Interviewer- Having said that, while a lot of this is about the democratization of media, of allowing voices to be heard, at the same time the artistic part of our efforts, the degree that we are conscious about developing narrative, suggests that we are developing some sort of aesthetics. Either in your relationship to Web designers and publishers in general or those specifically focussed on personal Websites. Do you have a sense of developing consensus of aesthetic principals?

Justin- I am happy to see the development of divergent aesthetics so that every time someone develops an aesthetic someone comes along and turns it on its head - cuts and pastes it.

Interviewer- can you give an example of that?

Justin- One consistent example is a guy named Walter Miller, who is a guy who has turned out to be a professional writer, but when we first saw him on line we had no idea that he was for real or not. He keeps a diary of living with his grandfather and cleaning his grandfathers’ carbuncle infested body every day. Caring after his license plate collection and all this kind of wretched tales of woe from a south Texas trailer park. It turns out that he is not real in terms of living the writing, but the writing is informal, purposely poorly spelled, it’s a gray background with black text on top, I don’t think he uses any HTML that was invented after 1994. And so that’s deliberate. And I have some anxiety myself because I don’t use any HTML that was developed after 1995-96 simply because I mostly work on slow computers with small screens and bad connections. So it is very hard for me to get excited about Shockwave, big gifs or image maps, because they are not very flexible technologies. I find the basic tools that came along with the specifications for the HTML technology early on, are pretty useful for what I want to do in terms of hypertext and images and stuff.

I always see people innovate. There is this one guy named the Guff, his Website is called "Musings of the Guff." And what’s nice about him is that he is not in San Francisco and I don’t what his job is, but I don’t think his job is as an html editor for Hotwired or a community developer for Electric Minds or something. He is doing his own thing. And while he is not on a map in terms of the Web geography, it doesn’t matter because he is not a member of the Web academy of arts and sciences.

I don’t know its tough because I see a number of people including Derek Powazek, and Lance Arthur and Maggie Donea, and stuff like that, they are getting kind of, I don’t know the media is formalizing. These people who are writing these personal narratives online start these associations to credit designers and develop a canonized style and become arbiters of style and taste on the Web, and I have a kind of instinctual reflex against that because it feels so professional to me, and what is exciting about the medium is that it is so amateur, and I don’t see any august body ruling over the Web and I don’t see why it should be that way. I am not sure what the Academy Awards have done for Hollywood but if there was an Academy Awards for the Web would that make it any different, I don’t know.

Interviewer-In this overmediated culture that we live in, we have developed anti-bodies to the virus of "slickness." And slickness or professionalism is read as "you are selling me something that I wouldn’t have bought otherwise." With those anti-bodies we also have an authenticity meter that we haven’t articulated. And we approach a piece of work, media, etc, and we say, "That ain’t it, that’s not authentic," or conversely, "That’s real, that’s honest, and don’t slick it up, because the moment you do you are going to polish away whatever it was that made it true."

Justin- The tough thing is that that it is a really fine balancing act online, cause you can say let’s be raw, but the bottom line is you are dealing with a keyboard and screen, and everything has to be slightly slick because you have to be literate, you have to be computer literate, and you have to stay on top of things because even if you don’t use the cutting edge technologies you have to know kind of what’s going on in order to generate stuff that invokes it or teases it or dances around it in different situations. And there are constantly little innovations that people are coming up within the frame of the browser and the screen, and so its always kind of slick so you have to push out to the boundaries of being rough with otherwise you get wrapped up in the computer kind of beauty of it.
I think a lot of the computer art that I have seen, like fractal patterns and alien landscapes and stuff, the beauty of your imagination set free with computer tools, it’s kind of exciting but it’s like T-shirts or something, it doesn’t look like art.

Interviewer-No it’s a tourist trap for expression.

Justin- I respect the people that are doing that because it pushes the boundaries of the tools, but there are simply people whose aesthetic is different than mine. You know like stories on the Fray are extremely well produced, and they do things with HTML that I never knew were possible. And they come out after lots of effort has been put into them. With Bud.com I am trying do more of a shotgun, I mean send me something and its going up, so there is not much of a cue or a standard in terms of quality because if you think its good enough to send to us well then we’ll put it in the pot and stir it around and see what comes up.

Interviewer- Context is what makes the thing work. As a theater producer I used to have a law of expectations. If you set something up with the right expectation, it could always be a pleasurable experience. That a bad theater performance, if its coouched as learning about bad theater performances, becomes a good experience, because you are de-constructing what’s not working and it becomes interesting. Or more to the point, if you are someone’s house and somebody that you didn’t know knew how to play a guitar and sing a song does so, they don’t have to be great, if it is such a surprise to you that they would do it at all, that they had it in them. Conversely, it you are told it’s the greatest show on earth-

Justin- It better be damn good

Interviewer- It better be beyond damn good. In that, I would argue, often it fails. In that there is hardly any show that can live up to too much good publicity. In that sense, what you are addressing is what are the ways that we set up the element of surprise. If I read in Bud.com and I say, "Where in the hell did that come from!" Where as Fray might set me up to be disappointed. As a teacher I know that it is because of that one person that surprises me that keeps me working in an introductory environment, as opposed to being a master teacher of would-be masters.

Justin- You know what, the founder of Wired, Louis Rosseto told me, his quote was, "We don’t to be the bozo filter for the net." We don’t want to read things from outside because there is too much, its going to be too much bad stuff. But its really two different kinds of perspectives, a lot of people will get good stuff out of Hotwired, and a lot of people are interested in the great unwashed. There is still that thing I want to get to in what you said. The notion that there is a great unwashed in the computer age is kind of ironic, or unlikely, almost untenable, that oh I am making raw unpolished medium in the computer.

Interviewer- Like Primitive Art on a computer. I know what you are saying. As I said, it’s not something that we can articulate about the authenticity issue, we can smell it in context. Its that feeling that they haven’t moderated their voice in order to please some third parties that are not in the specific dialogue that the work presents.

Justin- But that’s why Walter Miller is so interesting, because at once he is a writer, and I think he is developing a book or something out of it so he is moderating his voice in some way, but he is moderating it to the most crude possible strain, talking about human body disgustedness and illiterate spelling. Look him up and see what he tweaks in your head.

Interviewer- You struck me last year, at the Diner, you also have a persona for the theater, for a public self. Have you thought much more about the relationship between having been a writer to being a performer, and the difference in those modes of communicating?

Justin- A lot of the writers I know are good once they get up on stage they tell pretty good stories. And they are good at writing filtered things to given lengths. But I don’t know what it is I do, I spew on stage and I spew on the Webpage, and a lot of the writers tell me that its not sustainable because you need to be focussed. I mean, what’s the persona, I don’t know. I think my public and private persona is pretty closely linked. I think before I used to move through different styles of expression unconsciously and now I am more aware of invoking one voice or another. But I mean I think that’s just age, not necessarily an effect of writing.

One thing I must say is that the entire writing on a Webpage and telling my personal story in the internet medium, one thing it has done for me is give me a lot of confidence because it said to me you can talk about what matters to you, and others will find it interesting. And it will create opportunities for you. And so the confidence I got in doing that, which was a lot of hours alone, a lot of writing has yielded the chance to get up on stage. Because if I get up on stage and talk about what’s important to me. Again there are different tastes, but what is exciting for people is when I let my brain loose on stage. I started off doing public speaking where I would read an essay I had prepared, I moved to outlines, and my outlines got less and less strict, and so now I compose and outline a couple of hours before hand and run it through my brain a couple of times and then I kind of let my brain go. Some people like that, having all that thrown at them and then picking through the pieces and admiring the velocity of all of it. But it keeps changing, and I think the confidence to try things and to get up on stage and screw around comes in part because I never been punished much on the Web for trying anything and failing. We you are not dealing with venture capitalists its very exciting like that. You are not putting your house in hock and all that. And opportunities have come to me, and that’s very exciting, and I like to talk because that’s easier on your hands and the flesh to flesh contact can be really inspiring. I often talk to business groups or whatever and there are always one or two weirdoes that want to share a project with you, or get you to help them, or tell their story or whatever, you always learn something.