.
Being Spork an obstinate navy bird, soon we remind another one, which is very well-known and also obstinate:
"For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight."
But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing. A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak, and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings. The curve meant that he would fly slowly, and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face, until the ocean stood still beneath him. He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration, held his breath, forced one... single... more... inch... of... curve... Then his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell."
Richard Bach
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"But Spork says he copes just fine-- despite his mental illness he is one of a very few people who have access to a special government computer for researching computer viruses and fighting new attacks. Spork is brilliant at computer security and he also does black & white photography and makes the occasional pot on a wheel he bought when They thought he was manic, Spork gets lots of praise and even some fame for his anti-virus work and he does occasionally sell photos and ceramics, but he does these things for himself, to prove that he is not a broken Spork as the doctor who granted him disability insisted: "Forever and completely disabled, No chance of any creative work," not for money or prestige.
Spork was repeatedly sent for behavior modification treatment to correct his "inappropriate and maladaptive behavior," which consisted in chirping, pecking, and insisting he was a bird and could fly. His case manager, nurse, and social worker (she reappeared in various guises throughout Spork's treatment) never looked at her patients with enough of an open mind to actually see them, so she never realized that Spork actually is a bird...
Spork was vividly aware of the contrast between the way the mental health system treated him (as if he were something between a career criminal and a severely retarded three-year-old) and the great respect which he was accorded by his many clients. He also resented that he was unable to charge a market price for his consulting services because that would make him lose his government disability benefits, which he depended on for health care and housing. He therefore joined the consumer movement (the political movement of mentally ill people aimed at bettering their treatment in society), where he made friends with a bipolar Pelican named Peter Pong."
Millie Niss
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What both stories evidence is the difficulty - in any society - to one who is different. And both birds stand out for being obstinate in the acceptance of their difference, fighting for preserving it and acting according to their identities and objectives. But also they opposes completely - if Jonathan Livingston Seagull transmits hope, this story almost could be considered a self-help one; Spork's message is much more real and denotes almost total impotence of a mental patient in front of the vices, prejudices and ambiguities of the society and system of American mental health (?).
Spork is terribly conscious of his own limitations and possibilities and this turns the narrative even more attractive. However what enchants me most is his own ambiguity, due to the fact of being a cartoon: Spork is a bird that warbles, flies and does not like brushing the feathers, and because of this he is penalized by the system that does not believe that he is a bird; on the other hand he has totally human characteristics; he is a serious professional requested by the govern American. He has financial problems, he takes photos and makes ceramic, also he joins political movements of mentally hill people. This ambiguity has an incredible sense of humor and, at the same time, installs doubts:
- After all, who really is Spork, where Spork finishes and starts the delirium?
Another interesting point is Spork's Creativity and the creative activities' poverty that Miss Meddling offers him:
"Miss Meddling wants Spork to give up his currrent, active, life and go to a day program and make moccasins and trivets and glue buttons to mayonnaise jars."
In this point of the review, I open a parenthesis - I will never forget the emotion I felt when I saw, for the first time, an exhibition of the schizophrenic paranoide Arthur Bispo do Rosário's artistic objects. This brilliant Brazilian artist, lived for fifty years inside a hospital - the "Colônia Juliano Moreira", in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition was called "Registros de Minha Passagem sobre a Terra" (Registers of my time on Earth) and it occurred in 1989.
I could imagine Bispo do Rosário in his teeny cell, probably the image of the desolation, building his world bit by bit, gathering their fragments, placing a new order in them. The blue line that involved everything, mummifying the real objects, doing the cocoons for a time that never arrived. The crazy artist created an universe from nothing, using such a poor and precarious material, building his coatings and mantles, maps / flags, embroideries, constructions, boats, misses bands and scepters - a completely contemporary work made by someone completely far from any artistic information.
With Bispo do Rosário, more than never the Art reaches a regenerative mission - an anti-destiny, which starts when he organized the fragments of his destroyed world, organizing them in a new way, more coherent, able to correct the imperfections of this world.
Links:
http://www.proa.org/exhibicion/inconsciente/salas/id_bispo_1.html
http://www.oedipe.org/fr/spectacle/bispo
To finish two questions and a suggestion.
Questions:
1- Do you agree that to make Art has a regenerative function to mentally ill patients?
2- Do you classify the works produced by a mentally ill patient as Art?
Suggestion to Millie Niss:
I would love to see a Spork's New Cartoon in which the questions above could be the focus of the narrative.
Newsletter's Members answers:
(The answers are placed by order of arrival)
I- Paulo Villela (BR):1- Artistic doings as a regenerative function is just occupational therapy.
2- It may be... "What caracterizes a work of art is the aeternal presence in the thing of the amount of love and knowledge that, a past day, configurated it" - tha's a highly satisfying definition by Lucio Costa that enable us to consider art the production of mentally handicaped people having had the knowledge and intention doing it. That's the condition of Bispo do Rosário and a few others.¨
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
II - Elizabeth Curtis (UK)
My answers to your questions about mental health and art.
1. Art and creativity can help people affected by mental ill health to find an outlet for their emotions. Art is a way of expressing feelings when it is not easy to find words. The art works created by people with mental health problems may also give other people a clearer picture of what life is like for someone who is, or has been, affected by mental illness, tackling and reducing the stigma often associated with mental health, breaking down barriers to understanding of mental health problems. Art exhibitions created by people affected by mental health problems helps them reintegrate into the wider community.
2. People with mental illness should not be viewed through their diagnosis and their art works should be judged on their own merits.An interesting debate......
from
Libby
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III- Muriel Frega (AR)
1) Art, cooking , music, writing, sports, any activity that feeds the soul can be used with therapeutical ends.
2) Any human being can make art, which does not mean necessarily that that human being is an artist. They are two different things. Even there is people who are not artist and make better works of art than those that say to be artists! ;-)
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IV- Isabel Saij (FR)
1)-We are all mental patients in a way. Some of us living locked up in the psychiastric system, other being able to survive on their own, with other crutches: meds, drugs, alcool, tics, obsessions, the great feeling of being a so wellbalanced mind... and so on. To make Art has always a regenerating function in my opinion. It canalizes pulsions, a large spectrum of emotions and sometimes very disturbed or sad personnal experience which can make life unbereable if not softened through creative/intellectual activity or interesting jobs, which are nothing else than an occupational therapy for everybody in allday life...
2- Works produced by mental patients are a contribution to Art, and are Art. I can give an example with Gugging. It¹s a psychiatric hospital near Vienna (Austria). The psychiatrist Leo Navratil gave a studio to schizophrenic patients, considering their creations had more qualities than works simply made during an occupational therapy. So, some of them began to draw and paint in 1960 and became more and more famous, like Johann Hauser, August Walla, etc...(only men as far as I know!)
See the link: http://www.gugging.org/haus/index.html
I saw an exhibition during Art Cologne in a german gallery. A lot of small objects/scuptures... wonderful "art brut³ works, made with simple materials with much skill. They have talent and less censorship than we have to express pulsions. I would only remark on one point: the attitude of the art system which deals with their works... They get exhibitions in Europe, in the USA and Japan (1980/1990), but do they understand what¹s going on, and who makes money in this case?¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
V- David Daniels (USA) -
Dear Folks,
We are all mental patients in every way.
Earth is one big mental hospital.
On topic is death.
Off topic is life.
We must all stop pretending we are better than anyone else.
Or that one thing is better than another thing.
There is no good or bad. There is only life.
Your Friend,
David
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VI- Joesér Alvarez (BR)
1- I agree, and it was because of this that lately, I am even more
regenerated...2-
the classification or not as Art
is a task to the "specialist"
to the cura.tor "Xamã"
the attributed gift
whose balsamic look
establishes the valueif the masterpiece's fiat lux is sick or not
who dictates, cures the pain?PS:
1- It is almost impossible to translate this answer above into English because there is a kind of pun with the word curator - in Portuguese = curador but if you write "cura dor" or "cura a dor" , it means that someone cures the pain)
2- FIAT LUX - According to Genesis, first book of the Bible, God, after the creation of the sky and Earth , would have created the day with this enunciation.
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VII- Clemente Padín (UR)
1- Yes, not only for the "mentally ills" but for anyone of us, artists or not. Many of our great artists dangerously bordered the limits between madness and health (according to the parameters that, by convention, are estblished in every period of time). Let us remember Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud and so many others. The surrealists declared that crazy person were the true "visionary of the spirit" for being nearer of the pulsions and the subjective (the surreal). We can not forget those "transitory madnesses" that cause the alcohol, some species of fungi and drugs in general, which in some cases, generate excellent works. Sure they are "madnesses" according to the pattern of values that establish "media" and their "mecenas", the corporations that need an average type of human being healthful mentally to consume their products. In addition, the art is nearer the madness than the "health" (with commas). Mainly when the creation is radical. What artist can affirm that he/she is under control while creating?
2- Of course they can be works of art in the sense that, functionally, they are symbolic expressions of the reality, although this reality is altered by their hallucinations and disturbed perceptions. But, perhaps for that reason, richer and nearer of the true world. On the other hand, to whom competes to determine if a person is or is not a "mental patient". In some cases there are doctors who have been molded by the ideology of the system, and it is this ideology that indicates to them who must be isolate by his / her supposed madness according to historically relative canons, economically conditioned.
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VIII- Millie Niss
First of all, I want to thank everyone for contributing to this review with their answers. I was touched by the people, such as David Daniels and others, who expressed solidarity with mentally ill people by saying, "we are all mental patients." This is true in the fundamental sense that no one is truly healthy and that we are all human and subject to the same frailties. I appreciate the sentiment. On the other hand, there is something unique about the experience of being seriously mentally ill and losing your ambitions and social status to the illness. It makes you an outsider in society and gives you an understanding of poor people and other people who are at the bottom of society.
Because they are a group apart, mental patients have their own culture, and like any culture, there can be Art that comes out of it. Also like other subcultures, for example ethnic groups, gays, racial groups, other people with disabilities, the elderly, children, political subcultures, etc., the art made in the culture may attain universal value even as it is specifically part of the subculture. When I make artworks that are part of the mental illness culture, I generally intend them to be viewed by a wider audience for the sake of the art, even if the viewer is not specifically interested in mental illness. This is similar to the way a Brazilian person might use the literature and art styles of Brazil to make an artwork that is specifically Brazilian, yet their artwork can be enjoyed just as well by people from other countries.
1. Making art definitely can help people with mental illness feel better, and can occupy them when they have nothing to do because they cannot work. But if the work is JUST therapy, I don't think it counts as Art. I think that mental patients are as capable of making art as anyone else, but the work made during Art Therapy or Occupational Therapy rarely is Art, because these activities are designed by non-artists who often make it impossible for the clients to make anything creative or original. I described what Occupational Therapy activities are like in a text I wrote to introduce myself to another list:
I was familiar also with "programs" (especially "day programs," horrific, often mandatory, adult day care) for the mentally ill.Many of these programs purportedly used the arts (in "expressive therapies" like art or writing therapy or less ambitiously in overtand failing attempts to occupy people all day withoutspending any money or having enough staff to adapt the program to the individual client). The main feature of the "OT
[occupational therapy] projects" which clients in these programs are forced to carry out is that they leave absolutely no room for individual creativity. A typical activity (for adults who are not mentally retarded!) is cutting out pictures from magazines and glueing them on construction paper. Another (I didn't make thisup) was glueing buttons to mayonnaise jars (no, I don't know why!)The prototypical kind of OT project was the "craft project." The craft project comes with all the materials packaged in a plastic bag distrbuted by an occupational therapy supply company, and it consists in constructing something ugly and useless by following between three and five (more would take to long or tax the clients' limited abilities) rigid steps in which the client does not have a single design choice to make. The result is supposed to be that everyone's finished product is identical, but in fact the heavily medicated, unmotivated, and distressed clients usually do the steps wrong so that each person's item is misshapen in a unique way. One typical example of a craft project (which I saw carried out at an otherwise pretty descent private psychiatric hospital) was to make frog-shaped clips (supposedly to clip documents together though most clients had no documents), made out of pre-cut, pre-sanded wooden pieces (frog body and two frog legs), a pair of googly eyes, and a clothespin for theclip. Exactly one color of green paint was provided to paint the frog pieces before gluing them together. The next step was attaching the legs to the body and the clip to the back of the body (there was another color of paint for painting the clip). Finally, you were supposed to affix the googly eyes with gue to the frog body. The other facial features (e.g. mouth) were pre-printed on the body. The saddest thing about this (apart from the OTs taking notes on clipboards about each patient's skills, attitude, and behavior as they engaged in this task) was that the very few patients who successfully (sic!) completed the frog seemed to be very proud of their achievement, a Pyrrhic victory indeed. (I refused to participate, no doubt earning the blackest of black marks on my chart, but I busied myself crocheting hats with the yarn and hook
available in the OT room...)Under the conditions described in the above passage, you can see why most "art" made by mental patients is not ART.
2. The work made by mental patients may well be art, but it isn't unless it has objective artistic value. I do not believe in calling incoherent doodling by the name of "art" in order to make unhappy patients have better self-esteem. I do not think it helps people to lie about the value of their work, and most people, even mentally ill people, can tell whether people are praising them because they deserve praise or simply because they think it is a kindness to say good things about work which is not good.
Sometimes the work done by a mentally ill person can be artistically interesting by accident. Some people who suffer from schizophrenia hear voices which say things that seem like literature, for example poetic language or surreal content. But voices are not voluntary and if someone's voices or automatic speech is literary, but they do not make it deliberately or consciously, they are not an artist or writer themself. Their verbal productions may be turned into poetry or art by someone else who is a real writer or artist, and if that is done, the artist should credit the insane person with their contribution to the artwork (and ask permission to use their words if appropriate), but the one who molds the material into art is the real artist. Similarly, people who see visions may see things which if reproduced would be art. If they use their visions to make art, by drawing or painting them, in that case they are using their own artistic skill to transform their vision into Art, and are actually being artists to some extent. But really being an artist involves the conscious and deliberate molding of whatever material into art works, using one's intelligence and sensibility to actively control the effects the art has on the viewer.
Mental patients may be true artists in this sense, just as anyone else may be an artist by deliberately transforming their personal experience into something that has an appeal to others. Here is a poem I made out of delusions (false ideas which come from psychosis). The delusions are not mine. Some are invented, and some are borrowed from a friend who has schizophrenia:
I Do Just What The Little Voices Tell Me To
cloud-dwellers order me around misty voices congeal in the air
humans: the other white meat the rude anthropophagi wouldn't even consider you
the morals of cannibals: see Montaigne aboriginal comes out of forest, sees gas station
cf United States vs. Texaco oil drenched auks and gulls pollute the ground, cannot fly
fly room produces three Nobel prizes Nobel invented some kind of armament
a kinder, gentler conservative bathes under the thousand points of light gets sunstroke
don't laugh, it's true, you really are one of them duck behind the building
to avoid the mind control rays I think you are a turnip, go plant yourself
plants have feelings too, haven't you seen a despairing azalea red like the blood of green toads?
the narrative hides in the bushes, darts to and fro to avoid predators lions get bored,
comb manes you, too can be a hair dresser with the proper vocational training!
why, no, I'm a captain in the Martian infantry nerve gas useless
against unmanned flying vehicles like model airplanes Rumsfeld built
in parents' basement, age ten when they wouldn=t let him play with them
spin the bottle kiss the girl be prepared abstinence education wasted on
sterile mutant from Mars the pod people are coming coming coming no, not
in the ejaculatory sense though they have seven sexes and their matings produce
gamma rays which invade my brain and yours you are one of them I said you were one
of them you said not but your denials are pod people thoughts like Mendel=s genetically white pea flowers no not pee flowers human urine is a poor fertilizer as plants don=t like urea
and punning is a mental disorder like all wordplay the product of loose associations like
organizations for loose women? why not loose stools laxative products incorporated
scatology is symptomatic so is sense like three dollars and ninety five cents for a haircut
in 1985 during the Reagan years when ketchup was a vegetable and vegetables couldn=t
be unplugged by republicans every brainless body is a valuable human being fetuses unite
for Bush and Cheney! already-born people can be electrocuted by the state but an embryo
does not have original sin like Coke Classic, the original flavor formula guarded secretly
by a company of 273 Swiss Guards like the Pope but without Parkinson's dopamine
deficiencies suck who wants to shake like a reed of bamboo in Chiang Kai-Shek's garden
or his pandas' pen but too much dopamine is your cross to bear up on Calvary not
in a film by Mel Gibson not in Aramaic though the Kabbala is in part
limbic excess makes Martians come no we won't repeat the same old pun though
punsters are serial offenders and cereal boxes sometimes have Martians only if contents
is green and sugared and glows in the dark like fluorescing minerals or fish caught in coral
reef the sails, put on the mask, dive in shit forgot the oxygen come back up no we do not
repeat our puns did you know that in Australia your corpse can be rendered into a resin
and fed to a coral reef? i's true but green burial in South Carolina in a memorial nature
preserve is cheaper by the case than artificial jam bumper to bumper on the FDR Drive
someone throws a brick through my windshield missing me annihilates my Baby Jesus
air freshener like Woody Guthrie said doin' ninety I'm not wary long=s I got my Virgin
Mary glued to the dashboard of my car I don't care if it rains or freezes long's I got my baby Jesus! can you stop singing that goddamned song it's stuck in my head like a broken DVD
and no I don't have VD but are your BVDs clean or fertilized with slime and slush?
When mental patients are artists, they should be treated like any other artist, and they should be respected just as much, or even more than artists who do not have so many obstacles to overcome. Mentally ill artists should not be expected to make art only out of mental illness material; they should be allowed the same choice of themes as any artist.
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IX- Martha Deed (USA)
So many thoughtful responses. Quite a challenge for me to be brief on this subject or to contribute something that has not already been expressed more clearly by someone else.
For most of my adult life, I have been a practicing psychologist as well as a writer, so I thought I might say something from that perspective.
1- Do you agree that to make Art has a regenerated function to mentally hill patients?
Being able to express oneself clearly -- to match what is said or made (as in Art) with what one feels, thinks, or experiences -- is often very comforting and healing. It cuts through the terrible isolation of the mental illness.
When an artist becomes mentally ill, often the ability to make art is seriously impaired. This is an emergency for the artist; it's a form of suffocation. So, when I worked with an artist -- whether a writer, visual artist, or performance artist -- I had two immediate goals which I stated openly:
1) assist the person to be able to resume work that he or she respected as soon as possible, and 2) to try not to involve the artist in any sort of treatment method which would impair the artist's ability to make art.
While I am aware that there is a trend toward romaticizing mental illness as a source of artistic communication, my experience is that mental illness more often destroys than enhances a person's artistic ability. Damage can occur in many ways:
from the illness itself: a severe depression that leaves one vegetative and with difficulty thinking clearly or with diminished energy -- making art takes a lot of energy
confusion from psychosis that makes it impossible to follow through on even good ideas -- creating art is a complicated process with many steps. The ability to concentrate, focus, plan, etc. is often interfered with in times of mental illness
and also from the treatments used to resolve the mental illness. These most obviously include using medications that may reduce suffering and restore one's ability to perform normal duties like bathing and food preparation (Activities of Daily Living or ADLs in mental health jargon), but which impair one's creativity. If the suffering is severe, people are sometimes faced with choosing between feeling better and losing creative ability or staying sicker but being able to produce better work. It's an unfair choice, and it happens _a lot_. In addition, the mentally-ill artist may not be given that choice to make, but may have it made for her by mental health professionals who fail to recognize that their treatments may have an artistic cost associated with them.
Hazards for mentally- ill artists are not limited to medications, however. Talk therapies can also create hazards unless the therapist genuinely understands the mentally ill artist's creative processes. For example, deep probing into painful experiences in the artist's life can overwhelm the artist to the point that work is impossible. A mentally ill person may be able to go through deep and painful "talk therapies" and still be able to be a college professor or a truck driver, for instance, but not be able to generate art. So, pacing in talk therapy and frequent check-ins with the artist are crucial.
There is another hazard which no one likes to talk about. It's the Anne Sexton phenomenon in which the person may discover in the course of therapy that he/she is an artist and begin to produce significant work -- but the production of the work becomes entangled in the therapy -- the therapist takes too much credit for the "birth" of the artist, or becomes involved in the critiquing of the work, or makes claims that breach the artist's privacy. Any of these attitudes on the part of the therapist can genuinely harm the artist's necessary freedom to create work that is that person's best effort -- a freedom which needs to be free of desire to please the therapist.
2- Do you classify the works produced by a mental patient as Art?I agree with others who have said that Art should be evaluated on its own merits, not on the basis of the maker of the art or the circumstances of that person.
That said, I have seen instances where a mentally ill person, in the effort to communicate, produced Art that could be published and admired quite apart from the artist's circumstances. The author of this Art was not always an artist, but someone who was able to use artistic methods at least temporarily to free themselves from the pain of their illness or experience. In the same way, I have seen mentally ill or mentally-impaired children develop skills, e.g. chess, that allowed them to function in the "mainstreamed" world of school sufficiently to break through the isolation of being a "special needs child" and to gain respect of peers.
Of course, these works came from the person's imagination and abilities, not from the kind of guided or structured OT kits that Millie mentioned in her essay.
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IX- Regina Célia Pinto
You explained your ideas with much wisdom. Then, I would like to conclude the current debate with a homage for the Brazilian psychiatrist Doctor Nise da Silveira who not conformed with the violent treatments used in Psychiatric Hospitals, found in Art an Occupational Therapeutics for the treatment of schizophenics.
It was her who founded, in May 1946, the Service of Occupational Therapeutics in the ancient Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. And it was through the artistic activities as painting, modeling and wood engraving that arose in 1962 the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Museum of the Unconscious' Images).
The museum's collection has nowadays about 350 thousand works. In its gender it is one of the largest and more differentiated collections of the world.The recognition of the artistic value of the collection comes from artists and experts from several regions of the world. Always giving emphasis to the scientific value, during 54 years of existence, the museum already accomplished more than 100 exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. Jung, with whom Doctor Nise da Silveira shared ideas, visited the exhibition of Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente's paintings in Zurich, 1957.
Doctor Nise da Silveira was a studious of this artistic production arisen in the Service of Occupational Therapeutics and in her several books she shows us how these images arisen from the unconscious own a narrow connection with some creation's myths.
" the episode of schizophrenia is preceded by dreams , fears, visions of the world's end , and cosmic destruction. And on the other side, in the exit of schizophrenic episode appear thematics and symbols of the creation myths on the psychic production in the measure in which the conscience reconstructs itself and the function of real returns."
In her book "Imagens do Inconsciente" (Images of the Unconscious) the psychiatrist analysed some series of images, works done by mentally ill pacients. Those analysis make clear the way that they went through , the images reveal everything, it is really impressive.
I believe that the the work of Doctor Nise da Silveira is a message of hope to mentally ill pacients regarding the way they should be treated.
To finish a fragment of the song "Earth" by Caetano Veloso:
"that the force orders courage
for people to give affection
during all the trip
that you accomplish in the nothing
through which you load the name of your meat
Earth
Earth
For more distant
the nomadic navigator
Who never would forget you"
With this poetry I add to David Daniels' thought (see answer V), the image of Earth not as a Psychiatric Hospital, but as the Ship of Fools, in its trajectory without end for the unknown space...
The review continues, now on the "Oulipoems" by Millie Niss and Martha Deed.
1- On Oulipoems
statement by Millie Niss
Oulipoems at http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/ was made in collaboration with Martha Deed. It was published in the Iowa Review Web in September 2004 at but you should use the version at Sporkworld because one of the works in the collection, Poggle, has a more advanced version (which allows user-submitted
texts) on Sporkworld. (The Iowa Review did not have the expertise to install the PHP program which allows users to submit tile text for Poggle.)
Oulipoems contains an introduction which explains how the electronic interactive poems relate to the Oulipo Movement in French literature, at http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/intro.htmlOulipoems represents a later and different thread in my work from Spork. There is nothing personal in this work, other than my "personal"
intellectual interests and political opinions. There is no mention of
mental illness therefore. The work is also much more technically
sophisticated, using HTML, Flash, sound software such as ACID, Photoshop, PHP, etc. The sound should be turned on for the whole thing because there is sound on the main menu page, but some pieces use sound and some don't.
Oulipoems is a collection of electronic poetry experiments where the goal was to make poetry interactive in a new and different way in each piece. I was experimenting with user interface design, and my goal was to have a unique user interface and programming in each poem. For that reason, I did not make any traditional hypertext poetry where you click on words in the poem to get to new sections. Instead, each piece has its own kind of interaction.
Some works are best seen as poems in their own right with fixed content, in which the user interaction just serves to explore the content, whereas other pieces are games or tools for users to create their own poetry. See the introdiction for more on this. In most poems, if there is fixed content, it is political: there are antiwar messages in several pieces, and references to the US political scene and politicians in the Bush Administration.
I am not sure how this work will be seen by people from diverse countries, as for this collaborative review, because in many of the works, the English language plays a major role, as it must do in poetry written by an English speaker in English. "No War" is a sound-only poem, and may perhaps be easiest for people who do not read English well, but the structure of it is based on using sequences of words that share the same vowel sound, which may not be apparent to non native speakers. I hope that people will be able to appreciate the programming and design even if English is not their first language, but the work is intended as poetic, which means that the language matters.
Thank you so much for your collaboration and attention.
2- Orpheus and Oulipoems
Here I am again re-starting the collaborative review after a deserved rest and, like today is Sunday, if you wish good fun, drive yourselves to the games room of the Museum of theEssential and Beyond That
(http://www.arteonline.arq.br/museu/reformas/artgames.htm) . There you will meet Orpheus and much sense of humor."Orpheus and Eurydice do their laundry
Text by Joseph and Donna McElroy
Programming and Design by Millie Niss
Slave: Martha L. Deed""Orpheus" ( http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/orpheus.html) is a collaborative game, created by Millie Niss, Joseph and Donna McElroy and Martha Deed. The game shows an interface which reproduces the Greek Culture in a not classic way because it was transported to the world of digital games with the Millie Niss' sense of humor. Attention to the sound-track! Contrarily most of the artist' works, this one does not have any written text - narrative or poetic, but it is quite amusing!
The experience with the "Oulipoems" is different and, in my opinion, much more rich because they are essentially Language Games. They were inspired by the French literary movement "Oulipo" (http://www.oulipo.net/) from which make part Raymond Queneau, Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino and others. That movement uses the combination of Mathematics and Poetry and texts generated using constraints or rules .
I believe that I am not the best person to write comments on these poems almost games because my native language is not English, but I will try to comment and maybe these comments should be of your interest just because of this.
The "Oulipoems" are six: Sundays in the Park, Morningside Vector Space, No War, Head line News, Poogle and Te Electronic Muse. I intend to comment each one of them. Today only the first two.
"Language games", according to Wittgenstein, is an expression that indicates that words only gain sense in their effective use, when they are brought together by similarities, composing linguistic fragments (tales, ballads, greetings, dialogues, etc.). Also, where they function, as in games, with their own rules that determine the practice of the players.
"Sundays in the park" is this theory in the practice. The poem game interface is a rectangle filled with nine lines of words. Some of them appear to be joined in a group. At the bottom of the rectangle we can read: "click on words to make out isles of sense."
Example;
The first line:
Is tart warren bagdah come cheap dyed four know we puns
If we click on "is tart warren" we get these isles of sense:
Star war in > tarts wore in > tart swore in - tarts warren
The last line:
Ah nice ream sundaes in the ark
or
On ice cream sundays in the park (or sun day sin in the ark)
At the same time you are playing, a voice (will they be two?) repeats the words of the rectangle and so that the poem game also becomes a sound poem. It is intersting to add that words as Bagdah, palestinians can be found on the poetic interface, which also adds to the game a political sense. I imagine how much time was necessary to find all those words and to create this isles of sense. It seems wonderful that the poem game invites, insists and gives us wish of always click one more word to see what is going to arise. And in this click, always we have the hope of getting an ideal click which makes the nine rectangle lines of words form a text with a complete sense. And it is that what transform the poem into game and challenge. Well it was what a person who does not have English as native Language felt. Perhaps it will be different to an English spoken person.
To conclude the first poem I would like to comment here how Millie Niss dominates the action script programming; without this it would be impossible to create "Sundays in the park".
II- "Morningside Vector space"Millie Niss explains:
"Morningside Heights" is the name of my neighborhood in New York City, which is described by the texts in the Morningside Vector Space work. It is mixed income (some poor, some rich) and has a major university, Columbia
University, where I studied."
This interface of this poem game reminds me the map of a district or of a portion of it: a larger and clear blue a little bit purple rectangle, which have inside another pink rectangle and a colorfull square, situated at the righ. In this piece Millie Niss talks about a church - the "Episcopalian Cathedral of St. John the Divine". And we can see the draw of ths church inside of the colorful square. There are four white placs out of the same square, inside them one can read: pretentious, simple minded, sociological, melodramatic. The game start just on those placs, for this it is necessary to move the mouse over them. The mouse's movemente makes a text appear inside the pink rectangle and the text has the style of the plac's label. If we move the mouse over the colorful square the text change and then it has two styles at the same time. Example:In "Morningside Vector space" Millie Niss follows the "Exercices de Style" by Raymond Queneau where he tells the same simple story nineteen times, every time in a different style. Niss shows an excellent knowledge of Queneau, of the Oulipo movement and of the act / art of writing. At the same time she gives us information in a very ludicrous way.
III)- No WAR
"No War" is sound poetry and like the title sugests it is also a
contribution done by Martha Deed and Millie Niss to the lots of protests against Irak's War.The image which is the poem's background reveals a landscape hidden by a barbed wire "wall - trench", where we can read a blood color graffiti: No WAR. The semiotic of this image is rich! I believe that the majority of Planet Earth's inhabitants, even though do not understand English, looking at that image, will realize that it is a protest and a protest related to war. When we move the mouse over the image, we get sounds and I beleive that are two voices , the two Authors' voices, that enunciate words, some of them I can understand , others I can not, but I believe that the words are all related with the theme War. Also we can listen to noises like shots, and how much we move the mouse, how much the sound ambiance sugest the war ambiance, or at least I feel in this way.
In spite of not having anything related to war, my artist's electronic book: :" The Psychiatrist, the Net.Art - Web.Art and other stories" (2001) - has a page which works as sound poetry in the same style; in this page, the interactivity with the red small buttons play the cyber ambiance music or the cyber ambiance sound Poetry.IV- Headline News
This poem is still an enigma for me. I did not get to decipher it very well. I did not get to build a headline that makes sense. Maybe it is caused by my not so good English or..., knowing the sense of humour of Millie Niss, perhaps the goal could be exactly this... The best I did until now was:
" Rapacious senators advocates illicitly for co conspirators dollars in hussein dinners",
which is not a very good result because the concordance is wrong (advocateS) and the sense of the sentence is nule, but once more the poem - game becomes political because the words it offers to build the new headlines.
The base of the game is a rectangular diagram divided into 40 squares, each one of them with a word inside. The square's sides that are on the perimeter of the rectangle form grayish triangles / arrows which are situated out of the rectangle. If one click on that arrows he /she can heard a noise (very well chosen!) which suggests me a casino machine, although I have never gone to a casino! ;-). Each click also make the words change of square (scroll) and it gives us the hope of forming a new headline ... Also there are the option "scramble", which mixes all the words and then the chalenge is to come back to the initial structure of the diagram.
V- Poggle, a poetry crossword game
Millie Niss told me:
"Poggle was an adaptation of a game called "Boggle" where you make words out of letters on plastic cubes. I used poetry fragments instead of letters, so I named it "Poggle" for "Poetry Boggle."
Poggle is a engine - game to make Poetry.
We have to choose a square to begin a line and to continue building a poem, we must click one of the adjacent squares to click on it. The defy is that we have to choose one of the eight squares that are adjacents to the first one and also it is necessary that the poetry in the square chosen matches with the poetry of the first square. We have to do this during a period of time done by the hourglass which, of course, was programmed by Millie Niss. It is not easy, mainly to one that have not an excellent English as myself, for example. However it is funny and I got a poem from it, which I liked:"The sound of wind
playing the harmonica
the sound of wind
a seraphim running like lemon drops"I always considered Poetry something that only gifted persons - the Poets - could do, Millie Niss' Poggle showed me a different way to make poetry.
It is an amazing device where we can create poetry under the style of some poets like: John Hollander, Dirk and Jane, Shakespeare, Anne Sexton, Harryette Mullen and Robert Browning. For this it is necessary to chose one of the poets and click on the button "Generate a line" . A line with the style of the choosen poet will appear in the white rectangle. To build the poem we have to experiment. Each click on the button "Generate a line" will add a new line to the poem, if we like it we let it where it is, if not we can delete it or, using the arrows, move the line to another place in the poem. It is interesting that we can mix diverse styles, using different Poets in each line. I do not know why, I did not get to add new vocabullary to my poem. This is one of the options offered by the game, I tryed several times but none of the words I typed, appeared: singular noun, plural noun, adjectives or adverbes. I do not know where was my mistake. In spite of this, I admire this poetic device. Really a quite good one!
Well this is the last poem-game to analyse. I imagine that one that did not know the "Oulipoems" by Millie Niss and Martha Deed is surprised with the ingeniousness of them, in the same way I was when I play with them for the first time last year.
3- Clarifying "Sundays in the Park"
by Millie Niss
Dear Regina:
You said about my Oulipoem "Sundays in the Park":
At the same time you are playing, a voice (will they be two?) repeats the words of the rectangle and so that the poem game also becomes a sound poem. It is intersting to add that words as Bagdah, palestinians can be found on the poetic interface, which also adds to the game a political sense. I imagine how much time was necessary to find all those words and to create this isles of sense. It seems wonderful that the poem game invites, insists and gives us wish of always click one more word to see what is going to arise. And in this click, always we have the hope of getting an ideal click which makes the nine rectangle lines of words form a text with a complete sense. And it is that what transform the poem into game and challenge. Well it was what a person who does not have English as native Language felt. Perhaps it will be different to an English spoken person.
To conclude the first poem I would like to comment here how Millie Niss dominates the action script programming; without this it would be impossible to create "Sundays in the park".
I think you have grasped the goals of this piece quite well. The isles of sense give the user the impression that she can decode the "true" text if only she keeps clicking, but there is no true text, only a sort of semi-English gibberish (nonsense) which seems to refer to politics and current events and a day in the park with ice cream, but never quite manages to reveal meaning. It is a metaphor for deciphering poetry in general, especially postmodern poetry which doesn't make immediate sense. I see the poem as something which evokes (makes you think of) many ideas and feelings, but does not have a single "true meaning." Poetry is not a puzzle to be deciphered with the right key. Ironically, I use a puzzle to demonstratethis...
There are two voices on the soundtrack, superimposed, but both are me. I am saying two different versions of the text that you can get by clicking certain ways.
Millie
4- "On Morningside Vector space"
by Edward Picot
Regina -
For your Comparative Review, I've noted down some thoughts about "Morningside Vector Space":
1. Although the instruction at the bottom of the window says "move mouse over the coloured square to adjust the text in two dimensions", in fact you can also get different texts by pointing to the different lables around the outside of the coloured square. If you point to the "pretentious" label, for example, you get the text at its most pretentious: "An occurrence manifested itself yesterday: I was perambulating on the thoroughfare of Amsterdam Avenue. Arrayed on the pavement were a supernumerary quantity of confectionary coverings. I raised my vision towards the firmament, and perceived the facade of St. John the Divine, gargoyles glowering upon their parapets in the failing luminescence. I espied a human figure drawing near. 'Prey, sir,' he queried, 'do you know the hour?' I hastened to reply, glancing at the gold face of my Bulova, 'approximately three quarters past five.' He accomplished his departure. An oceanic current of frigidity bore me home." If you point to "Simple Minded" you get "I walked. On the sidewalk. By the big church. There was a man. He wanted the time. I gave him my watch. He left. I was cold." - which is the shortest version of the narrative. Or if you point at "Plain Source Text" you get the same text which appears when you first access the game - the text, presumably, from which all the others are derived: "Yesterday, I was walking on Amsterdam Avenue. There were cracks in the sidewalk. I looked up and saw the Cathedral of St, John the Divine, tall and unfinished. A man approached me. 'Excuse me, do you have the time,' he said. I told him 5:47. He waled away. It was windy." (Is "waled" a misprint of "walked", by the way? I rather like "waled" as a word.)
2. The drawing of the church isn't visible in the coloured square all the time. It isn't there at all initially: it appears when you mouseover the square. Then it comes and goes, sometimes fainter, sometimes stronger, sometimes disappearing altogether, depending on which part of the square you're pointing to. At first I thought that the drawing was at its most visible when the text description of the church was at its most fulsome - but actually there is a point at which you get a description of "the facade of St John the Divine, its gargoyles glowering upon their parapets in the failing luminescence", and the drawing is almost completely invisible - so now I can't make out what the criteria for its visibility are.
3. For me the most interesting detail is that in some versions of the narrative the narrator merely gives the vagrant the time of day, whereas in other versions she actually gives him her watch - which seems to suggest that the style in which a story is told can change not only our perceptions of the events which are being described, but the actual content of the narrative, the events themselves. To put it another way, a story which is conveyed via text has no other existence than in the text through which it is conveyed. Change your choice of words and you change the story, not just superficially, but fundamentally. But this is slightly contradicted by the fact that we're allowed access to a "Plain Source Text", which seems to suggest that there's a "true" or "original" version of the story from which all the others are derived.
4. Following up this point, what's the piece actually about? It seems to be about the fact that when we sit down to write a narrative there are always many different ways in which it can be written - many different points of view from which the events can be seen, and many different emphases which can be put on them, depending on how we choose to describe them. And whatever choice we make, it's always a provisional one. Traditional literary interpretation tends to trade on the idea that whatever we see in print represents the final decision of the author about how he or she wants to tell the story, and to alter a single word, or even a punctuation mark, would be a kind of blasphemy. As readers we are supposed to chain ourselves to the text and extract as much meaning from it as possible, in an attempt to get as close as possible to the author's original intentions. We are meant to submit outselves, in other words, to the writer's authority - note the link between the two words, author/authority. Likewise, as writers, we are meant to slave away at the text until it attains this feeling of inevitability, the feeling that everything has been expressed in that particular way because that's the only way in which it could possibly have been expressed. But the truth of the matter is that writers never really feel quite that way about their writing, and readers shouldn't feel that way about what they read. One of the things new media text tends to do, with its nonlinear structure and its interactivity, is to pick apart the edifice of textual authority - to suggest that every story can be told in more than one way - perhaps there really isn't a final incontrovertible version of any given narrative. "Morningside Vector Space" (a title which I really like, by the way) is a witty and beautifully-designed piece on the theme of textual ambiguity, textual questionability - but personally I think it would be more challenging to the reader if there wasn't a "plain source text" for us to go back to when things get too confusing.
- Edward
5- Collaborating with Millie Niss (and others)by Martha Deed
The alert visitor to Regina Pinto’s current collaborative review of Millie Niss’s work will notice a second name from time-to-time. The credits for this individual include "Slave" in the Orpheus piece http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/orpheus.html and on The Museum in the Art Games Room – perhaps the most painfully accurate description of my role – "Llama Portraiture" in "Jewel on the Erie Canal" http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/nt.html and soloist in "Toilet" https://archive.the-next.eliterature.org/museum-of-the-essential/museu/bathroom/toilet.html and "Sheep Apnea," http://www.sporkworld.org/sheep/ among the recombinant Sheep on Regina’s Sheep Parade Blog http://bigsheep.blogspot.com . Occasionally, my participation is kept off the credit page. Usually, we use this practice to salvage some shred of dignity for me, such as my performance duties in "The Usability Chronicles" www.sporkworld.org/parody (in the credits and in the "Bananaphone" http://www.sporkworld.org/parody/banana.html).
But even when I appear as a collaborator, listed with Millie Niss – on the same line of a title page and in the same size font – the question remains: what does collaboration mean anyway, and how does it change from one project to the next. Can collaborators be "equal" – or does the very notion of a 50-50 contribution to a piece suggest high conflict? Do collaborators need to share a core of similar skills or is it better if they bring contrasting or complementary skill-sets to the project. And – what if one collaborator is far more-skilled or more-recognized than the other? How do collaborators work around the inevitable conflicts in vision to complete a project? Finally, how does the real (non-cyber) relationship between collaborators influence a collaboration?
For Millie and me, the nature of the collaborating fluctuates, depending upon the nature of the project and my technical knowledge of the software we are using. However, because "Oulipoems" is so heavy with code, the two of us decided that Millie’s name should dominate author credits. Because I wrote the text for "Headline News" http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/headline.html in "Oulipoems" http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/ that piece may represent a 50-50 contribution. I had no input (other than proofreading, beta testing, and carrying bottles of water onto the field of creative battle) for "Sundays in the Park" http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/sundays.html or "Morningside Vector Space" http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/vector.html . I had no part at all in "The Electronic Muse" http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/muse.html . I wrote some of the texts in "Poggle." http://www.sporkworld.org/epoetry/poggle4.html . In "No War," http://www.sporkworld.org/oulipoems/nowar_splash.html , I did voice-overs and entered some of Millie’s code (the boring, repetitive parts).
A good test of successful collaboration with texts is when both of us lay claim to the cleverest parts.
Collaboration with Millie has taken me from total innocence of web art creation to at least a beginner’s level where, at least occasionally, I am able to produce multimedia web work independently, as with "Stove" (in the Museum’s Restaurant http://www.iis.com.br/%7Eregvampi/museu/restaurant/salao.html ). In our latest work, while Millie remains by far the better designer and coder – and also inventor of projects – I have reached a level of design input which is gratifying. Better yet, while I cannot (yet?) write usable actionscript, I can participate in debugging, because I now can understand the logic of the code. Thus, for me, a major benefit of our collaboration is learning that I am still teachable. Further, the more I learn, the more I am able to invent new work.
Millie says that she is learning too, and that in fact, if she doesn’t learn from doing a project she is not happy. Often we plan projects influenced by what we want to learn. Our next projects involve video, new to both of us.
Successful collaboration involves a synergy – when Millie and I are "clicking," we are zanier and more experimental than either one of us is individually. Thus, we almost have cyber-personae. Although we are mother and daughter in real life (really) – our web mother-daughter relationship becomes quite fictional. This fiction first appeared in "Penumbrae" http://www.sporkworld.org/penumbrae/ in which we wrote a series of motherly explanations for the sources of rather improper poems the daughter wrote to please her mother. The mother, of course being a wonderful mother, though quite proper and entirely clueless, was extravagantly pleased. But the proper mother, innocently, adds naughtier poems to the collection than the daughter’s poems. The mother’s contribution includes a poem that Millie has declared "the most salacious poem about a mailbox that I have ever read." The mother believes the poem to be about a winter mailbox which is frigid in the cold weather.
"Oulipoems" involved brainstorming, screwy humor, texts written on crumpled paper napkins in our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, and many technical challenges for me. Because of its technical complexity, my contribution was 25% at most. If the division were always 3:1, I would be uncomfortable taking any credit at all, but because we achieved a 50:50 collaboration on "Headline News," I have been able to enjoy the acceptance this work has received almost guilt-free.
I have deliberately focused this commentary on Millie’s work now appearing in Regina’s collaborative review series, but even these few paragraphs would not be complete if I didn’t mention a couple of other collaborative experiences.
When Regina asked me if she could do a collaboration on my poem "Stuck in Middletown" http://www.arteonline.arq.br/festival/martha_deed/ last January, I knew I would be pleased with the results and I was not disappointed. In this case, the collaboration occurred serially. I wrote the poem and took the photographs at the time of a winter storm, and Regina did her work later. There was little input from me while Regina worked– and obviously there had been none from her while I was writing and taking pictures. The result delighted me. Similarly, I have participated in other 8 or 9 person collaborations in which each person’s work was submitted to a facilitator and then subjected to someone else’s interpretation with little or no artistic control – or control over getting the finished product seen by others (published). The creative process in both cases was really rewarding; collaborators who were initially strangers to me became valued colleagues and friends. But, perhaps because of the unwieldyness of so many "cooks," along with the inevitable crises that interfere with the creative lives of so many of us, we ended up with credible work which may never be viewed as a whole. That has been somewhat frustrating.
For the past year, I have also been collaborating with a fellow writer on a cycle of rengay. Here the collaboration is necessitated by the form, but the choice of collaborator has been based on contrasting writing styles and world views. We have been pleased with some of our work, and plan to continue. The work has been satisfying, but slowed by trivial illnesses, high school graduations and serious storm damage to my collaborator’s home. Rengay demand a certain focused quiet, I think, and that is difficult when someone is tearing off the front of your house or even if you are trying to be succinct (but original) and you should be cooking dinner.
This returns me to a question I ask myself about the work Millie and I do. We feel it works, but certainly it is hazardous to combine a family relationship with creative endeavors. The generational differences alone could kill the spontaneity I think is necessary for the work to succeed. In our case, while the noise level in our workroom is not always as seemly as one would wish, I think it helps that often the younger one is teaching the older one. So the wisdom doesn’t follow age but goes against it. It helps to see our work as important play-time separate from family responsibilities. It helps for each of us to maintain separate work for which we receive independent recognition.
It helps not to take ourselves too seriously even while we are serious about our work. It’s a danger, when collaborating with a loved one, to put the work ahead of the person, or the person ahead of the work, neither of which is the correct attitude. (Millie’s conclusion, thanks!)
Thank you so much Millie Niss and Martha Deed for accept to participate of this review. It was really excellent to work with you. Sincere congratulations for your wonderful work and for your ingeniousness.
Many thanks for you that collaborated with ideas or only reading with interest everything that was discussed.
Rio de Janeiro July 24st, 2005
Regina Célia Pinto
