A religious speech by Pope John XXIII, a line from an Ezra Pound poem, a riff from a Beatles song, a snippet of Mao Tse-Tung's communist philosophy, a strain from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Such a cultural crazy quilt could easily reflect the montage of ideas, audio clips, and images users find on the Web.
Instead, they represent some of the random references in the 1969 musical composition, "Requiem for a Young Poet," by the late Bernd Alois Zimmerman.
"Requiem" makes its US debut in New York on Tuesday with an Internet twist: Carnegie Hall commissioned artist and Web designer Vivian Selbo to create an "Internet interpretation" of Zimmerman's opus. Selbo was the interface director for äda'web, the innovative Net art forum that the Walker Museum acquired last fall.
"I wasn't familiar with Zimmerman's music, but I was intrigued by the opportunity to subvert the cycle of e-commerce and entice site visitors to engage in content," says Selbo, who also designed the promotional parts of Carnegie Hall's homepage.
"I felt I could return to the idea that people want to be entertained and play when they're online, rather than buy the cheapest book," Selbo said.
When starting to work on her Net-art complement to the "Requiem" performance, Selbo challenged herself to do more than simply illustrate Zimmerman's work. She asked herself, "How can I animate these words and music and be contrapuntal to the composition?"
A somber, before-its-time multimedia collage of historical orations and appropriated and original music, the Web "Requiem" involves an entire symphony orchestra, a jazz band, two loudspeakers playing four different tracks of spoken words, and three separate choral groups.
Selbo's small budget limited the scope of technology she could use. It also prevented her from buying rights or paying fees to use images. So she created ASCII art to animate some of the diverse figures represented in "Requiem," including Mao and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The use of text honors the lingual layers of the complex performance. Zimmerman himself referred to "Requiem" as a "lingual" rather than a "symphonic" work. Rendering the images as text also eliminates copyright issues.
Rather than include an automatic soundtrack of audio samples from "Requiem" to accompany the ASCII animations, Selbo decided to make the music optional.
"Sound is so fickle on the Web. You never know what kind of sound card a user has, or where their speakers are," she explained. "Plus, Zimmerman's music can be daunting. I didn't want the overwhelming sounds to take the site visitor by surprise. I wanted the user to be in control."
Selbo's interpretation is a visually striking collision of words and imagery that reflects Zimmerman's own artistic goals for "Requiem," but do more than mimic the live performance.
Bill Jones, editor of Artbyte, a Manhattan-based journal about digital art, believes that Carnegie Hall's decision to add a creative component to its commercial homepage reflects an emerging symbiosis between Net art and e-commerce.
"Artists finding their way into the commercial sector is a new phenomenon," said Jones. "And institutions recruit them because they're looking for creative thinkers to find new ways to use digital equipment. Is such Net art 'fine art' or 'commercial art'? Those definitions don't belong to our digital age."
"Carnegie Hall's decision to commission the 'Requiem' Net art piece is a wonderful idea," observes Charles Traub, chairman of the graduate program of photography and related media at New York's School of Visual Arts.
"Yes, it is a piece of publicity, but it also represents everything I believe in in terms of the power of digital art: the synthesis of different creative energies that results in a very complex work that is much bigger than the sum of its parts."
