Interviewer: There was a good article in the Nation Magazine (July 27,1998) about anti-memoir. The writer suggested that we have already crossed that line where a declaration of personal revelation coming from an interpretation of the writer’s social context, as being disempowered, is given inherent literary value in the marketplace. And, of course, there are now people standing up saying , “No, only good writing has inherent literary value.”

In some ways this is reflection of the political corrertness debate. Content must be constructed in artful way, such that it leads to profound meaning as opposed to superficial meaning. But defining who determines the difference between profound and superficial leads to the larger debate about criticism and the construction of a aesthetic concensus, and that is another whole set of problems to sort out.

From my standpoint, and the standpoint of your work at Paper Tiger, the biggest problem is still that most people think that their voices are not worth being heard.

Adrienne Jenek: I guess the question is how is it possible to come up with an approach that encourages self-expression, but sustains a critical awareness of the larger issues. Graham Weinbren, wrote an interesting article about digital narratives. His claim was that with these tools we are able to create all these different layers that sort of overlap and, interlap, etc. As a result, you actually will get closer to understanding much more about the real story. Interactive, multi-layered digital stories will be closer to a reproduction of the way we experience life. Certainly that can be done with words. I mean if you think about interior monologues that are found in literature, there is the potential to create a sense of multi-layered consciousness. But the digital world possibly provides an even greater potential for presenting a fuller life.

But the categorizations, the systems, the forms of interactive narrative structure, present a bunch of philosophic questions that we will also have to address.

Interviewer: In essence we are trying to create holistic narratives and yet we are still forced to rely on analytical models , to categorizations of information that seem antithetical to your narrative intentions. We are caught between narrative and scientific paradigms all over the field of creation of interactive new media.

Let’s discuss the issue of tools. Do you have some thoughts about moving from the analog, television, video environment to the interactive digital environment? What is good about it? What is bad about it? What are the useful lessons you would give someone that wants to move from linear TV to digital interactivity.

Adrienne Jenek: Well one is making some sense of a drop in so-called quality as you move from broadcast television video standards of resolution to the CDROM or web standards of resolution. You need to consider what the effect of that is on your audience.

I ended up thinking about it in terms of enveloping it within my aesthetic. There is certainly a lot of challenges that have to do with resolution at the current moment and for some people it is just not yet the time to switch. If you are not prepared to love a degraded image , or the compromises that need to be made around sound, then you should re-consider moving from one field to the other.

But that raises another question. I've done a number of pretty complex live television pieces that required extraordinarily high production standards. But I think there is a seduction to the idea of being able to get things perfect. You spend an enormous amount of time just grappling with the myriad technical issues that come up around compatibility issues and the conversion issues those kinds of issues. This is information that requires you to be inside the industry. So if you are outside of the industry, as I was, you are constantly trying to catch up.

As an artist, you are constantly aware of how that effects the work and your creative decisions. I had to keep saying to myself at every single term, “What is the meaning of the work, what is most important here. “Because in relationship to the tools of television production, where there were established tool sets, skills and standards, there are so many options in new media that not sustaining a really strong understanding of what is essential meaning in your work, can mean you never complete your work.

As we come into new tools and we realize the possibilities within them, it effects what we are making so I think that you sustain both a sense of danger and excitement around the idea that you are actually collaborating with a machine. I think at times the technology ends up wrestling the sense of control over meaning away from the author. In servicing the potential of the software you create a formal cleverness, that is not in service of the story, and so these “technical” innovations often exist at the detriment of the story.

Interviewer: It feels like an endless potential to explore the possible meaning of the myriad palate that we are offered through the authoring environment on a computer. And as a multimedia artist you can also get caught in trying to manipulate all of the media yourself, and so you lose some perspective simply because your collaborations are minimal.


Adrienne Jenek: Yes, but I in no way want to portray "Mauve Desert," as a purposeful act of creative isolation. I was director, producer, conceiver, writer, mostly because I didn't have any money. But if you look at the credits or the tremendous amount of help in terms of crew people and technical support and consultation all along the way , it was not a single endeavor. My engagement with people and with their understanding of the machines clearly had an effect on the piece.

I guess one of the things that I should say as well- that is related to the discussion in terms of the move from analog to digital, particularly for internet producers- is the extremely short development cycle for work created with these technologies in many cases. I was in a very unique situation in which I was able to spend five years developing this project. But that is in no way how things are usually developed commercially, or independently because the technology develops so rapidly that you can't hope for something to remain the same over the five years.

There is a wild sort of race to colonize new technology in the marketplace that informs a great deal of work . There is all this potential that's available in a given set of software tools that in many cases has not been scratched in a piece of work because of how quickly things are seen to be needed to be done.

And so the gestation period and the working through between the ideas and the tools, a lot of that is just being thrown aside.

Interviewer: I always tell students about this idea that a boat wrecks off the coast of some isolated country and somehow a bunch of used 1992 SGI boxes wash up on the beach. And somebody finds them and plugs them in and spends 30 years figuring out why they were created. Nobody had even the slightest idea what potential was already in that box, as we discard it for the next box. Obviously artists just haven't had a chance to develop a transparent understanding of these medium

Adrienne Jenek: I think this is huge in terms of like the way that art has been understood throughout the centuries, an artist must achieve a degree of mastery over the tools in order to successfully express themselves. Again, that’s why we need to constantly be going back to what is the core of our project, what we need to say, what are our ideas, etc, because obviously tools are going to keep changing.

And some artists take the tact of viewing a part of their creative process is in building their own tools, although there are a number of challenges around that as well.

I am interested in the writing of Maria France Fernandez and some other people around the whole political idea of obsolescence. What does it mean to choose obsolescent technology as your medium, particularly in thinking about artists that are working in Mexico other economically developing contexts. What does it mean to make a forthright political decision that you are going to use this piece of obsolete technology? This idea needs to be taken into account because we just can't keep jumping through these hoops.