Min essä Strange Crossing, The Case of XML finns publicerad i antologin Media and Materiality in the Neo Avant-Garde (utgivare Jonas Ingvarsson och Jesper Olsson, Peter Lang, 2012)
Essän presenterades för första gången på Nordiska Sommaruniversitetets session i Estland 2006.
Ur en sammanfattning:
GRAHAM, XML AND DATA [STRUCTURE] ART
“...there are people who think of XML as a programming space, and people who think of it as a literary space.”
Dave Winer
“It would be possible to “compose” the entire set of permutationally possible pages and to select the applicable variant(s) with the aid of a computer that could “see” the ensemble instantly.”
Dan Graham
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is “a simple, very flexible text format […] Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere” (w3.org). As “a markup of a text is a theory of this text” (Dahlström), there is obviously a relation between XML as a format and the literary or other text it takes part in representing. Furthermore, “[w]hile most programming languages […] are incomprehensible to the average person, XML is written in plain English. Both humans and computers can 'read' it” (MacManus). This means that the link to literature potentially extends to the XML file itself.
But XML is a strange and busy crossing, where not only Man meets Machine, but where the performance of art intersects the hallucination of literature. Matt Butler writes about Dan Graham’s ‘Schema’ from 1966: “[t]he artwork consisted of a formal procedure for how to describe a document, or a "set of pages," with no real reference to the content of that document. This […] shares a remarkable similarity with XML, invented over 30 years later.” Consequently, using XML, Butler created a machine-readable translation of ‘Schema’.
New Media reverse the relationship between paradigm and syntagm that has been established by literature. “Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialised” (Manovich). In the New Media called Conceptual Art, Graham with ‘Schema’ provided a way of constructing innumerable imaginary syntagms.
Another artwork by Graham, ‘Side effect/Common drug’ (also from 1966), places a two-dimensional array at the viewer’s disposal. A number of drugs constitute the first indices, their unwanted side effects, such as blurring of vision and nasal congestion, the second indices. Here, Graham explains, “… the optical-reflexive time sequence of the reading constitutes the content… The extension of the data field (in time of the reading process) continues until all self-reflexive effects – points – are optically canceled.” If we consider Graham’s comment a descriptive and not a normative statement, it seems like both ‘Side effect’ and ‘Schema’ (including Butler’s appropriation) belong to a certain vein of code art. Not code art in the modern performative software sense as it is usually conceived. Nor code art as implemented by older, algorithmic instruction works in Dada and Fluxus, Minimalism and Oulipo. But Data [Structure] Art.
Thus the purpose of this essay: to outline the features of Dan Graham’s early conceptual art, as these appear in the light cast by the computer culture’s brightly flashing L.E.D:s. We also investigate, in passing, how the aestetics of XML is formed by the interplay between Man and Machine, as well as by the tension between antithetical artistic approaches.