Interviewer: The internet was a new area for your work, for example your "Waiting for Godot" experimental performance in the Palace virtual reality context. Let's talk about what you think the internet represents as a narrative form or as a form of expression etc.

Adrienne Jenek: Basically the internet presents a massive challenge that a number of people have tried to crack in a different ways in terms of narrative, for example serial narratives, live soap opera narratives. A number of these projects "failed" because the audience has taken a while to catch up to it. My contention is that the internet is not ready for narrative and artistic projects to work successfully. It is a big research lab right now. The strongest thing about it is that there is opportunity to play - to pretend- and that is really exciting to me as an artist. The idea that something can be staged or done and it is going have a definite impact or engagement seems unrealistic. Personally, I think you can just throw that out the window.

Because we are still trying to figure out consuming media on a computer effects people. How people , artists, large and small, like to interact with it. If they like to interact with it? How does it effect them that they are going from working on their spreadsheet, their e-mail communication or whatever else and then moving into the space of entertainment or the kinds of contemplative states that artistic works generate.

How does it make a difference that you go to a quiet corner and sit in your comfortable chair and open a book and that that opens you up? Or you drive to a gallery or walk through a gallery and open the door and there is a different setting. How much of a difference does that make in terms of our receptivity? And how much of a difference does it make that we are sitting in the same chair in the same space, pointed in the same direction? Are people really able to dive more deeply into characters or complicated big scenarios on a computer?

These are a lot of questions. At the same time, it seems like narrative holds is one piece of the puzzle of how to create an environment that actually is going to be move beyond the banality I find in chat room or other online forms of presence.

And I am not talking about list serves or threaded discussions that have been very successful. I am talking about places like the Palace, or other online worlds where, if you are not shooting and killing, there is something else that should be happening, but most of the time it doesn't happen.

And I think narrative or dramatic devices are areas really to be explored within that context. I think that there is a place of pretend there that mixes what people can come up in their own imaginations with inhabiting a story filled environment that provides a context for sparking their imagination.

And so I am interested in unlocking some of those questions. To that extent I have been involved with my collaborator, Lisa Brenneis on a number of different projects that has to do with inserting drama, inserting narrative, inserting narrative lines, into these different spaces that exist already as public spaces, as public streets on the internet. And because they are open places, they are places that really anything can happen. Anybody can go and trying to understand the way that, like an external narrative or dialogue that has been predetermined can effect a spontaneity or a dialogue or increase the depth or change, shift the engagement within this spontaneous media.


Interviewer: An internet guerilla theater of sorts.

Adrienne Jenek: Yes, sure. That is one way to put it.

Interviewer: Well that was the image that came to my mind. Mainly because you said street corner and I suddenly put myself back in my guerilla theater days. And I thought about how a lot of our work dealt with an interactive intervention into normalcy in order to make everybody aware of what was weird about normalcy.

Adrienne Jenek: No, it is definitely is a line with those considerations. But also because this normalcy is, in a sense, abnormal it has this other level of questioning the social and cultural presumptions. And there is certainly questioning about the technology-about what is actually happening that comes into play.


Interviewer: What are your major challenges or issues looking out into the future?

Adrienne Jenek: Beyond my own struggles with these tools right now, I am having a very interesting struggle about my work in general. Being based out in the desert is having a really very strong effect on my understanding of what is happening with these machines. And where they are going and how they are changing our process as people within nature or not within nature, as the case may be. I think it is going to take some period of time for me to consider these issues and there isn’t any easy resolution to it. I am really , daily challenged with thinking about what are the modes of life that are being lost and given up and what is being gained. And trying to think really, really hard about what these computers, what these tools are really good for and what they are not so good for.

So essentially my next project has to do with moving into the area of education, but using stories and this whole idea of continuum. It will also deal with using the computer to point people outside the computer and try to understand the way that the medium itself fits into an environment that is changing, as our ideas about what our role is in the environment are changing.

And to consider what is happening with the earth. I mean clearly if I am just thinking in the next hundred years, shit, if you are thinking in the next 50 years, I am quite certain that a good portion of the population is going to be on another planet or in space fairly soon. And I am curious about whether we are going to abandon this planet and what is going to happen with the resources and the knowledge that has been accumulated over thousands and thousands of years about how to actually live in a diverse, serious, natural world. And how much of the natural world is infused with our humanity and how much that might or might not be secondary good.

They are huge questions and I am not sure where I am going to end up. And also I am speaking really haltingly, because it is really... I am curious what my final answers are going to force me into . I am wondering how inevitably our path has been drawn already by our use and consumption and embrace and excitement around these tools? Right now, I am in a very different place. I am excited about all the possibilities, but I am also really feeling tentative about how quickly…, how quickly we are giving up some things that we are giving up. There is this totally different pace and way of learning that we are giving up for another way of learning.

And, again, I am curious of how much the understanding of humanity that I know and that I am interested in and devoted to and committed to , how much of that essence will continue to travel on. And how much of it has to do with the way that we, the way that the natural world, in very subtle ways effects us, and how we effect it.

So my interest in the future in these technologies has to do with using them as a platform to ask a bunch of questions about that.

Interviewer: Well those are the most provocative issues we have to face, and I really , I am happy for you that you are in high desert environment. I have a deep spiritual connection in that area. For several years I went to Joshua Tree on what you might call vision quests, although not connected to any specific ritual practice. I just went to the desert and fasted and stayed quiet for a week or so, and saw what the experience would bring me. I am convinced that in the 21st century, maybe sooner than we think , we are going to have to build all sorts of recreational health facilities that are about taking time out periodically to be unplugged completely. That it may be literally a weekly necessity that people have to go into zones in which there is no electrical activity. Because I am also of the opinion that it is unhealthy, if not cancer causing, trying to absorb all the media that we absorb. We just ain't built for this acceleration and we can speed our present, but it only shortens our future. We will have down time one way or another. If we are going to be healthy, we are going to find completely new structures that allow us to get away from our machines. I think those of us who have been drawn, like moths to the fire of all this stuff, we, besides getting our wings burned off, we have got to fly back to the flock and say, well you know, it is a nice fire, but ...

Adrienne Jenek: These are really hard questions, but I am feeling like I am being forced into a place where I have to begin to articulate these things. Even if it means discontinuing the work.

Interviewer: I don't think you would be ostracized. I mean there is an entire literature that is developing of technological backlash, right. Of former junkies, he Clifford Stolls of the world, who are returning from the abyss of their addiction with cautionary tales. I think there are dialogues about addictiveness as much as there are dialogues about the fear of technology culture. Everything in moderation is still the best thing. But we have been selling the idea to people that technology is a basically a good idea. We need to acknowledge that the techno-hesitant culture maybe right, that they shouldn't come running to these things.

Adrienne Jenek: Well, we are again going back to the issue of storytelling. Digital story telling remains provocative in that we need stories to survive. I mean even if we are on another planet , there will be stories of this planet. I mean the storytelling aspect of it outlasts whatever forms it takes, whatever tools. To me it is clear that it is an essential human need and is the basis of our communication structure. It is the way that information gets passed on all different levels, etc. So whatever the new forms it is all going to continue to exist.

And, it is important that that continue to exist in all different forms as well.

Interviewer: I agree with you. I have no more to say. It has been wonderful talking to you, Adrienne.